Hallandale Beach

Hallandale Beach began as farmland. Like the rest of Broward County, it held no permanent settlement of European descent until the closing years of the nineteenth century; before that, Seminole villages inland of the shore hunted here and gathered coontie root for arrowroot starch. Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway changed that, and Flagler recruited Luther Halland, who, with the Swedish immigrant Olaf Zetterlund, sold the place to settlers on cheap land and a climate that never froze. Halland built the trading post and served as the community's first postmaster.

By 1900 the settlement held about a dozen families, seven of them Swedish, three English and two of African descent. A school arrived in 1904 and a church two years later. The town incorporated on 14 May 1927 (the eighth municipality in Broward County) with roughly 1,500 residents, electric light and street lighting already in place; it reincorporated as a city in 1947 so that it could annex the unincorporated land around it, and took its present name on 27 August 1999.

Today the city covers about 4.6 square miles between Hollywood to the north, Aventura to the south, Pembroke Park to the west and the Atlantic to the east, and it is home to Gulfstream Park, the thoroughbred track and casino that has run since 1939. The 2020 census recorded 41,217 residents. Broward County Transit serves the city, and Hallandale Beach also runs a free community minibus on four routes.

The condominium market runs almost entirely along South Ocean Drive, where a nearly unbroken wall of towers faces the beach. Buildings from the early 1970s stand beside 2000s replacements, and the range in scale is extreme, from a 109-residence low-rise to complexes holding well over a thousand homes.