Palm Beach, Florida

“ Thus they passed Juno and Palm Beach, and then saw the thicker cluster of fine dwellings of Miami itself, the most southerly city on the Florida mainland.
Paul was guiding the Sky-Bird at this time, and turned her across the limpid waters of Biscayne Bay, cutting a huge circle above the town and slowly swooping downward toward the broad white beach, as he picked out a level stretch for landing. Townspeople who had been watching the strange airplane, so much like a great bird, now ran forward to see it land. ”

“ Guideposts for Florida begin to appear, and heavy touring cars roll past on the way to Miami and Palm Beach. There are some charming wooden churches—the Negro ones being poorer, looking better sacrifices unto God than those of the Whites. ”

“ The courage of the pioneer is proverbial. It seems to me that of the Dade County pioneer ranks as high as any. His land may some day be beautiful. To-day it is the stretch of purgatory which lies between one paradise and another, for through it one passes from Palm Beach down into the miraculous sea. ”

“ No innovations could do away with the Southern foliage, which here was in rank growth and profusion. We saw orange trees in full bearing; palmetto trees in abundance, from the scrub saw-palmetto to the lordly cabbage palm, and cactuses six feet high, together with all the other trees and plants of the warm latitudes.
There is a fine shell road to the sea beach that is so hard that the wheels of a wagon scarcely make a mark upon it. This beach is the favorite promenade drive of natives and visitors in the season which had not come quite yet, although near at hand. ”

“ There is not a horse in the settlement, and only one mule, whose duty is to haul a light summer car between the houses. The vehicles of Palm Beach are said to be confined to 380 "bicycles, wheel-chairs and jinrickshas." Off to the westward the distant horizon is bounded by the mysterious region of the everglades. Far down the coast the railway terminates at Miami, the southernmost railway station in the United States, a little town on Miami River, where it enters the broad expanse of Biscayne Bay, which is separated from the Atlantic by the first of the long chain of Florida keys. ”

“ Bradley’s is different. It is run exclusively for the wealthy northern patrons of Palm Beach; and the person whose legal residence or place of business is located in{58} Florida is supposed to be barred. Almost everybody who goes there can afford to lose and lose heavily ”

“ Also a proposed route from a point on SR 15 North of Satsuma, North to intersection with SR 15 and SR 100 in Palatka. Palm Beach - Martin - Okeechobee - Osceola - Orange - Seminole - Volusia - Putnam - Clay - Duval - Nassau 27 205 From Cape Sable in Monroe County in a Northeasterly direction via Royal Palm State Park to junction with SR 5 in Florida City and North along SR 5 to Krome Avenue in Homestead, then along Krome Avenue and in a Northerly direction to intersection with SR 90. Thence Northeasterly along proposed route to intersect with SR 25 South of the Broward County Line. ”

“ At half past eleven every morning, stimulated by the early morning talk of dress, all the feminine population of Palm Beach, accompanied by all obtainable male escorts, set out from their hotels and homes in wheel-chairs for their daily pilgrimage to the beach.
The beach is not prized by Palm Beach visitors because of its bathing facilities, but because of the perfect spirit of camaraderie and democracy which reigns there. A Philadelphia Biddle is just as apt as not to come along and accidentally rub damp sand on a South Bend Smith. Anything may happen. ”

“ The Gulf Stream is within about 1 m. of the shore, and the climate is mild and equable, the winter temperature normally ranging between 70° and 75° F. On the Atlantic is the Breakers, a large hotel, and facing Lake Worth is the Royal Poinciana, the largest hotel in the southern states. Palm Beach has few permanent residents and is not incorporated. On the mainland just across the lake is the city of West Palm Beach (pop. in 1905, state census, 1280) , a pleasure resort and the county-seat of Palm Beach county (created in 1909) . ”

“ In the long run, however, the big-money tourists don’t want to go to a hustling, bustling, rapidly growing city for their winter holidays, even though the city may boast perpetual warmth and sunshine.{166} What they want is clean air and plenty of sun and sky, and a complete change from the scenery to which they are accustomed in their northern cities, and a surcease from all noises except the noises they make themselves—which are frequently much louder than the ordinary noises of a city. For that reason Palm Beach was in a class by itself. The big-money tourists went to Palm Beach. ”

“ The business of being smart and appearing at the proper places at the proper hour is merely the accepted method of killing time with many Palm Beachers; but with many others it is as serious as the death of a near relative. Palm Beach is well sprinkled with people who are determined to break into New York society, and who have selected Palm Beach as the place to drive the entering wedge because results can be obtained there with greater speed, with less expense and with more noise than in any other section of the country. ”

“ To those who bathe in its limpid waters it is a matter of curiosity to see below, the slow crawling of the conch, while the nimble crab scampers off in haste, and fish and prawn dart wantonly around. When the tide is down there is no turnpike in the world better fitted for a pleasure ride than that smooth hard beach, from which no dust can rise, and which is of course as level as a floor.
The spot on which Dr. Gordon proposed to build, was one commanding a view both of the distant fort and of the open sea, or rather of the green islands which guarded the mouth of the bay. ”

“ Even Palm Beach has nothing unusual to show until the holidays of mid-winter bring its vast hostelries back to life. One loses little in fleeing all day onward at Southern express speed.
Miami, however, is worth a halt, if only for a glimpse of the United States in full tropical setting. There the refugee from winter will find cocoanuts nodding everywhere above him; there he may pick his morning grape-fruit at the door; and he need be no plutocrat to have his table graced with those aristocratic fruits of the tropics, the papaya and the alligator-pear. ”

“ They are successful at Palm Beach because the Palm Beachers find them useful things in which to kill time. But at Miami Beach one has no time for time-killing. There is something doing every minute. There is golf and tennis and polo and bathing and dancing and seeing the bootlegger, or rushing over to town to see a movie or an orange grove or another bootlegger or something, and if one tried to get around in a wheel-chair, he’d come down with nervous prostration in a couple of days. ”

“ Then the moon began to rise from beyond the Bahamas, a vast, full moon, with the sea seeming to cling to her lower limb as she freed herself. Dusky, at first, she paled as she rose, and now, in her light, the palms of the island and the coral beach showed clear.
Palm Island is a scrub of cactus and bay cedar bushes, half a mile long and quarter of a mile broad, with not more than forty trees. Crabs and turtles and gulls are its only visitors, and desolation sits there visible and naked. But in the moonlight, on a night like this and seen from the sea, it is fairyland—storyland. ”

“ Everyone in the North who has the money and leisure to get away from home during a portion of the winter knows Spruce Beach. It is one of nature's most beautiful spots on the eastern coast of Florida, and man has made it one of the most expensive places in the world. ”

“ In time, coral sand-spit and mangrove swamp were cleared for a wonderland playground, of divine climate whither winter tourists throng by the hundred thousand. In time, too, these sand-spits and swamps and older formations of the sunny peninsula furnished homes and sources of livelihood or of wealth to many thousands more, people, these, to whom Florida is a Career, not a Resort. ”

“ There are many lonely men and women at Palm Beach who almost cry with gratitude when somebody speaks to them. They are like many Congressmen, who are big people at home, but of less account in Washington than a head porter. Out of all the people who flock to Palm Beach to spend large amounts of money and bask in the soothing rays that emanate from the socially prominent, ninety per cent. might be compared to very small potatoes in a two hundred-acre lot. Even the majority of the people whose names are names to conjure with in Palm Beach society can’t be found in the pages of Who’s Who. ”

“ Jumpkinson-Joneses, satiated though they be with private cars, press notices, and Palm Beach, can hardly fail to be sensible to the almost delirious beauty of the scene at bathing hour.
Nowhere is the sand more like a deep, warm dust of yellow gold; nowhere is there a margin of the earth so splashed with spots of brilliant color: sweaters, parasols, bathing suits, canvas shelters—blue, green, purple, pink, yellow, orange, scarlet—vibrating together in the sharp sunlight like brush marks on a high-keyed canvas by Sorolla ”

“ So passes Palm Beach into its long summer sleep; and the haunts of men are desolate. But it is otherwise with the Wild.
Night and the March moon awake the winter-dormant wilderness from the white man's deadening spell. Now, unrestrained, the sound of negro singing floats inland on the sea-wind from inlet, bar, and glassy-still lagoon; great, cumbersome, shadowy things lumber down to tidewater—huge turtles on egg-laying intent. In the dune-hammock the black bear, crab-hungry, awakes from his December sleep and claws the palmetto fruit; the bay lynx steals beachward ”

“ With only three semitropical beach areas in the United States, the southern parts of Florida, California, and Texas, Padre is the largest and last undeveloped warm water beach area left. On Valentine’s Day, 1954, the beautiful Queen Isabella Causeway opened at the southern tip of the island.
The climate is as good as Miami’s, and it is blessed with one of the finest white sand beaches in the world. 50 Laguna Madre is a natural water sports basin, and the deep sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico is already world famous. ”

“ At Palm Beach one has the feeling that he is breathing the very same air that the world’s greatest bankers and society people are breathing, whereas over in West Palm Beach one doesn’t know or care who has been breathing the air. ”

“ Along this famous peninsula the sea rolls with ceaseless beat upon some of the most gorgeous beaches of the American coast. To the glories of tropical vegetation and the charms of the climate, Florida thus adds the magnificence of its unrivalled marine environment. ”

“ The ride through Florida is tedious. The miles of palmettoes, with leaves glittering like racks of bared cutlasses in the sun, the miles of dark swamp, in which the cypresses seem to wade like dismal club-footed men, the miles of live-oak strung with their sad tattered curtains of Spanish moss, the miles of sandy waste, of pineapple [Pg 593] and orange groves, of pines with feathery palm-like tops, above all the sifting of fine Florida dust, which covers everything inside the car as with a coat of flour—these make you wish that you were North again. ”

“ They are more desirous to enter into the social life, of these two places than they are of any other winter resort, for, while the South is honeycombed with Northern hotels, they are usually laid along the lines that will make capital for promoters. Beyond the climate and the visitors, there is nothing.
Palm Beach is an imitation of Monaco. It is not a city. It is without history. New Orleans is the quaintest city alive in America, but its horizon is broader, its basis more substantial, than any other Southern city, and it is not such a Mecca for the casual traveler. ”

“ The Beach Club occupies a plain white house, low-spreading and unpretentious, but fitted most agreeably within, and boasting a superb cuisine. Not every one is admitted. Members have cards, and must be vouched for, formally, by persons known to those who operate the place. Many of the quiet pleasant people who, leading their own lives regardless of the splurging going on about them, form the background of Palm Beach life—much as "walking ladies and gentlemen" form the crowd in a spectacular theatrical production—have never seen the inside of the Beach Club ”

“ On the mainland side of Lake Worth is the rising young city of West Palm Beach, where one is not afraid—as he usually is in Palm Beach—to offer a storekeeper or a newsboy a nickel lest he should regard it as some strange, unknown foreign coin. West Palm Beach is full of ordinary people who are unacquainted with wheel-chairs and think nothing of walking two or three blocks, or even as much as half a mile if the necessity arises. They frequently get along for days at a time without spending{14} more than two dollars and eighty-five cents a day. ”

“ There is a beautiful sand beach in front of this section upon the bay, and it extends South for a mile, probably a mile and a half.” Labor is scarce, it would be best to take it along, the same of house servants. There is timber enough for all building purposes, if there were saw-mills. The country is remarkably healthy, and the climate in winter and spring cannot be excelled, it is pleasant even in summer. ”

“ The population of the key is about 400, chiefly engaged in lumbering. Excellent hunting and fishing can be had in the vicinity, and many pretty shells and sea-mosses are found along the shore. A hard sand beach, half a mile in length, is a favorite promenade. There are no horses on the island, but boats, here the only means of transportation, can be hired from $3.00 to $5.00 a day. Remains of the former Indian occupants, such as shell mounds, stone axes, arrowheads, pottery, etc., are very abundant. ”