The town came together fast. Flagler’s surveyor platted forty-eight blocks between Clear Lake and the Lake Worth Lagoon, the railroad reached the new settlement in the spring of 1894, and on November 5 that year seventy-eight residents crowded into the “Calaboose” — the little wooden jailhouse — and voted 77 to 1 to incorporate. That made West Palm Beach the oldest incorporated municipality in South Florida, on the books two full years before Miami. One early resident remembered it as nothing but white sand, two steel rails, a few acres of pineapples, and scrub on every side. From that, a city.
West Palm Beach grew in waves. Pineapple farms and winter vegetables gave way to a 1920s land boom that quadrupled the population and left whole neighborhoods of Mediterranean-Revival houses — red barrel-tile roofs, stucco walls, shady courtyards — in El Cid, Flamingo Park, and Old Northwood. Hurricanes and downtown fires knocked the young city down more than once, and it rebuilt each time in brick and stone. Out on the flat, early-paved streets, so many residents took to two wheels that West Palm Beach was once cheerfully called the “bicyclingest town in the U.S.A.”
Why People Visit West Palm Beach
West Palm Beach rewards visitors who want culture with their coastline: a serious arts scene, a lively downtown, historic neighborhoods under the palms, and the Intracoastal at the center of it all. Add the island just across the water and the year-round South Florida sun, and Flagler’s mainland city makes an easy case for itself.
