Look at a downtown map and you’ll find the streets named, in alphabetical order, for native plants: Althea, Banyan, Clematis, Datura, Evernia, Fern. Flagler’s planners laid the grid that way in 1893, and Clematis became the main drag — storefronts and theaters — while a block over, Banyan Street filled with saloons so rowdy that the temperance crusader Carry Nation came to town in 1904 to set it straight. Clematis faded mid-century, then came roaring back in the 1990s as the city’s nightlife and festival heart. The plant names are still there, in order, if you know to look.
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.
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.
