THE PALM BEACH SEASON
January Through April · Palm Beach, Florida · A Season · Since 1894
The Palm Beach season runs from after Thanksgiving to Easter, with its weight in January, February and March. It is not an event. It is four months in which a particular set of people are all on a barrier island three-quarters of a mile wide, and the calendar fills with balls, luncheons and benefits because they are all there at once.
The island was built for this and has never been used for anything else.
The Island
Henry Flagler brought the railway down the Florida coast and opened a hotel on Lake Worth in 1894. He built a house nearby, Whitehall, and entertained in it in a way that set the pattern. The season existed because Flagler’s guests came for it.
Paris Singer arrived in 1918, heir to the sewing machine fortune, and began building a convalescent hospital for shell-shocked officers on what was then a gravel road called Worth Avenue. The war ended before it opened. He made it a club instead, opened it in January 1919, and decided the membership himself.
His architect was Addison Mizner, who had no formal training and an eye for Spanish and Moorish building picked up while travelling. What he did at the club, and then at the houses along the ocean for the Stotesburys, the Phippses and the Vanderbilts, became the Palm Beach look. The island has been building versions of it ever since.
The Clubs
The social structure of Palm Beach is its clubs, and the ones that matter are closed.
The Everglades Club sits at the west end of Worth Avenue behind an entrance most visitors walk past without seeing. It keeps no website. Membership is by invitation. The Bath and Tennis, on the ocean at the south end, asks for invitation and a sponsor. The Palm Beach Country Club is at the north end. Club Colette takes a great many of the season’s dinners.
What is open is the hotel. The Breakers holds the largest balls of the season, the International Red Cross Ball among them, and a person with a ticket may attend without belonging to anything.
That distinction is worth understanding before arriving. The galas can be bought into. The clubs cannot, and the clubs are where the season actually happens.
What to Know
Black tie means black tie. The Red Cross Ball is white tie, and it is not the only one that is.
January through March is the season proper. November and December are quiet. By April the island is emptying.
Worth Avenue is four blocks long, and the vias running off it are the point: courtyards, staircases that go nowhere, shops Mizner built to look three centuries older than they are.
Whitehall is open as a museum, with Flagler’s private railway carriage parked behind it. Most people who come for the season never go.
The mistake is booking a hotel and expecting to find the season. Palm Beach is private in the sense that matters, and access runs through people rather than tickets.
The Court
The Palm Beach season is not the Court’s own. Places at the season’s balls, a table at the right dinners and rooms on the island are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. Rooms in February are the difficult part.
