Party Pictures 1/13/04 - Coconuts New Year's @ The Colony, New Year's @ Club Colette

New Yorkers hit Palm Beach

“She thinks black and white,
She even drinks Black & White,
That black and white baby a’ mine …”

… Cole Porter wrote way back when but from the looks of our latest Quest cover, he could have been writing about Maggie Scherer. The lovely (and charming) Mrs. Scherer, along with her vigilant Dalmatian Domino (again, the black and white) is our cover girl for the January. Palm Beach is always the first issue of the new year for Quest because, among other things, so many of our readers are in residence, part-time or full-time there at this time of the year. And because January is the dullest and grayest (and often coldest) month in New York, it nice to think of the alternative. Or one of the alternatives.

January 2004 issue of Quest

There were probably fifty, sixty thousand people in Palm Beach over the holidays. And counting West Palm, which has become the haven of the trendsetters who are New York – no exaggeration – there were probably a couple hundred thousand visiting dignitaries and retinue gracing those pearly sandy shores.

The following is my editor’s letter for this Palm Beach issue:

Our annual Palm Beach issue comes by no coincidence just when New Yorkers are thinking or wishing seriously about getting away from the cold and the grey and the snow of winter in the City.

This tiny little village of fabled fortunes was created by a real estate visionary named Henry Flagler more than a century ago after having made his pile in a promising little concern called Standard Oil.

Mr. Flagler was also one of the premier developers of the state of Florida as it is known today. In his day, the railroad was the business to be in (and the hot stock to own). So he started the East Coast Railway and he built a hotel in St. Augustine where his northern passengers could get off, instantly shed their heavy woolens and take in the sunshine and the smell of orange blossoms everywhere.

The success of this venture led him south with visions (not delusions) of greater grandeur and he acquired more and more land along the way, including a lush but innocuous little strip of sand and jungle. He named it Palm Beach for self-evident reasons, and built another large hotel.

Before long many New Yorkers with time and money were finding their way out of the blizzards and into the shade of the sheltering palms and began building their own Mediterranean tile and stucco palaces. By the 1920s, tiny little Palm Beach was the winter home of the vastly rich spending their days (and especially their nights) living it up, gambling (at Mr. Bradley’s casino) and living down their often wild highlife (or keeping it out of the northern papers).

The Great Depression put an end to a lot of the spectacle of leisure as well as many of those who lived it. By the 1950s the community though still a special enclave, was indeed a little on the sleepy side. By the early 1970s, the town was considered passé by trendsetters, with many of its citizens either the elder grannies or their ne’er do much trust fund grand-babies.

Had Mr. Flagler still been around in those somnambulant days thirty years ago, no doubt he would have been buying real estate again. Because Palm Beach was at the onset of a boom unimaginable to all except those with his kind of vision.

Today’s Palm Beach is a mecca, not only for the rich Americans (as well as Europeans and Canadians) but for the young and the entrepreneurial. The past two decades has seen a residential building boom beyond compare, while the age demographic has dropped precipitously. Mr. Flagler’s auxiliary development, West Palm Beach – once the borough for the island’s service community – is now the proud possessor of luxury condominium towers, multi-million dollar private residences, and swanky shopping malls, not to mention an international airport that rivals Miami in air traffic.

Palm Beach is still the enclave that it was for Henry Flagler’s prospective customer profile, and living on that little emerald isle is not for the faint-hearted financially. Real estate taxes alone are astounding: I know one resident whose annual taxes for the privilege of maintaining her palatial residence there is a half million. Nevertheless, as it was in the days of yore, Palm Beach is still where many want to be, even year round now, for the same reason it attracted Henry Flagler: it’s fabulous and fabulously comfortable.