Palm Beach: Wealth Abounds

Take in railroad magnate Henry Flagler's mansion, Whitehall. Don't miss one of the top 10 Japanese gardens outside of Japan at the Morikami. Clematis Street is the place for restaurants and clubs. For upscale shopping, try Worth Avenue and various locations in Boca Raton. The Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton is a great place to take a turtle walk during the summer sea turtle nesting season. If you visit on Election Day, why not swing into a polling place and see what a "Butterfly Ballot" really looks like?!

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Despite its reputation as a very wealthy community, Palm Beach County also has plenty of more modest areas as well. The Henry Morrison Flagler Museum is a wonderful house museum, and the cost of visiting is largely underwritten by the foundation that owns it, making it very affordable to visit.

Best Way To Get Around:

As with most of Florida, driving really is the best way to get around here. Biking or walking the areas of Palm Beach is a good way to take in the architecture of some of the nation's grandest homes.

Every other Friday, the City of Lake Worth hosts "Evening on the Avenue," a night when all the shops stay open late, restaurants and bars offer specials, and several stages provide live music.

Like the old story of Brigadoon, one little place named Audrey's (which is normally closed for dinner) springs to life for Evening on the Avenue. Chef Edmund Dyer prepares an abbreviated, but exquisite, menu just twice each month.

Two of Ed's signature appetizers are Cream baccala (codfish) and Shrimp Caponata, a mixture of shrimp, olives and spices. Both of these are served with crisp bruschetta, fresh, whole garlic cloves, and olive oil. The helpings are large, and really set the stage for a wonderful meal to come. Appetizers are priced at around five or six dollars each.

All entrees are served with soup or salad, and an assortment of breads and mini-muffins. I had the hearty and perfectly-seasoned Plantation Lamb Stew, and my partner had a cool and spicy Gazpacho. Our dining companions raved about the dressing on the salad.

The portions at Audrey's are great for big eaters like me. I had a delicate, flaky tilapia fillet sauteed with white wine, butter, sundried tomatos and capers. It absolutely melted in my mouth. My partner enjoyed pork tenderloin medallions and shittake mushrooms with a cranberry and rosemary demiglaze, while our friends both enjoyed chicken breast Florentine, topped with sauteed spinach, provolone cheese, and a parmesan peppercorn cream sauce. All the entrees were served with a light white-and-wild rice mixture, and broccoli and baby carrots. Entrees are reasonably priced at $14-15 each.

The desserts included a wide variety of cheesecakes (including one sugar-free variety), peanut butter pie, key lime pie, and I'm sure several others that escape me right now. The desserts were artfully presented on plates decorated with fresh whipped cream, caramel sauce and fresh strawberries.

Beer and wine, as well as a wide assortment of soft drinks like sodas, juices and teas are available. My only complaint about the restaurant (a pet peeve of mine) is that my iced tea was served with lemon slices instead of lemon wedges. How the heck am I supposed to squeeze a little slice like that?

I highly recommend Audrey's as a wonderful dinner spot on Friday nights. Chef Edmund also serves breakfast on Sunday mornings, and Audrey herself prepares a variety of sandwiches for lunches during the week.

Audrey's is open for dinner every other Friday, so don't forget to call ahead to check on the actual dates for Evening on the Avenue.

Long before Disney World and Miami Beach, Florida was a very different place than it is today. There wasn't much to speak of between the old Spanish city of St. Augustine and the thriving metropolis of Key West: a lighthouse here and there, a small settlement of a few families every 20 miles or so. A big reason for this was lack of easy access: one needed a boat to get just about anywhere.

That all changed when Henry Morrison Flagler, one of the founding partners in Standard Oil, set his sights on Florida real estate development. Flagler established the Florida East Coast Railway, and a collection of luxury hotels along the way. The railway not only made it easier for people to get to Florida, but also easier for a wide variety of fruits and vegetables to get to northern markets as well. When he reached Palm Beach in 1902, he built a modest(!), three-story, 55-room wedding gift for his wife, and named it Whitehall.

Today, Whitehall is the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum, a beautiful, if gaudy, example of the excessive wealth of many during the Gilded Age. Like many similarly-classed people of the day, Flagler used his Palm Beach house only during a very brief winter season (his other house was in Mamaroneck, New York).

The first room of the house, Marble Hall, is a HUGE room, said to be the largest of any private home of the day. The room was meant for entertaining, as was the ballroom. The highlight of the Palm Beach Social Calendar was a costume party, held in Whitehall's ballroom, honoring George Washington's birthday. Men and women all wore powdered wigs, and received tiny hatchets and cherries as party favors. The Flagler's also entertained in the mansion's central courtyard, which offered the additional advantage of catching cool ocean breezes.

The house is full of wonderful architectural details like wood beams with leather insets, plaster ornamentation covered with aluminum leaf (a very expensive process 100 years ago), and domed ceilings with indirect recessed lighting from around the edges. Paintings, statuary and other decorative art objects abound.

Upstairs are the 15 guest bedrooms, 13 servant's rooms, 17 bathrooms and Mrs. Flagler's sitting room. Many of the rooms have been turned into exhibits on Flagler's life and accomplishments, as well as changing exhibits on Florida history and the turn of the 20th century. The third floor, now used for museum storage, housed the servants of the houseguests who came to visit.

In the 1940s, after the Flagler family sold the house, a multi-storied hotel was constructed adjoining the mansion. When it hit the financial skids by the late 50s, Flagler's granddaughter purchased the property and established the museum as a tribute to her grandfather. The upper floors of the hotel were removed, and so the building's facade, at least from the front, is unchanged from Flagler's time. Today the museum is still undergoing restoration, but is still well worth a visit. A gift shop offers a wealth of books on Flagler's life and times, as well as jewelry and many decorative objects.

Outside, Flagler's personal railcar is open for visitors, and it is quite interesting to see, especially all the luxury additions like the surround-spray shower and the servant call buttons in every room. With this exception, though, I found the grounds to be rather disappointing. For a house this large, the property is surprisingly small. Had it not been for the hotel addition, the ballroom would have opened out onto a plaza overlooking Lake Worth (actually the Intracoastal Waterway). Across the water are homes and shops and businesses...not at all what I would want to look at were I wealthy enough to live in this place.

But then I got to thinking: this really was Flagler's dream, to open Florida to development. No matter what one thinks about whether or not that should have been done, Flagler's success in realizing his dream can't be denied. And he didn't stop in Palm Beach. The Florida East Coast Railway continued south through Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and on to Key West. The completion of the Overseas Railway in 1912 was truly an engineering marvel.

Today, tourism and agriculture are the foundations of Florida's economy. Both are a direct legacy of Henry Morrison Flagler.

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The Henry Morrison Flagler Museum is located in Palm Beach, Florida. From Interstate 95, head east on Okeechobee Boulevard (exit 52). Go about 3 miles to the first traffic light past the Intracoastal Waterway, and turn left onto Cocoanut Way. The museum is on the left, just past the third traffic light. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday; call 561-655-2833 for hours and prices.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, a colony of Japanese-Americans took up residence in Palm Beach County. Known as the Yamato colony, they raised pineapples, among other things. Over time, most of the settlers moved on, but George Morikami remained. He donated his property to Palm Beach County in the hope that it would help others in his new and much beloved home in America grow to appreciate his native homeland of Japan.

Today, the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens is one of the largest Japanese Gardens in the nation. Though not yet complete, it has already been named one of the ten best Japanese Gardens outside of Japan, and the title is well deserved.

With Morikami Lake as a centerpiece, the garden proffers waterfalls and streams, rock gardens, islands, bridges, stone lanterns, koi ponds, and a magnificent use of native vegetation incorporated in with more traditional plantings. Nearly eight-tenths of a mile of gentle paths, all meeting accessibility standards, wind through smaller adjoining gardens that represent 6 major historical periods in Japanese garden development, from 8th century Shinden Gardens to 20th century Romantic Gardens. My personal favorites are the 15th century Late Rock Garden, totally abstract in nature with raked gravel representing water (typical Zen), and the 16th century Flat Garden, which combines the Zen aesthetic with expansive views across Morikami Lake.

The old museum is a beautiful house with wide verandas and great interactive exhibits about Japanese culture, as well as specific information on the Yamato Colony. The new museum houses changing exhibits, an auditorium, classrooms, a library, a gift shop, and the delightful Cornell Cafe, which serves traditional Japanese fare on a patio overlooking the garden.

Special events and classes, many of which are free with museum entrance, add to the learning aspect of the Morikami.

As beautiful and inspiring as the gardens are, the staff is sometimes a little snippy (so typical of the Boca Raton/Delray Beach area), and mailings to membership are frequently up to a week late in announcing special events. Still, a membership entitles you to unlimited free admission, and a short while in the Zen Garden makes that pushy little admissions clerk fade away into the background......