Palm Beach Design and Addison Mizner

The only way travelers can tour Florida without paying homage to Palm Beach is if they're Trappist or Buddhist monks and have given up the American cult-worship of worldly objects. I'm not a monk of any persuasion and have yet to give up my precious material goodies. My guess is you, Gentle Readers, are in the same boat as well. Therefore, we'll take a few moments to explore the sights in this most interesting place and chat about how it got this way. And why it pulls so effectively at our collective heart strings.

What makes Palm Beach so great, anyway? I mean, what's the big deal? Here are a few of the most obvious answers.

• Bathed by cooling Atlantic-Gulf Stream breezes
• Located on a luxurious subtropical barrier island
• Separated from the southeastern Florida mainland by beautiful Lake Worth
• The winter resort capital of the fabulously rich and very famous

Without any argument, as surely as the North and South Poles attract compass needles, the last item on the above list seizes our attention, enticing us “common” folk with its visions of nearly unobtainable material wealth and promises of happy, carefree lives of privilege and status. Make no mistake, I'm talking about Palm Beach itself, not its pale shadow on the mainland, West Palm Beach. As an aside, Henry Flagler built West Palm for his working class minions. People like you and me who've had to ride the grindstone just to keep afloat and stay one small step ahead of the bill collectors. People who wouldn't know a stock dividend from a newspaper coupon for Kraft American singles or Cheerios.

Palm Beach fascinates many of us because of our ever so human desires to live vicariously. That's why that ridiculous Robin Leech (if anyone was more appropriately named I don’t know it) and his loathsome TV series, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, was so popular for so long. The hook is that we paint ourselves right into that picture of opulence, of course after we hit the lottery big time or inherited beaucoup bucks when Aunt Minnie died without issue. And there we are, deliriously twirling the dance floors at gala costume balls, mixing with the affluent and media celebrities, living in houses that look exactly like Mar-A-Lago, Casa Nana, or Whitehall. As if we'd fit right in with our neighbors like the Pulitzers, Kennedys, Rockefellers, or The Donalds. Hey, think about it. Those guys pull their trousers up the same way we do, right? One leg at a time. Yeah, right. Almost makes me want to run out and buy another dozen PowerBall tickets before the wife reminds me we need milk for the baby. Gets you thinking that if we could have picked our parents we wouldn't be in this drab, middle-income fix. Really.

If you're not completely comatose you might remember Henry Flagler built his railroad south from St. Augustine to Palm Beach, with every intention of making it the winter resort capital for America’s wealthiest and BEST families. Well, if he could see it today, he'd know he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Although Palm Beach flourished from the get-go, it really jumped off the map of the idle rich after Paris Singer, heir to the fabulous sewing machine fortune, established a winter home on those balmy shores in the early 1900s. In the winter of 1917, Singer brought with him an invalid friend from frozen New York. That particular fellow had recently given three strangers a ride in his motor car and had been robbed and beaten rather badly by the ungrateful thugs, aggravating an old injury from his youth that had threatened his leg with amputation. As a brief and uncharitable aside, Singer was also noted for his roving eye and a well-developed appreciation of beautiful horses and very fast women. He “dated” the internationally famous dancer Isadora Duncan for a decade and sired a child by her without benefit of clerical ministrations, generating a rollicking scandal in those gentler, kinder, and far more publicly moral days.

Those two men, the filthy rich heir and Addison Mizner, his injured Falstaffian friend and New York society architect, memorable for his outrageous sense of humor and down to earth language, changed the way the world regarded Palm Beach and, soon thereafter, Florida itself. The relationship started when Singer asked Mizner to redesign his small vacation home, enlarge it, make it more comfortable, and give it a much more distinctive appearance. Mizner was happy to comply, building the lovely Chinese Villa for Singer, with its vibrant colors, quaint oriental carvings and sweeping pagoda-style rooflines. Singer, apparently quite the independent fellow, exuberantly planted a stuffed, five-foot alligator on the tile roof in his self-described effort “to defy good taste.” Hell, with all that money do you think he gave a rat's ass what his pretentious neighbors thought? Get real.

Prior to 1917, the architecture of Palm Beach was a very mixed bag. By and large visually undistinguished, and often downright ugly, it was a hodge-podge of Cape Cod-styled cottages, shingled bungalows, Swiss Chalets, several Beaux-Arts mansions—including Flagler’s enormous Classic Revival, Whitehall, which then, as now, was in a class by itself— and numerous modest Florida Cracker houses, most of which were located in small subdivisions. When Singer decided to up the ante considerably by demanding that the renovation be distinctive, Mizner readily accommodated his wish. But their relationship really blossomed toward the end of 1917. The restless heir determined to build a rest home, the Touchstone Convalescent Club, for World War I shell-shocked soldiers and sailors—officers and gentlemen only, naturally—and commissioned Mizner to work on a structure that would knock his neighbors' collective socks off. Which it really did as Mizner designed a “Spanish” Renaissance monastery complex with a soaring tower, rambling tile roofs, stuccoed walls, intimate patios and courts, broad terraces, elegant Mediterranean decoration, and tropical landscaping. It was a dream of Iberia transplanted to Florida.

As World War I began winding down in 1918, Singer realized the demand for a restorative hospital for well-to-do officers in far-away Florida might not be a profitable proposition. So he ordered the putative and unoccupied rest home to be converted into the now famous Everglades Club, a private watering hole for his wealthy drinking and carousing buddies. He gave Mizner a free hand in the revised design. The architect responded by taking the striking tower and dazzling tile roofs that were already completed and created an extraordinary complex of buildings, with an open plan that integrated rooms, patios, and terraces in an intimate design never seen before. His was the first practical adaptation of the Mediterranean Revival style that had first been used in Florida in 1885 by John Carrère and Thomas Hastings for Flagler's Ponce de León Hotel and in 1914 in Miami by F. Burrall Hoffman and Paul Chalfin for James Deering's (of International Harvester fame) remarkable Italian Renaissance estate, Villa Vizcaya. Mizner’s genius was to make the style practical and affordable.

Let’s pause for a moment to insert a word or two about the Mediterranean Revival style mentioned above. On a personal note, I simply hate it when writers assume absolutely every reader knows all the precise details of the esoteric crap they're running on and on about. The Mediterranean Revival style represents a period in American architecture in which aesthetic inspiration came not from within but from external, exotic sources. Not from Spain alone but a collage from many countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean Revival turns up in structures in Florida, California, Texas, and states throughout the Southwest, Mexico, and all over colonial Central and South America. The form has been used to great effect by dozens of first-rate architects during the early to mid-20th Century and by countless hacks as well. By nature it is a composite style. Traditional elements of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance are combined with varying bits and pieces of more time-contemporaneous creativity. Or, what nose-up-in-the-air architects love to call, the vernacular.

A tip of the hat goes to Addison Mizner, the architect single-handedly responsible for the flowering of what he termed the “Spanish style” among the snob-elite at Palm Beach and Boca Raton earlier in the 20th Century. From whence it spread rapidly throughout the State and then the U.S. For all its marked excesses, especially the unrestrained and ever so Conspicuous Consumption aspect, the Mediterranean Revival style was perfectly adaptable to south and central Florida, with its Spanish history and sub-tropical ambiance.

Construction of the Ponce de León Hotel and Villa Vizcaya cost beaucoup bucks and required hundreds of skilled European craftsmen working for years. Something the notoriously tightwad millionaires building vacation houses in Palm Beach that were used less than three months of the year were very reluctant to do. Mizner made those gangs of stone cutters, tile setters, woodworkers, expensive hand craftsmen all, unnecessary. His solution involved the use of indigenous materials and innovative yet simple construction techniques he taught local unskilled laborers. Believe me, the word genius is not used lightly in this context. As an architect, Mizner was no Frank Lloyd Wright. Period. But, to give the devil his due, by creating many interesting, attractive, and even memorable buildings Mizner essentially created Palm Beach and the essence of the south Florida urbanscape so widely admired today.

Mizner's background is one of the most interesting and unusual in the history of American architecture. His family was from pioneer California stock. He grew up as part of the upper-crust elite of San Francisco. His father was a highly placed diplomat, serving as the United States Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to all of Central America. As a teenager, Addison lived for a year with his family in Guatemala, becoming fluent in Spanish. While there he acquired a lifelong love for Colonial Spanish architecture. Upon returning to San Francisco, Mizner took and failed the entrance exam to the University of California in Berkeley. He then journeyed to Spain, studying rather informally at the University of Salamanca. The striking architecture of Spain, with its many distinctive styles and periods, seems to have impressed him far more than his formal course of studies. After returning home he became a draftsman with a noted San Francisco architect, Willis Polk. Who wisely demanded that his young assistant learn not only drafting but also the entire construction process, including all the major building trades, training that would serve him very well in the future.

After several years toiling behind a drawing board, Mizner left Polk’s employ to dabble in several other fields of endeavor. Near the end of his life he would regale his many friends, social contacts, and clients with a seemingly endless repertoire of stories concerning his fantastic exploits. He worked as an underground miner in Nevada. Traveled to the Alaskan gold fields and barely escaped a gang intent on killing him for his hidden treasure. Worked as an art conservator for Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii. Was stranded penniless in Hong Kong. Fought a professional boxer for a large purse in Australia, winning the bout and enough money to pay his debts and buy a ticket back to San Francisco. And made fabulous profits by exporting religious artifacts from Guatemala to New York. An activity that promoted looting and grave-robbing. Although those stories were usually highly embellished by Mizner, making his exploits appear more incredible than they already were, they nevertheless were based on actual events in his life.

After returning from his buying trip to Guatemala, at the splendid age of 30, Mizner decided it was time to pick an honorable profession and settle down. Why he selected architecture is anyone's guess. He moved to New York City in 1904 and immediately began capitalizing on his family's social connections, which were considerable. Having learned the value of upper-crust relationships to establish oneself in business, he started at the top, calling on the leading families of New York: the Belmonts, Fishes, and Oelrichs. And soon captivated them with his original wit and high spirits. Addison knew how to party with the right people and, more importantly, how to convert them into clients in formal as well as informal social settings. It wasn't long before he won several small but important commissions from his society friends and also from Stanford White, a noted architect who would soon be murdered by the insanely jealous, Harry Thaw, at Madison Square Garden, no less. Thaw, who was certainly more than a two or three clicks off normal, had become royally incensed when he learned exactly who had taken his wife’s virginity several years before their marriage.

For thirteen productive years, Mizner concentrated on building a solid residential practice in New York. As a result of his society contacts at the highest levels, he met Paris Singer and the two became friends. When Singer returned from Europe in 1917, burnt out from his genuinely demanding war relief efforts and learned that the architect was having difficulty recovering from a savage beating at the hands of three thugs, he generously suggested Mizner accompany him to Palm Beach as his guest for several months' recuperation. The rest, as they say, is history.

The instant success of the Everglades Club changed Mizner's plans to return to his New York practice. Within a few weeks of the Club’s opening Mizner received four architectural commissions from Singer’s wealthy friends for vacation homes. In a flash he was off to the races. Never again would Palm Beach be filled with tired and boring residences designed on the back of envelopes by local general contractors. Over the next decade, Mizner would become America’s leading, busiest, and most successful society architect.

To demonstrate just how influential to Florida’s urban history Mizner really was, I've provided an abbreviated inventory of his well-heeled and socially prominent clients and the names of their resort residences in or around Palm Beach and Boca Raton. Hey, don’t you love the super rich, giving their houses names. Where do you think they got that practice? You wouldn't think they were aping the Brits, would you? Of course not. Either way, the list reads like a WHO's WHO of Eastern elites and includes old and shamelessly new money.

• Paris Singer's Chinese Villa.
• Paris Singer's Everglades Club.
• The Edward Stotesbury's El Mirasol (incidentally the Stotesburys' daughter, Louise, married General Douglas MacArthur at El Mirasol in 1922), which immediately upon being completed became the “standard” by which all other large Palm Beach mansions were judged.
• Charles Munn's Louwana.
• Harold Vanderbilt's El Solana, originally built for Mizner himself, and then greatly enlarged for Vanderbilt.
• Willey Lyon Kingsley's La Bellucia.
• Mrs. Elizabeth Slater's Costa Bella.
• Alfred Kay's villa, Audita.
• O. Frank Woodward's house on Seminole Avenue.
• DeGrimm Renfro's Villa Tranquilla.
• Casa Bendita, the great oceanfront home for the fabulously wealthy John Phipps—the famous architectural historian, George Edgell, termed the house a “monumental work” in which “a perfect Spanish flavor is maintained.”
• Joseph Cudahy's Grace Trail.
• The 32-room Seminole Avenue home of William Gray Warden, whose father founded Atlantic Refinery and joined John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust in 1874; the Warden house survives today in an interesting adaptive re-use as six condo units (Mizner designed this house to half-scale in comparison to the adjacent homes because Mr. Warden wanted a “small house” while his wife wanted one of more massive proportions. After construction was completed both Wardens loved the house, despite its substantial size, occupying the entire oceanfront block between root Trail and Seminole Avenue).
• Barclay and Mary Wanamaker Warburton’s Villa des Cygnes, whose name was later changed to Villa Maria Marrone.
• The Gulfstream Club, which was designed for a group of wealthy financiers, including Paris Singer, William Gray Warden, Edward Stotesbury, Edward Shearson, and John Harris (an apparently true story is that the five financiers were preparing to return to New York City and demanded to see a preliminary design of the Club before they departed. In a little over six hours Mizner drew the draft design that later was built and was judged in the professional journal, Architectural Forum, as the most attractive Spanish-Italian adaptation in the U.S.).
• Casa Leoni, Leonard Thomas’s breathtaking Venetian palazzo on Lake Worth.
• Edward Shearson’s Villa Flora (one of the six great mansions Mizner built in 1923).
• Preston Pope Satterwhite’s Casa Florencia (one of the six great mansions Mizner built in 1923).
• William Wood's The Towers (one of the six great mansions Mizner built in 1923).
• Anthony Drexel Biddle's El Sarimento (one of the six great mansions Mizner built in 1923).
• George Luke Mesker's La Fontana (one of the six great mansions Mizner built in 1923).
• Playa Riente, Mizner's largest house (one of the six great mansions Mizner built in 1923), was built for Joshua Cosden, a wealthy Oklahoma oilman who would go bankrupt in 1926, sell the home, and immediately acquire another fortune only to lose it in the Great Crash of 1929. Mrs. Horace Dodge bought Playa Riente from the Cosdens and had Mizner design a huge addition with a cloister and patio.
• The La Guerida estate for Rodman Wanamaker II.
• Joseph Speidel's Casa Joseto.
• Mizner built another house for himself, Sin Cuidado (Without Worry or Care Free) only to sell it shortly after completion to Edward Small Moore, who immediately had the architect enlarge it as Collado Hueco.
• John Magee's Lagomar.
• Arthur Clafin's elaborate Lake Worth estate.
• National Tea Company founder George Rasmussen's exquisite Casa Nana, Mizner's last large Palm Beach home, is my personal favorite Mizner exterior with its marvelous round stair tower and three-story stairwell that dominates the front of the house. Later the mansion was owned by dime-store widow Mary Woolworth Donahue and even later by Lowell “Bud” Paxson, co-founder of the Home Shopping Network, and his wife, Marla. In 2003, the Paxsons put the mansion on the sales block for $38 million, a whopping asking price in any real estate market. Inside the 37,000 square foot oceanfront palace are nine bedrooms, fourteen baths, and a 16th Century marble fireplace that King Henry II of France reportedly had made for his mistress, Diana de Poitiers. Outside, the 3-acre site is complete with heated pool, pool pavilion, and a three-bedroom guesthouse with its own swimming pool. No wonder the asking price was $38 million. Cheap at any price. Right.
• Several renovations for Mrs. William Vanderbilt.
• Nate Springold's La Puertas.
• Daniel Carstairs's villa, designed as a farmhouse of the Ferdinand and Isabella period.
• Concha Marina, another house Mizner built for himself, only to turn around and sell it to George and Isabel Dodge Sloane, who promptly hired Addison to enlarge it.

In truth, the actual number of houses designed by Mizner will never be known. Hard to believe, but no accurate inventory of contracted projects was kept by Mizner's firm. The list we have today omits designs known to have been created by Mizner and also includes names that can not be matched to specific houses. The real bottom line is that no matter how many houses Mizner designed, his influence on vacation residential architecture in Palm Beach, Boca Raton, and along the entire eastern coast of Florida cannot be overstated. He was a master of proportion and produced buildings that were entirely appropriate to the locale and climate, visually stimulating, and highly livable. Would that one-tenth of architects were half so talented.

You shouldn't overlook the marvelous commercial properties Mizner designed in Palm Beach: Via Mizner, Via Parigi, Plaza Building, Florida Embassy Club (now the Society of the Four Arts' Ester B. O'Keeffe Gallery Building on Royal Palm Way).

Obviously Mizner was no slouch at wooing and wining clients. He worked long, hard days and met his clients socially at night at parties and balls that dragged on throughout the night. But that didn't in itself make him successful. He possessed considerable architectural ability and put it to work. A fitting but mute tribute to Mizner's talent is the 100 percent survival rate of his houses in the powerful 1928 hurricane. A storm that destroyed or visited considerable damage on many Palm Beach structures designed by other architects. Like George Merritt in Coral Gables, Mizner knew how to design and deliver quality buildings.

The six great mansions Mizner designed and built in 1923 marked a sea change in Mizner's reputation as he became acknowledged as Palm Beach’s and America’s leading society architect. But even more importantly it signaled a critical directional change in the style of vacation homes in Palm Beach and Florida as a whole. Size, grandeur, and opulence became the watchwords. Owners of smaller properties soon began to remodel/renovate in a grand fashion dictated by the six “great” houses—Edward Shearson's Villa Flora, Preston Pope Satterwhite's Casa Florencia, William Wood's The Towers, Anthony Drexel Biddle's El Sarimento, George Luke Mesker's La Fontana, and, Mizner's largest house, Joshua Cosden's Playa Riente. Before 1923, Mizner was able to win only a few commissions for large mansions. After that critical year, most of his clients wanted residences that were on a more substantial or even a lavish scale.

Addison bit the dust financially in the two-fisted beating of the Florida land bust of 1926 and then the Great Depression, dying of a massive heart attack in 1933. Some of his work lives on today but many of his best buildings have fallen to the wrecking ball: Plaza Riente, El Mirasol, Casa Bendita, The Towers, Casa Florencia, Casa Joseto, La Fontana, and many others. A precious few survive for us to admire today: Via Mizner, the Warden house, the Everglades Club, the Florida Embassy Club, and El Solano, which had served briefly as Mizner’s residence.

I'd like to take a moment to explain why Addison Mizner was so important to Palm Beach, south Florida, and beyond. When the Spanish departed St. Augustine for the last time, they left behind little architectural heritage except the Castillo de San Marcos and a few very humble residential and commercial structures. Although both Carrère and Hastings in St. Augustine and F. Burral Hoffman in Miami turned to Mediterranean Revival designs, they were extremely impractical in terms of cost-effective construction. Mizner was the first architect to pull together all the disparate elements: south Florida’s history, the romantic setting, the climate and the relentless sun, moderating the heat naturally with coastal breezes, and perhaps most importantly, the techniques to build Mediterranean Revival houses relatively quickly and cheaply. Once Mizner had organized those elements into a coherent whole, he found the right client to start the ball rolling with Paris Singer and the Everglades Club. Without hesitation or a backward glance, he grafted onto that architectural style a building tradition that would quickly become indigenous to Florida.

But more than that, Mizner knew what made resort living work for his clients. His houses centered on the loggia, what today we might call the great room. Perhaps he borrowed the concept from the Hawaiian lanai. Perhaps he created it from whole cloth. Whatever its origin, the loggia became the hallmark of his designs. Some houses had one. Others had two, one up, one down. Or on opposite sides of the house. One to be used by guests and the other by the host family. One for breakfast and lunch and the other as an informal family room.

Every Mizner house had a walled patio landscaped with lush tropical plants and shrubs and a partially paved terrace onto which the major rooms of the house opened. Those delightful spaces quickly became outdoor family rooms, particularly at night, when the breezes were strong and cooling. He also loved formal entryways orienting the house to the street. And whatever weaknesses he had as a designer, Mizner built striking staircases that were the centerpieces of his entrance halls and seemed to float upwards without visible support. He also designed the houses to be used by assemblies of people; they worked marvelously for parties large and small, indoor and out.

All those details were conscious efforts on Mizner's part. He never designed a mere replica of a Spanish building even though that was well within his ability. His houses were south Florida adaptations on Mediterranean themes: Spanish, Italian, and Moorish/Moroccan. He turned the old “Spanish style” inside out by using numerous openings in the walls to let the sun and air in and make residents feel as though they were living outdoors. He took great pains to relate the living areas of the house to the patios, gardens, and terraces with equally enticing views from inside out and outside in. In effect, Mizner first changed the way rich people thought about resort living and then changed the way the rest of us felt about how our own houses should relate to the environment. That's why his work is significant beyond the Palm Beach swells for whom he worked so hard.

Incidentally, if any of you Gentle Readers pick up one of the more traditional tourist books about Florida, you might find a number of snide references to Mizner's glaring incompetence as an architect. About his “forgetting” a staircase here, a bedroom there, or even a kitchen. And his inability to do elevations until the structure was completed. Those tales are absolute rubbish, fabricated largely by Mizner himself as he entertained his many friends in private social settings and not a few public watering holes. Whether you appreciate his style or not, Mizner was a serious and accomplished architect. Period.

If you’re uncertain as to where the truth lies in this matter, simply consult the standard reference, Donald Curl's masterful, Mizner's Florida: American Resort Architecture (MIT Press, 1987), for dozens of wonderful photographs and a concise analysis of the man’s well-documented contributions to professional architecture.

Despite numerous critics and possibly jealous competitors, Mizner was far ahead of his time. He practically invented the manufacture of faux objects from what he called, Woodite, an inexpensive substance that realistically simulated much more expensive and authentic antique materials. Woodite was a pulpy, fluid substance made from a mixture Mizner himself devised: wood shavings, sawdust, plaster of Paris, and various fibrous materials. The liquid was poured into molds of the original, allowed to cure, and then treated exactly like wood. Sawed, sanded, painted, or stained. He then established a corporate structure, Mizner Industries, to manufacture various interior and exterior objects for use in the houses he and other architects across the country designed for their upper-crust clientele. Fired clay roof tiles, indoor ceramic floor tiles, wall and ceiling panels, lighting fixtures, “antique” and authentic fine period furniture reproductions, cast stone exterior ornaments, wrought iron, wicker furniture, custom paints. Mizner Industries did all that and much more.

If you tour Palm Beach, I hope you don't miss some of its other architectural marvels. Of special interest is Flagler's elegant Classical/Mediterranean Revival Breakers Hotel Complex. The original wooden structure burned practically to the ground in 1925. After the fire the hotel was rebuilt, this time with fireproof masonry, in only ten months to be ready for the opening of the next season. It's decidedly on the grand scale and is very expensive if you’re tempted to stay there. But, hey, it's only money.

Then there’s Joseph Urban's and Marion Syms Wyeth's collaboration on Mar-A-Lago, the lavish mansion built for Grande Dame Marjorie Meriweather Post of the cereal fortune. Of course you can't forget Flagler’s magnificent estate, Whitehall, now a private museum. Or the yellow Paramount Theater Building, with its green awnings and memorable entryway on North County Road, also designed by Joseph Urban, a successful theatrical set designer as well as an architect. My list includes the U.S. Post Office on North County Road; Bethesda-By-the-Sea Episcopal Church at 141 South County Road; the Norton Museum of Art in the 1400 block of South Olive Avenue; and the Vineta Hotel on Coconut Row.

And you don't dare overlook the marvelous Everglades Club or El Solano, Mizner's residence at 721 South County Road. My advice, after you've driven along Worth Avenue, gawking like all the other tourists at the internationally famous shopping district, park your car and stroll around Via Mizner, a charming commercial and residential complex of multi-story structures that has been restored. Mizner lived in an apartment there from 1925 until his death from a heart attack in 1933. Some think his ghost still roams through the quiet walkways and covered arcades. Whether the high-spirited and never-say-die architect is there or not, Via Mizner is a special treat in a special urban place.

On a personal note, I must admit to being uncomfortable in Palm Beach. It's too much a celebration of Conspicuous Consumption and rampant thoughtless materialism for my taste, both as an urban planner and as an individual. However, it's a city that I enjoy visiting, at least in terms of architectural eye-candy. And I appreciate its many contributions to the field of urban design. By the way, if you're interested in visiting Palm Beach and in getting an outsiders view of how the truly rich live, my advice is to travel in the summer when hotel rates are more affordable. And when many of those incredible stores on Worth Avenue are running sales (that input was from my lovely wife, who prowled the avenues and vias of Palm Beach like a shark searching for a victim).

If you want to sample the really high life, The Breakers is opulent, old money Florida that can't be beaten. Too rich for my blood but truly elegant, with perhaps the best spa in the U.S. But bring a credit card that has lots of room on it or bags of cash. My personal taste runs more to the nearby and luxurious Four Seasons Resort. But the Ritz-Carlton, located on South Ocean Boulevard in Manalapan, holds a special place in my heart. Where my wife and I almost became accustomed to the pampering and free booze on their justly famous Club Level. It was a most enjoyable experience, for the week we could afford. Just remember, tipping is a way of life in those places. Get used to it. Hey, it was our anniversary. We were entitled.