Long eclipsed by its more glamorous neighbor across the Lake Worth Lagoon, West Palm Beach has pulled off a full-blown identity shift. This isn’t the old Protestant money that built Palm Beach. It’s startup money, crypto money and New York exodus money. They came for the taxes and stayed for something they didn’t expect: a real city. Historically, West Palm was always where, for lack of a better phrase, the help lived. Henry Flagler designed Palm Beach County that way during the Gilded Age: paradise for millionaires on the island, worker housing on the mainland. That dynamic held for a century. Then, developers noticed the underutilized waterfront. Artists discovered neighborhoods full of 1920s Mediterranean Revival houses selling for nothing. Chefs realized you could open without waiting three generations for a permit.
Now, Goldman Sachs has offices here. So does J.P. Morgan. Vanderbilt is building a graduate campus, and the Norton Museum of Art got a Norman Foster expansion. The upshot of all this bigwig migration—and a 60 percent jump in home prices over four years—is a South Florida city in full bloom. Nothing captures the shift quite like the buzziest openings, from Mr. C’s Bellini Rooftop Lounge to Biba Social, a Riviera-chic members-only club debuting this winter in the historic Hotel Biba. With high-end boutique suites and a club-owned boat, it’s bottling the kind of discretion and decadence Palm Beach once monopolized.
So skip the bridge and Mar-a-Lago tourist traffic and stay in West Palm—it’s only 10 minutes from the Palm Beach International Airport, anyway. Palm Beach still has the beach and the pedigree. West Palm has everything else, including the restaurants that close at 2 a.m., the galleries that show artists under 80 years old and the shops you can afford. This guide shows you where the new Florida money actually spends its time.
