West Palm Beach

Lia and I arrived in West Palm Beach on a whim, having originally booked a hotel across the Intracoastal in Palm Beach proper, only to discover the town we actually wanted was on the mainland side. Downtown West Palm has none of the hedged-in exclusivity of its famous neighbor — instead there’s Clematis Street humming with restaurant patios, a waterfront park where a Thursday night concert draws families with folding chairs, and a skyline that keeps quietly growing upward. We liked it immediately for being a real city first and a resort town second.

Clematis Street and downtown

We spent our first evening wandering Clematis Street, where restored 1920s storefronts now hold tapas bars, breweries, and an old movie palace turned event space. On Thursdays the street shuts down for Clematis by Night, a free concert series that turns the block into a slow-moving block party — kids chasing each other around a fountain while a local band plays classic rock covers to a crowd nursing rosé from plastic cups. Nearby, the Norton Museum of Art surprised us with a serious collection for a mid-sized city, heavy on Chinese jade and American modernism, housed in a striking Foster + Partners building wrapped in glass and greenery.

The waterfront and the bridge to Palm Beach

Waterfront Commons and Meyer Amphitheatre form a long green ribbon along the Intracoastal, and we spent a lazy morning there watching yachts idle past en route to the inlet, joggers looping the promenade, and a fishing pier crowded with retirees. Crossing the Royal Park Bridge into Palm Beach itself takes minutes on foot, and it’s worth the walk if only to gawk at the hedge-walled estates of Worth Avenue before retreating back to West Palm’s more affordable, more relaxed side of the water for dinner. We ate stone crab claws at a bayfront spot and agreed the view of Palm Beach’s skyline from a distance was better than being inside it.

Getting There

Palm Beach International Airport sits just a few miles west of downtown, close enough that you can be checked into a hotel within twenty minutes of landing. It’s roughly a seventy-mile, hour-and-fifteen-minute drive north from Fort Lauderdale on I-95, or about three hours south from Orlando via the Florida Turnpike, both easy highway runs through the flat, palm-studded interior of South Florida.