The Breakers Hotel

The Breakers Hotel is a historic Italian Renaissance Revival-style oceanfront resort located at 1 South County Road in Palm Beach, Florida, directly across Lake Worth Lagoon from West Palm Beach. Sitting on 140 acres of oceanfront property on the island of Palm Beach, it's one of America's most iconic resorts, founded in 1896 by magnate Henry M. Flagler. The structure you see today is actually the third version of the hotel, having opened in December 1926 after two earlier buildings burned down in 1903 and 1925. What's remarkable is that The Breakers stands as the last remaining piece of what was once the grand Flagler System Hotel complex, which also included the Royal Poinciana Hotel and the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine. Today it remains one of the defining landmarks of the Palm Beach County coastline and a window into Gilded Age hospitality culture in South Florida.

Origins and Founding

Flagler started with St. Augustine. In 1885, he acquired a site and began building his first hotel there. But he didn't stop there. He was always pushing south, buying and building Florida railroads and rapidly extending lines down the state's east coast. As the Florida East Coast Railroad opened up the region to development and tourism, Flagler kept on acquiring or constructing resort hotels along the route. In 1893, he announced plans to extend the Florida East Coast Railroad to the isolated area of Lake Worth and construct the Hotel Royal Poinciana on the lake's eastern shore. When it opened in 1894, the Royal Poinciana became the world's largest hotel, stretching more than 1,800 feet along Lake Worth.

The Palm Beach Inn opened on January 16, 1896, and was fully booked for most of that first season. Unlike the Royal Poinciana, which sat along the Lake Worth Lagoon, this new hotel faced the Atlantic Ocean. It was smaller and quieter than the vast Royal Poinciana, and it was the first oceanfront hotel of its kind south of Daytona Beach. Flagler extended the Florida East Coast Railway to Miami and built the Port of Palm Beach, a 1,000-foot pier off the Palm Beach Inn, enabling travel via steamship to Nassau, Havana, and Key West.

Something curious happened. Regular guests stopped asking for rooms at the main hotel. They'd ask instead for rooms "down by the breakers." The name caught on. When Flagler doubled the size of the Palm Beach Inn for the 1901 season, he renamed it The Breakers. By the early 1900s, the property included accommodations for 600 guests, cottages, a casino, a saltwater bath, and the first 18-hole golf course in Florida.

The Two Great Fires

The wooden structure that Flagler built so successfully faced a terrible fate. Not once, but twice. On June 9, 1903, while workers were enlarging the wooden building for the fourth time in less than a decade, The Breakers went up in flames. Fire broke out in the casino kitchen during the expansion and became visible as far away as Fort Pierce and Miami. The East Coast and West Palm Beach fire departments fought it, but it was no use. The hotel, a cottage, the casino, and several nearby stores all burned. Losses totaled approximately $730,000 in 1903 dollars.

Just two weeks after the fire, the 73-year-old Flagler made an announcement that shocked everyone. The Breakers would not only be rebuilt, it would also open for the upcoming winter season. On February 1, 1904, The Breakers reopened to universal acclaim. The new structure was a rambling four-story colonial-style building constructed entirely of wood, containing 425 rooms and suites. Room rates started at four dollars a night and included three meals a day. The guest register read like a "Who's Who" of early twentieth-century America: Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan vacationed alongside United States presidents and European nobility.

The rebuilt wooden structure didn't last long. Tragedy struck again on March 18, 1925, twelve years after Flagler's death, when another fire destroyed the all-wood building. Damage totaled somewhere between $2.5 million and $7 million. The Royal Poinciana Hotel temporarily housed approximately 450 guests and 300 employees of The Breakers and the Palm Beach Hotel. Four days after the fire, on March 22, Florida East Coast Hotel vice president H. E. Bemis announced the company would rebuild. This time they'd abandon wooden construction for fireproof concrete.

Architecture of the Current Structure

The Florida East Coast Hotel Company chose the architectural firm Schultze and Weaver for the new hotel. They'd later design the Waldorf-Astoria, Pierre, and Sherry Netherlands Hotels in New York City. For the style, Schultze and Weaver settled on Italian Renaissance. Leonard Schultze had admired the Villa Medici (1575) during a trip to Rome years earlier, and he used that building as inspiration for The Breakers' facade.

On December 4, 1925, the New York City-based Turner Construction Company signed a contract to build the new Breakers. Construction began in January 1926. They had to build, furnish, and landscape the seven-story hotel all before Christmas 1926, when the Palm Beach season would start. More than 1,200 construction workers labored around the clock to meet that deadline. Seventy-five artisans came from Italy to complete the magnificent hand-painted ceilings in the lobby and first-floor public rooms. The immense structure was finished for $7 million in just 11.5 months. That's remarkable.

The hotel opened with stunning features. There's a 200-foot-long main lobby with an arched, hand-painted ceiling; a vast Florentine Dining Room, richly decorated with a beamed ceiling modeled after the Palazzo Davanzati (circa 1400) in Florence; magnificent North and South Loggias; and shaded terraces with landscaped patios. The lushly landscaped 1,040-foot, palm-lined main drive leads to the resort's Florentine Fountain, modeled after the Boboli Gardens in Florence. The lobby itself takes inspiration from the Great Hall of the Palazzo Carrega in Genoa (circa 1560).

The Italian Renaissance-style hotel's lobby stretches 200 feet long. Seventy-five Italian artisans hand-painted the arched ceiling, and the space contains a 161-by-25-foot carpet with a colorful botanical motif. The Breakers was entered on the National Register of Historic Places on August 14, 1973.

World War II: Ream General Hospital

During World War II, the resort played a remarkable role. The U.S. Army Air Force requisitioned the grand hotel on December 12, 1942, transforming it into Ream General Hospital. For the next 18 months, wounded soldiers replaced America's wealthiest socialites. The luxurious Breakers was converted to a military hospital in anticipation of casualties from the Allied invasion of Africa.

The Army got creative with the space. The ballroom became a recreation hall, the Coconut Grove room a dental clinic, the south loggia an officers' lounge, and the mezzanine section operating rooms. They also created a maternity ward where more than a dozen babies were born. At its peak, Ream General Hospital had 400 staffers and approximately 750 patients, many suffering injuries during the North African campaign.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited in 1944. So did then-Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman. They toured the facility and chatted with patients. About three dozen "Breakers Babies" were born during this period, according to hotel historian James Ponce.

An agreement filed with the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 26, 1944, stated that Ream General Hospital would return to civilian use on December 10. The Florida East Coast Hotel Company received $800,000 in compensation. Architect John Volk and two Miami firms quickly restored The Breakers. Some guests checked in as early as December 24, but full reopening didn't happen until January 7, 1945.

Modern Era, Ownership, and Amenities

The property remains family-owned, passed down to Flagler's third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, and later to her family, the Kenans, when she died. It's one of the few family-owned, independent hotels in the world. That's rare these days, with all the mergers and acquisitions. Flagler System, Inc. (FSI) is the privately held parent company and maintains original family ownership of The Breakers Palm Beach, Breakers West Country Club, One North Breakers Row, and various commercial real estate properties on the island.

The Kenan family invests an average of $30 million annually into maintaining the property, restoring and improving the guest experience. In 1995, the hotel completed a five-year, $75 million renovation program.

The resort features 534 guest rooms, including 72 suites among them the Imperial and Royal Poinciana Suites. Each room offers views of the Atlantic or resort grounds, décor inspired by Palm Beach's casually chic lifestyle, and complimentary high-speed WiFi. There's also The Flagler Club, a 13-room, eight-suite boutique hotel within the resort, located on the sixth and seventh floors with restricted access for guests.

It's a full-service destination. Thirty-six holes of golf, spa services, and on-site designer stores. Eight world-class restaurants and a 6,000 square-foot Ocean Fitness facility. Throughout the grounds, the hotel implements ecologically friendly practices that conserve resources and protect the environment. It's committed to expanding and enhancing its environmental programs to protect and preserve natural resources. As a modern operation, it employs more than 2,400 people.

The resort has received recognition from the American Automobile Association, the American Institute of Architects, Forbes Travel Guide, and U.S. News & World Report. The Breakers bills itself as the oldest continuously operating business in Florida.