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Welcome to West Palm Beach.Wiki

The free encyclopedia for West Palm Beach and South Florida's Palm Beach County. We're here to explore communities, history, and culture in this dynamic region.

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About West Palm Beach

West Palm Beach is the county seat of Palm Beach County, Florida. It's also the largest city on Florida's Treasure Coast and Palm Beaches region. Founded in 1894 by Henry Morrison Flagler—an oil, railroad, and hotel magnate—the city started as a service community for his Royal Poinciana Hotel on adjacent Palm Beach island. That same year it was incorporated and has since grown into a major urban center with a population exceeding 117,000 residents. You'll find the city stretched along the western shore of the Lake Worth Lagoon, separated from the town of Palm Beach and the Atlantic Ocean by the Intracoastal Waterway.

Over the past few years, West Palm Beach has transformed itself economically. Financial services firms, hedge funds, and private equity companies have been relocating from New York and northeastern cities, attracted by Florida's favorable tax climate and growing professional infrastructure. Downtown's Clematis Street and CityPlace (now Rosemary Square) districts have become the heart of this revitalized urban core, anchoring a thriving arts, dining, and entertainment scene. The city benefits from strong transportation connections: Palm Beach International Airport, the Brightline intercity passenger rail station linking West Palm Beach to Miami and Orlando, and an extensive highway network including Interstate 95.

Explore West Palm Beach

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Featured Article

Clematis Street. The principal commercial and entertainment corridor of downtown West Palm Beach, running east to west from the Intracoastal Waterway toward Dixie Highway. It was first developed in the late nineteenth century alongside the city's founding, then fell into decline through much of the mid-twentieth century before benefiting from sustained revitalization efforts beginning in the 1990s. Today it's packed with restaurants, bars, retail shops, and live music venues where locals and visitors come to spend time. The street hosts recurring outdoor events. Clematis by Night, that weekly gathering that's been running for years, draws crowds to its waterfront blocks. The eastern terminus at Centennial Fountain and the adjacent waterfront park offer direct views across the Intracoastal Waterway toward Palm Beach island. Read more →

Did You Know?

West Palm Beach and Palm Beach County have remarkable stories to tell. The city was founded in 1894 as a service and labor community for Henry Flagler's Royal Poinciana Hotel. At the time, it was the largest wooden hotel in the world, built to welcome the American elite who arrived on Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway. In 1992, the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts opened on Okeechobee Boulevard in downtown. It now hosts more than 300 performances annually across its multiple venues and ranks among Florida's largest performing arts facilities.

Belle Glade, a farming city in the western reaches of Palm Beach County on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee, stands out for a different reason entirely. It's produced more NFL players per capita than virtually any other municipality in the United States. This distinction has drawn national sports media attention for decades and earned the city an informal nickname: "Muck City," a reference to the rich agricultural soil of the Everglades Agricultural Area. Technology history was made here too. The IBM Personal Computer, which transformed global computing when it launched in 1981, was developed at IBM's facility in Boca Raton, located in southern Palm Beach County. Don Estridge led the team behind this project, which helped establish South Florida as a significant hub in the history of the technology industry.

The 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane remains one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history. September 16, 1928: the storm made landfall near Palm Beach. The subsequent collapse of the dike surrounding Lake Okeechobee killed an estimated 2,500 people, the majority of them Black agricultural laborers living in communities around the lake's southern shore. This tragedy prompted the construction of the Herbert Hoover Dike, which today encircles Lake Okeechobee and is managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

How to Contribute

West Palm Beach.Wiki is a community-maintained free encyclopedia covering West Palm Beach, Palm Beach County, and the surrounding South Florida region. If you've got knowledge of the area, you're welcome to create an account and contribute. Before making substantive changes, new editors should review the style guide and editorial policies. Articles that need expansion can be found at the stubs category, and you can propose entirely new topics at the requested articles page.

This project operates independently. We're not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia. Our content is freely licensed and written by volunteer contributors who know this area well.