Gilded Age Grandeur on the Gold Coast

Whitehall was Henry Flagler's wedding gift to his third wife Mary Lily Kenan in 1902 — a 55-room Beaux-Arts palace built in 18 months at a cost of $2.5 million (roughly $90 million today). Flagler was John D. Rockefeller's partner at Standard Oil and the visionary who extended his Florida East Coast Railway all the way to Key West, single-handedly opening South Florida to tourists, settlers, and commerce. The mansion served as the couple's winter retreat until Flagler's death in 1913, then became a hotel before Mary Lily's niece saved it as a museum in 1960. Today its 75 rooms include the original Louis XV ballroom, a grand foyer modeled after the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and Flagler's private railcar Rambler — a gleaming mahogany-paneled Pullman car that transported the industrialist through his Florida empire. The museum offers one of the most vivid windows into Gilded Age excess and ambition anywhere in the American South.

Founded in 1941 by Chicago steel magnate Ralph Norton, the Norton Museum of Art has grown into one of the finest regional art museums in the American Southeast, with a permanent collection of over 8,000 works. Its strengths are extraordinary: French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism with works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso; American art from the Hudson River School through Abstract Expressionism; and one of the most comprehensive collections of Chinese art in Florida, featuring jade, bronze, and ceramic works spanning 5,000 years. A major 2019 expansion by Lord Norman Foster nearly doubled the gallery space and added a stunning glass-roofed sculpture garden. The photography wing — which includes works by Ansel Adams, Man Ray, and Cindy Sherman — is alone worth the drive from Miami.

Worth Avenue is four blocks of some of the most rarefied retail real estate in America, stretching from South County Road to the Lake Worth Lagoon. Architect Addison Mizner designed the street in the early 1920s in his signature Mediterranean Revival style — whitewashed stucco, red barrel tile roofs, wrought-iron balconies, and hidden courtyards called vias that open off the main boulevard. Even if Hermès, Gucci, and Cartier are beyond your budget, the architecture itself is a masterpiece. Walk the vias — particularly Via Mizner — to discover hidden fountains, bougainvillea-draped archways, and the tiny alley shops that Mizner built for artisans. The street culminates at the Lake Worth Lagoon with views of the Intracoastal Waterway.