Atlantic Avenue: The Gold Coast's Best Small-City Day

Old School Square is an arts campus built around Delray Beach's original schoolhouse, a 1913 Mediterranean Revival building that is the oldest surviving public building in the city. Alongside it stands the 1926 gymnasium, restored as a performance venue, and the open Amphitheater plaza that hosts everything from jazz concerts to art fairs. The Cornell Art Museum inside the school building mounts rotating exhibitions of contemporary and Florida-connected art. The campus is located at Swinton Avenue and Atlantic Avenue, where Delray's grid of residential streets meets its main commercial street — a crossroads that defines the city's identity as genuinely walkable in a region where almost nothing is.

Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach runs two miles from Swinton Avenue to the Atlantic Ocean, and is lined with independent restaurants, galleries, boutiques, and sidewalk cafés on a human-scaled street that rewards slow walking. Morning is the best time — the light is good, the heat hasn't built, and the avenue belongs to residents on their way to coffee rather than tourists. The Pineapple Grove Arts District branches off one block north on NE 2nd Avenue, with additional galleries in converted storefronts and a rotating public art program that puts murals on every available wall.

The Morikami's six Japanese garden styles — strolling garden, rock garden, paradise garden, koi pond garden, dry landscape garden, and garden of everlasting fragrance — spread across 200 acres donated by Japanese immigrant George Morikami, one of the last survivors of the 1904 Yamato Colony of pineapple farmers who settled Palm Beach County. The gardens are at their most photogenic and meditative in the afternoon light: the raked gravel patterns of the dry landscape garden, the slow circles of the koi pond, the ancient stone lanterns placed according to centuries-old Japanese garden principles. Even without entering the museum, the gardens' walking path takes 45 minutes at a comfortable pace. Afternoons here have a quality of unhurriedness that is rare in South Florida.