What Palm Beach Is Like Without Donald Trump
This coming Mother’s Day, Mar-a-Lago will serve its last formal meal of the season, a sumptuous buffet brunch typical of the private club’s over-the-top style. For what remains of the month of May, the beach club’s poolside snack bar will offer light fare. Then, like so much of Palm Beach, the hurricane shutters will go up, the wait staff will be furloughed and the long, hot summer of repairs and renovations will begin.
The community is recovering from having a sitting US president take up part-time residency in what is basically a catering facility.
With Trump gone, things get back to normal. That is, as normal as possible given the unprecedented circumstance of having a sitting president of the United States take up part-time residency in what is basically a catering facility. The newly constructed helipad on the sweeping back lawn will sit empty, and the lawn itself will be void of the crush of Bentleys, Porsches, and Maseratis that are usually there during "the season," now defined as the six months and one day of residency that shelters residents from paying state income tax elsewhere. Logging in at the polls on Election Day is essential to this process, so the clock generally starts ticking on the first Tuesday of November. Even before Easter, the car carriers start to appear along South Ocean Boulevard, loading up for the trip to Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other points north.
The patrician Bath & Tennis Club gets its parking lot back. This past winter, the Secret Service took eminent domain, setting up tents in order to screen visitors and bomb-sweep cars before allowing them to enter Mar-a-Lago’s service gate, now the designated access onto the estate’s grounds. The main gate, with its Moorish arch and meandering driveway, is rendered inaccessible when the president is in residence, along with a two-mile stretch of South Ocean Boulevard. Only residents with proper identification are allowed beyond the concrete barricades that basically divide the island of Palm Beach into two halves, north and south of Mar-a-Lago, with a buffer of billionaires’ homes in between.
The Shiny Sheet, Palm Beach’s daily newspaper of record (nicknamed for its slick, smudge-proof stock) cuts back to two flimsy issues a week. Lately, it has been rife with Trump-centric recaps and boasts about the bullish real estate market, along with a tally of notable deaths - a sort of yearbook for the recently deceased. But for many, May is when life begins in Palm Beach. The sky turns cerulean and is generally cloudless, and the air remains pleasantly balmy. There is a softness to the ocean, particularly beautiful on brilliantly moonlit nights. Restaurants become more accessible: We can now go back to BrickTops and Chez Jean-Pierre for dinner, and Green's Pharmacy for our Sunday breakfasts at the counter. One can drive to Worth Avenue, the deluxe shopping street, and actually park directly in front of the stores.
Best of all, Palm Beach International Airport is delightfully quiet, as opposed to its in-season "Last Flight From Saigon" atmosphere. There’s plentiful parking, no lines, and few delays, save for the afternoons further along in the summer, when daily thunderstorms become the norm. More and more, as Palm Beach evolves into a less seasonal place, a lot of awfully nice people are staying put. New healthcare facilities are being built, along with a growing tech presence. Construction of a grand RH Gallery is almost complete, and cranes creating high-rise condo towers seem to be popping up everywhere they are allowed - which is not on Palm Beach island, where pretty much nothing is allowed.
Trump has tested that aspect of Palm Beach to its max, not only since the election, but for decades before. His battles with the Planning, Zoning, and Building Department are legendary, from his initial desire to subdivide Mar-a-Lago into buildable lots to erecting an 80-foot flagpole as a middle finger salute to the town that said "No!"
Similarly, he hit Palm Beach County with a $100-million lawsuit in in 2015 for what he called "deliberate and malicious" moves to direct departing flights from the Palm Beach International Airport over Mar-a-Lago. He dropped that suit in November, after the election. It's a moot point now anyway, as the Secret Service requested a no-fly zone whenever Air Force One revs its engines. All is quiet then. Trump’s complaints about noise disturbing his membership also don’t consider the sweet sounds of future Marine One transportation, which many suspect is the reason behind the resort's new landing pad.
All of this irony adds to the already surreal nature of Palm Beach, America’s first and maybe last uber-rich resort. It’s never been normal, not since the arrival of Standard Oil scion Henry Flagler’s private railcar in 1894. But with POTUS out of the equation, at least until Mar-a-Lago reopens in late October, normal is ever-so-slightly nearer.
T&C contributor Steven Stolman has called Palm Beach home since 1995.
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