Palm Beach, Florida Souvenir View Book.
Palm Beach, Florida Souvenir View Book.
Rare Albertype Company Palm Beach Souvenir Album; Illustrated with Sixteen Collotype Plates of the Resort Town in its Early Decades
Buffalo, New York: Union Souvenir Co. [Plates printed by] The Albertype Co., Brooklyn, [n.d., circa 1910s].
$1,250.00
In Stock
Item Number: 152161
Rare early photographic souvenir view book of Palm Beach, Florida. Oblong format, 16 pages, original printed wrappers bound with the publisher’s silk cord, the upper wrapper lettered “Palm Beach, Florida” and mounted with a hand-colored view of a solitary coconut palm at the water’s edge, a small rowboat at rest beyond. The plates record Palm Beach in the era of its first great resort hotels, among them a fine view of The Breakers – the rambling wood-frame hotel that stood from 1904 until it was destroyed by fire in March 1925, before the present concrete structure rose in its place. The building pictured here vanished a century ago, which places this album firmly within the period 1904 to 1925, when Palm Beach was establishing itself as the winter playground of Gilded Age America. The Albertype Company was among the foremost American producers of fine collotype view books in the early twentieth century, and souvenir albums of this kind preserve a vivid record of a Palm Beach that no longer exists. In very good condition. A scarce piece of Palm Beach local history.
Palm Beach's emergence as America's preeminent winter resort in the early twentieth century was inseparable from the ambitions of Henry Morrison Flagler, the Standard Oil co-founder who recognized in the Florida barrier island the raw material for a destination without rival. Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway, completed to Palm Beach in 1894, made the island accessible to the northeastern elite for the first time, and his twin hotels, the Royal Poinciana on Lake Worth and The Breakers on the Atlantic oceanfront, established the architectural and social grammar of the season. At its height, the Royal Poinciana was the largest wooden hotel in the world, and its winter registers read as a cross-section of the American plutocracy: Vanderbilts, Astors, Belmonts, and Rockefellers alongside sitting presidents and European nobility. The social rituals that structured the season, the afternoon promenades along the Jungle Trail, the wheeled afromobile chairs, the elaborate dinner dances and charity galas, constituted a world of conspicuous leisure that was as carefully choreographed as it was genuinely splendid.
