Souvenir of The Palm Beaches, Florida.
Chicago: Curt Teich & Co. , [n.d., circa 1910s].
$475.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152165
+$500
Rare C.T. & Co. Palm Beach Souvenir Album; Illustrated with Beautiful Color Lithograph Plates of the Resort Town at the Height of its Golden Age
Rare early color lithograph souvenir album of the Palm Beaches, Florida. Octavo, original illustrated wrappers printed in full color, the upper wrapper depicting golfers on the links beneath coconut palms with an inset view captioned "View of the Royal Poinciana and White Hall From West Palm Beach," titled in bold gilt lettering "Souvenir of The Palm Beaches Florida." The interior pages combine descriptive text on Palm Beach and West Palm Beach with color lithograph plates throughout, the plates photographed by Albert Guionnaud and printed by C.T. & Co. Subjects include The Breakers, the Beach Casino, the Royal Poinciana, Whitehall, and a hand-colored vignette view of Ocean Boulevard. The descriptive text presents Palm Beach as the playground of American millionaires and titled nobility, and West Palm Beach as a rapidly growing city of 15,000 with streets of waterbound macadam and asphalt. In near fine 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.
Souvenir of The Palm Beaches, Florida.
$475.00
In Stock
