This Week in the Palm Beaches.

Palm Beach, Florida, during the 1920s was one of the most spectacular expressions of American wealth, leisure, and architectural ambition in the history of the nation, a narrow barrier island that had been transformed by the railroad magnate Henry Morrison Flagler from a wilderness of palmetto scrub into the preeminent winter retreat of the American plutocracy, and which reached the peak of its extravagance precisely in the years surrounding 1926. The great Addison Mizner, whose synthesis of Spanish Colonial Revival, Venetian Gothic, and Mediterranean Revival architecture gave Palm Beach its distinctive visual identity, was at the height of his powers and influence in the early 1920s, designing magnificent estates along the Intracoastal Waterway for the Vanderbilts, the Stotesburys, and the most prominent names in American industrial and financial life. The Florida land boom of the mid-1920s had transformed the broader region into a speculative frenzy of extraordinary proportions, with real estate values inflating at a rate that attracted investors from across the country and generated a building activity in Palm Beach County that dwarfed anything previously seen in the state. The year 1926 marked both the apex and the sudden catastrophic collapse of this era: the Great Miami Hurricane of September 18, 1926, one of the most destructive storms in Florida history, struck the Gold Coast with devastating force, killing hundreds, destroying thousands of structures, and shattering the confidence of investors whose money had sustained the boom, precipitating a regional economic collapse that presaged the national Great Depression by three full years and ended forever the particular gilded dream of limitless Florida prosperity that publications like This Week in the Palm Beaches had so confidently chronicled in the months and years immediately preceding it.