Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu by Les Standiford
This is a powerhouse book crammed with startling revelations and background history.
Les Standiford has added yet another crown jewel to his incredible list of fascinating and informative must read books.
EXCERPTS:
The glare of the spotlight that Trump’s presence brought has been as much bane as blessing. For this writer, what follows is an attempt to trace the record of an improbable dream of wealth and privilege carried from hand to hand, slowly working its way into shape, tempered by the intrigues of jealousy, greed, and the perpetual thirst for control.
It is the tale of how an unlikely place was born from nothing and how that place in turn spawned the perfect domicile to represent and nourish it
In that otherworldly retreat for the ultraprivileged there had been nothing like exotic Mar-a-Lago, Spanish for “sea-to-lake,”
In 1905, when a U.S.-supported revolution had resulted in the secession of Panama from Columbia and the new government’s authorization of an agreement for the building of a canal across the isthmus, Flagler had his justification for going to Key West.
In the end, the principal effect of what became known as the Oversea Railway was to transform Key West, which had always been a workingman’s town, into a tourist destination. Passengers on the Havana Special (one could board a Pullman car in Penn Station that would be ferried within a few days across the Florida Straits to Cuba)
“Now I can die happy,” a visibly moved Flagler told the assembled crowd during the arrival celebration, which included a children’s choir brought to serenade him. Later, as he was being led from the reviewing stand, Flagler turned to Joe Parrott to remark, “I can hear the children, but I can’t see them.”
In December it was a minor bit of business, upping the amount set for Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine from the high five figures into the low sixes, but the fact that she had called in her own attorneys for the work and again made no mention of any change as regarded the standing of her new husband would soon prove to be significant.
“Flagler’s opening of the east coast [of Florida] to rail travel and his resort hotels in Palm Beach and Miami marked the establishment of Florida’s greatest industries … No depressions or freezes, however damaging or painful, could destroy them, and in the following decades they would become as identified with the state as palm trees and alligators.”
“Mar-a-Lago is more of a Boca [Raton] idea than a Palm Beach idea. Mar-a-Lago is a new-money idea at an old-money location.” Shortly after Mar-a-Lago opened, when its initiation fees
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