Golf Course Architecture: Issue 57 - July 2019

Illenis erume sitatatur maio int maxim alitiis dolor atquatium que vit exeria paritio reiuntia vellest, sequissit voluptis int, alit W hen American industrialist Henry Flagler developed a railway along Florida’s east coast in the late nineteenth century, he ushered in a period of development that would transform the state. Before his standard gauge tracks arrived, Miami was just a small settlement with a handful of inhabitants. But Flagler hadn’t originally planned to extend the railroad quite so far south. Its terminus was to be Palm Beach, where America’s elite could spend their winters at his hotels, first the Royal Poinciana and, in 1896, The Palm Beach Inn, which a few years later would be renamed The Breakers, having become synonymous with the crashing waves beneath the hotel’s Atlantic-view rooms. The Royal Poinciana closed during the height of the Great Depression, but The Breakers remains a mainstay of a luxury Palm Beach lifestyle. The original hotel was destroyed by fire in 1903 and again in 1925, after which it was rebuilt to a design by New York architects Schultze and Toby Ingleton follows in the footsteps of America’s gilded elite to visit The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida, where Rees Jones has just completed a renovation of the resort’s Ocean course 67 The par-four sixth hole on the renovated Ocean course at The Breakers Photo: Larry Lambrecht