During this decade, Palm Beach resorts operated year-round.

MM Cloutier
| Special to the Palm Beach Daily News

If they were alive today, Gilded Age Palm Beach residents and visitors would be amazed at all the changes on the island—that’s a given—but what would particularly surprise a guy like Leland Sterry, the preeminent island hotelier of that era a century ago?

Many things, each telling how the island developed, but first he marveled at the grandeur of the hotel, founded in 1896, which he ran from 1907 until his death in 1923.

Ultimately, two years after Sterry’s death, fire consumed The Breakers from roof to foundation. The hotel was rebuilt in Italian Renaissance style.

And what, he might ask, became of The Breakers’ 1,000-plus-room sister hotel, the Royal Poinciana, which once dominated the lakeshore west of The Breakers?

The skyline there is empty, he said, before learning that it was demolished in the 1930s, a victim of the 1928 hurricane and changing hotel tastes.

Ah, but here’s the good news, Mr. Sterry: Palm Beach is bustling with activity in October.

During his tenure, Palm Beach’s winter “season” increased from two months to four, but the city was otherwise largely shut down (old-timers today will remember officials removing traffic lights due to lack of traffic).

Now think about Sterry’s disbelief when he asks: Do you mean Palm Beach hotels are now open in the summer? When did this happen?

Looking back, when it actually happened, it was a turning point.

In the decades following Sterry’s tenure with the Breakers, the “season” continued to get longer.

By the late 1960s, when the Colony Hotel’s loyal annual visitors, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who sometimes traveled with their pugs, raved that Palm Beach in May was the best-kept secret, all signs pointed to an unprecedented long ” season” in Palm Beach.

But summer in subtropical Palm Beach? It’s too hot. Hurricanes are possible.

The Colony, built in 1947, and the nearby Brazilian Court, which debuted on New Year’s Day in 1926, reportedly flirted with the idea of staying open during the summer in the late 1960s, opening small sections of their property after May.

But everything changed in 1971.

The late Earl E.T. Smith, a former ambassador to Cuba and member of the New York Stock Exchange, became the ninth mayor of Palm Beach, and Publix, Palm Beach’s first chain grocery store, was set to open.

And The Breakers, the grand dame of Palm Beach hotels, has decided to stay open year-round for the first time. Why did it—or more importantly, why could it—stay open during the summer? Two words: air conditioning.

The resort, which now has 531 rooms and suites, installed air conditioning in 1970.

This has opened the door for guests to visit in comfort year-round, injecting new energy into the island and stimulating other summer activities nearby. The installation of air conditioning at the Breakers also coincided with the resort’s efforts to create a less stuffy atmosphere.

According to The Breakers archives, this meant that the usual formal attire for winter guests at dinner and other hotel events was replaced by a “less dictated” dress code. As then-Vice President and General Manager of The Breakers John F. (Jack) Clifford told the Daily News in 1971, “In the past, only older, more established people could afford us.”

Opening in the summer allowed The Breakers and Palm Beach to tap into a broader tourist market, including Europeans and Latinos who traditionally vacation in the summer.

Meanwhile, as Florida’s post-World War II population growth far outpaced the national average, Floridians became Palm Beach’s summer tourists, enjoying less expensive room rates than the winter season at The Breakers (today all hotels in Palm Beach offer tempting summer rates). ).

Opening doors in the summer also meant facilitating weddings, conventions and other causes. And it was a “victory” for the hotel staff. “It’s hard enough to find good people without telling them to go somewhere else because you close for the summer,” Clifford said, according to local news reports.

Soon, other hotels on the island, including The Colony and The Brazil Court, were fully air-conditioned, and hotels opening in the coming years will be cool all year round.

“Certainly the introduction of air conditioning has been a huge catalyst in making Palm Beach more of a year-round vacation destination,” Colony CEO and President Sarah Wetenhall told the Daily News. Now, she says, “there’s no bad time to visit.”

By the time the Four Seasons Palm Beach debuted in 1994 after merging with a former island hotel, and the Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan opened in 1991 before becoming Eau Palm Beach in 2013, no one would have thought to ask : Do you have air conditioning? and open in summer?