Excerpt from Introduction:
If there is one resort community in America that signifies enormous wealth, unparalleled exclusivity, and unmitigated extravagance, it is Palm Beach. Two little words: "palm" and "beach." When combined they conjure up a benign image of nothing more than tropical trees, a deserted expanse of sand, and the soft sound of lapping surf. How sublimely simple. In truth, that's pretty much what Palm Beach was before the arrival of its modern-day settlers and until a certain Henry Morrison Flagler, a founder of Standard Oil, cast his canny eyes on the island's oceanfront acres in the early 1890s and bought them for $300,000. There's something to be said for visionaries who know what people want before they know it themselves. For Flagler, it was a retreat where the rich could go to escape the bone-chilling winter elsewhere...