North Palm Beach's Public Golf Course Just Turned 100, and the Village Showed Up Like It Mattered

Fireworks over a municipal golf course are not something most towns bother with. North Palm Beach did it anyway. On the last night of a four-day centennial celebration that ran April 30 through May 3, a ten-minute show lit up the fairways at North Palm Beach Country Club, closing out a weekend that had already included glow-in-the-dark tennis, a pool-party swim exhibition, and a charity golf outing with local pros. Mayor Lisa Interlandi and Vice Mayor Orlando Puyol were on hand to welcome guests, standing next to the club's general manager and its head golf professional, Allan Bowman, as if a public golf course turning 100 were the kind of thing that calls for the mayor to show up personally. In this Village, apparently, it is.

That reaction is the real story here, more than the birthday itself. North Palm Beach doesn't have a bustling downtown strip or a beachfront boardwalk drawing foot traffic the way some of its neighbors do. What it has, and has quietly had for a century, is a golf course that the Village owns outright, that residents can walk onto without a membership fee or a sponsor, and that just proved it can pull out the mayor, the fire department's fireworks contractor, and half the neighborhood on a random spring weekend. If you live here and have never set foot on the course, this is the year to understand what that piece of land has actually meant to the place.

A Private Club Built for Yacht Traffic, Handed to the Public

The course didn't start as anyone's civic amenity. In 1926, golf course architect Seth Raynor designed it as the Palm Beach Winter Club, a private draw meant to lure real estate investors and Palm Beach socialites who arrived by car or sailed up Lake Worth in their own yachts to play a round. For decades it stayed exactly what it was built to be: an exclusive stop for people who could get there by boat.

The shift came in 1962, when the Village of North Palm Beach bought the course outright. What had been a rich person's amenity became a municipal one, open to whoever wanted to book a tee time, a transition that's easy to gloss over but is genuinely unusual. Plenty of towns inherit golf courses through bankruptcy or abandonment. North Palm Beach bought a working, storied private club and turned it into public infrastructure on purpose.

The Redesign That Cost a Dollar

The next chapter is the one golf people actually talk about. In 2006 the Village brought in Jack Nicklaus, a longtime North Palm Beach resident, to redesign the course. He charged the Village one dollar for the work. The result is one of only two Nicklaus Signature courses in the entire country that are municipally owned, a distinction that puts North Palm Beach in the same sentence as very few other public parks and recreation departments anywhere.

The course got another upgrade in 2019, and it currently carries a ranking as the top municipal golf course in Florida from GolfWeek Magazine. That's not a marketing line invented for the centennial. It's a standing designation the course has held into this year, on top of the Nicklaus pedigree and a lighted driving range that keeps the property in use well past sunset.

None of that changes who gets to play it. The course sits at 951 US Highway 1, walk-in rates are posted seasonally on the Village's own site, and non-members can book tee times up to ten days out. A design lineage that runs through Seth Raynor and Jack Nicklaus is sitting on land the Village owns, priced for whoever wants to show up with clubs, not for whoever can front a membership deposit.

The Clubhouse Has Been Doing Its Own Kind of Work

The dining side of the property has its own history worth knowing if you've eaten there in the last several years. For a long stretch, the on-site restaurant operated as Farmer's Table, the farm-to-table concept known for grass-fed beef, chemical-free shrimp, and a menu built around clean, seasonal ingredients rather than the usual clubhouse burger-and-fries lineup. It anchored a 24,000-square-foot clubhouse that was, by design, meant to feel less like a private grill room and more like a public gathering space with a really good kitchen attached.

This year's centennial coverage referred to the venue as The Clubhouse Restaurant, offering happy hour pricing and half off house beer and wine as part of the celebration. Whatever the exact branding on the door this month, the pattern holds: it's a restaurant built into a public golf course, open to people who never plan to swing a club, sitting on the Intracoastal side of the property with fairway views during happy hour.

Even the Fishing Derby Moved to the Golf Course

The detail that tells you the most about how this Village operates is a small one. North Palm Beach already has its own beloved summer tradition, the Anchorage Aweigh Fishing Tournament at Anchorage Park, an event that's technically in its 19th official year but is actually the 20th, since one year was lost to Covid cancellation. Lines go in the water at 6 a.m. at the Anchorage Park Marina, anglers chase trout, sheepshead, and snapper inshore or king, dolphin, wahoo, and grouper offshore, and the day ends with a cookout and awards ceremony back at the park.

For the golf course centennial, the Village didn't invent a new activity. It borrowed that one. Working with the West Palm Beach Fishing Club, organizers ran a kids' fishing clinic directly on holes 16, 17, and 18 of the golf course, poles provided, prizes and donuts on hand for young anglers. A tradition that normally belongs to the marina got moved onto the fairways for four days, which is a pretty good sign that in North Palm Beach, civic pride doesn't sort itself neatly into "golf people" and "boat people." It's the same crowd, showing up for whichever version of the party is happening that weekend.

That instinct to show up doesn't stop when the centennial banners come down. On September 19, the Village's own Environmental Committee is hosting a volunteer build of Vertical Oyster Gardens at Anchorage Park, a hands-on project meant to help filter and clean the local waterways. It's a smaller, quieter event than fireworks over the 18th green, but it's built from the same instinct: a public amenity, a Village department behind it, and residents expected to actually turn up and do something with their Saturday morning.

What This Means If You Live Here and Have Never Played a Round

None of this requires you to golf. It's worth knowing the course exists as public land with a real design pedigree, not because it should change your weekend plans, but because it reframes what North Palm Beach actually is. This is a Village that took a 1920s yacht-club exclusive and, within a couple of generations, turned it into a $1-redesign municipal asset good enough to rank first in the state. The same civic muscle that bought that course in 1962 is the muscle behind the fishing tournament at Anchorage Park, the oyster garden build this month, and a centennial weekend that pulled in the mayor because a hundred-year-old public course actually meant something to the people who use it.

If you've lived here for years and never walked the grounds at 951 US Highway 1, the centennial year is as good a reason as any to go see what a dollar bill in a drawer somewhere at Village Hall actually bought this town.

For more on how North Palm Beach's public spaces, waterways, and neighborhoods fit together day to day, the North Palm Beach neighborhood guide is a good place to keep exploring.

If you're weighing a move to a Village where the public golf course doubles as the town square, Leila Kallop can walk you through what daily life here actually looks like, block by block. Request a private consultation to start the conversation.