Palm Beach's resorts were open year-round during this decade.

M. M. Cloutier
| Special to Palm Beach Daily News

If they were alive today, the residents and visitors of Gilded Age Palm Beach would have been startled by all the changes on the island – that’s a given – but what in particular would someone like Leland Sterry, a leading island hotelier from that century ago, could surprise you?

Many things – all telling how the island developed – but first he would marvel at the grandeur of the hotel that was founded in 1896 and that he managed from 1907 until his death in 1923.

After all, two years after Sterry died, the fire devoured The Breakers from roof to foundation. The hotel was rebuilt in Italian Renaissance style.

And what, he might ask, became of The Breakers’ thousand-plus-room sister hotel, the Royal Poinciana, which once presided over the lakefront just west of The Breakers?

The horizon there is empty, he would say, before he heard it was razed in the 1930s, a victim of the 1928 hurricane and changing hotel tastes.

Ah, but here’s some good news, Mr. Sterry: Palm Beach is vibrant in October.

In his day, Palm Beach’s winter season had grown from two to four months, but otherwise the city was largely closed (old-timers may remember officials removing the traffic lights because there was no traffic).

Now look at what Sterry’s disbelief might be as he asks: You mean the hotels in Palm Beach are now open in the summer? When did that happen?

In retrospect, it was a turning point when that happened.

For decades after Sterry’s tenure with The Breakers, the “season” continued to grow longer.

By the late 1960s, when The Colony Hotel’s devoted annual patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who sometimes traveled with their pugs in tow, raved about Palm Beach being a best-kept secret in May, all signs pointed to an unprecedented long Palm Beach season.

But summer in subtropical Palm Beach? Too hot. Possible hurricanes.

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

But what changed everything was 1971.

The late Earl E.T. Smith, former ambassador to Cuba and member of the New York Stock Exchange, had become Palm Beach’s ninth mayor, and Publix, the first supermarket chain in Palm Beach, was about to open.

And The Breakers – the big lady among hotels in Palm Beach – decided to stay open all year round for the first time. Why did it – or perhaps more importantly why could it – remain open in the summer? Two words: air conditioning.

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

That paved the way for guests to visit comfortably all year round, injecting new energy into the island and encouraging other summer activities nearby. The Breakers’ installation of air conditioning also coincided with the resort’s push for a less stuffy atmosphere.

According to The Breakers archives, that meant changing the usual formal attire of winter guests for dinner and other on-site functions to a “less prescribed” dress code. As then-vice president and general manager of The Breakers, John F. (Jack) Clifford, told the Daily News in 1971, “It used to be only the older, more established people who could afford us.”

By opening in the summer, The Breakers – and Palm Beach – introduced a wider tourist market, including Europeans and Latin Americans who traditionally holiday in the summer.

Meanwhile, as Florida’s population growth after World War II far exceeded the national average, Floridians became summer tourists in Palm Beach and enjoyed less expensive room rates compared to the winter season at The Breakers (today all Palm Beach hotels offer Beach attractive summer rates).

Keeping the doors open in the summer also meant promoting weddings, conferences and other businesses. And it was a “win” for hotel workers. “Good people are hard enough to find without telling them to go somewhere else because you’re closing for the summer,” Clifford said, according to local news reports.

Before long, other hotels on the island, including The Colony and The Brazilian Court, were fully air-conditioned – and hotels that would open in the coming years would be cool all year round.

“Of course, the introduction of air conditioning was a huge catalyst in making Palm Beach more of a year-round destination,” Sarah Wetenhall, CEO and president of Colony, told the Daily News. Now she said, “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, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to ask: Do you have air conditioning? and open in summer?