It is hard to imagine that The Breakers hotel that stands so dignified and timeless today was ever anything less. But a century ago, Palm Beach’s most iconic oceanfront hotel was made of wood, and on March 18, 1925, a fire ignited there that was so voracious it reduced the grand structure to little more than smoldering rubble.
Because of conditions that day, the fire’s reach was epic as wind-swept embers flew westward, torching and scorching structures across the island’s midsection as they went. In a matter of hours, another hotel on the lake would also lie in ruins.
In the chaos, scores of people were displaced, looters helped themselves, and property damage would tally in the millions of dollars.
More on The Breakers: Five things you may not know about the Palm Beach resort
Of all the destruction, locals and visitors alike were shocked at the void where The Breakers once stood majestically beside the beach. But their fears — that the grand oceanfront hotel, originally built in 1896, was gone forever — never materialized.
The Breakers was not stranger to fire. In 1903, flames consumed the original six-year-old structure. The hotel’s founder Henry Flagler quickly vowed to rebuild and did. But after this second fire, what rose from the rubble was vastly different.
Inspired by the Italian Renaissance, more than 1,000 construction workers labored in round-the-clock shifts. Dozens of artisans crafted elegantly detailed ceiling paintings and frescoes. What followed was both bigger and more resilient, with bones of reinforced concrete.
The Palm Beach fire department responded quickly to the alarm when the 1925 fire started at The Breakers. Within 90 minutes, fire departments from as far away as Fort Pierce and Miami sent men and equipment to help.
Over its 125-plus-year history, The Breakers also has weathered so much more, including the nation’s various economic crises and challenges. It also persevered through the 2020 COVID pandemic that paralyzed communities around the world.
All of that is not lost on The Breakers’ CEO Paul N. Leone, who told the Daily News that the upcoming anniversary of the 1925 fire reminds him of the resilience and vision of its family ownership.
“In the face of devastation, they were inspired not just to rebuild, but to reimagine, emerging stronger, grander and as magnificent as ever,” Leone said. “Their unwavering determination mirrored that of Henry Flagler himself, elevating The Breakers to new heights as America’s finest resort.”
That commitment to excellence and continuous improvement is the resort’s guiding principle, he said.
Fire starts in fourth-floor room
After the 1925 fire, The Breakers was rebuilt as an Italian Renaissance-style showpiece. It opened in December 1926.
On March 18, 1925, more than 400 guests were registered at The Breakers, including Titanic survivor “Unsinkable” Mollie Brown and Mrs. Edward F. Hutton (Marjorie Merriweather Post), whose ocean-to-lake estate, Mar-a-Lago, was under construction.
The fine weather — upper 70s, breezy, a mix of sun and clouds — called for sunbathing, golfing on The Breakers’ links or relaxing along the hotel’s oceanview verandas.
When The Breakers caught fire in 1925, many guests initially gathered out front and watched as the flames began to devour the iconic hotel, then a wood-frame structure.
At the time, The Breakers was a four-story, 425-room Colonial-style hotel. Standard Oil baron, developer and railroad magnate Henry Flagler had built it immediately after his original version, first known as the Palm Beach Inn, burned to the ground in 1903, six years after it had opened.
In 1925, The Breakers was better than ever. For one thing, its casino bathhouse had been recently remodeled with a new pool area, 1,000 dressing rooms, a 10-foot deep pool, a diving tower and Russian and Turkish baths.
But around 4 p.m. March 18, a guest noticed smoke coming from the hotel’s south wing. Fire was discovered in the fourth-floor room of Mrs. William Hale Thompson, the wife of Chicago’s then-former mayor.
As the fire, later attributed to defective wiring, spread in the wood-frame building, guests threw their jewels, furs and keepsakes from windows and hurriedly left the building, joining throngs of spectators who watched as a giant mushroom cloud of dense smoke poured from The Breakers’ south wing.
“I saw smoke billowing like a wet-leaf fire,” Frank Hennessey, a longtime Breakers office manager, told the Palm Beach Daily News in 1975. “Terrible.”
Then fire burst through The Breakers’ roof. Swarms of cinders flew skyward, traveling northwest in a shifting breeze. They soon rained down on Main Street, now known as Royal Poinciana Way, and homes nearby.
More fires ignited. Shop owners used what they had on hand — carpets, coats or buckets of water — to douse sparks.
Fire spreads
1925 aerial of both hotel fires: Cinders flew high into the air from the The Breakers’ raging fire and traveled as far northwest as the lake setting the lakefront 300-room Palm Beach Hotel ablaze. The midsection of the island, including Main Street and numerous large buildings, was then sandwiched in between two roaring fires.
Just northwest of Main Street and a half-mile from The Breakers, 160 guests were registered at the lakefront Palm Beach Hotel.
It was a longtime gathering spot, where, in 1911, 35 male residents had voted to incorporate the Town of Palm Beach.
Owner Sidney Maddock, whose family had lived in Palm Beach since 1891, built the 300-room hotel in 1902. Guests enjoyed boating excursions from the hotel’s dock on the lake and watching sunsets from its grand west porch. Abutting the hotel, there were a dozen new shops to browse, too.
But when cinders from the now-raging Breakers’ fire set the Palm Beach Hotel’s roof ablaze, guests barely reached their rooms in time to save small articles.
The adjacent shops burned, too.
Days later, Maddock lamented in a postcard to his wife, “The dear old Palm Beach Hotel is a total loss. … I was there at the time and held the hose like the rest, but it blazed in seven places.”
Firefighters responded quickly
A photo of the Breakers fire in 1925 is hanging on the wall of the South Fire Station in Palm Beach. Palm Beach Fire Rescue’s Stuart Grimes, a history enthusiast, has been collecting historical items during his 10 years at the department.
From the onset of the conflagration, local authorities took action.
The Palm Beach Fire Department responded quickly to the alarm and called for help from the West Palm Beach fire crew. Within 90 minutes, the firefighting brigade in Palm Beach included men and pumper trucks from as far away as Miami. They battled a then-out-of-control blaze anchored on either side by the ocean and the lake.
At one point, firefighters wanted to use dynamite to slow the blaze at The Breakers, but too many spectators were standing too close to risk it.
When looting became evident with reports of valuables being transported off the island, Palm Beach Police Chief Joseph Borman arranged for stepped-up protection and for the National Guard to patrol the devastated town and its bridges to the mainland.
“That night, to prevent looting, a curfew was imposed,” Carola Bibo Levinstim recalled in 1981. From 1919-1928, her family operated a 40-room hostelry near the Palm Beach Hotel.
Levinstim’s family and others in the vicinity formed bucket-brigades “to pass pails, pots and pans of water to neighbors seated precariously on their shingled roofs. The hope was that by moistening the sun-parched shingles, they might be better protected from the flying sparks.”
It worked.
Royal Poinciana survives
On March 18, 1925, hotel employees and guests carrying hurriedly packed suitcases fled a devastating fire at The Palm Beach Hotel, located where the Biltmore condominiums are today. The blaze was caused by embers from a fire that same day at The Breakers, which also burned to the ground and then was rebuilt by 1926 at a cost of $6 million by owner/Standard Oil baron Henry M. Flagler. The Palm Beach Hotel, which was never rebuilt after its fire, originally was completed and opened in 1902 by Sydney Maddock. Maddock, influential in Palm Beach back then, gave space in the hotel for meetings of Palm Beach’s founding fathers, who incorporated Palm Beach in 1911. The Palm Beach Hotel offered 220 feet of Lake Worth frontage, 300 rooms (50 of them with private baths) and daily rates of $3 and up.
Other efforts to combat fire were successful, too.
A stone’s throw south from the Palm Beach Hotel stood Flagler’s other Palm Beach hotel, the mammoth Royal Poinciana, built in 1894.
With six stories and seven miles of corridors, it was considered the largest wooden structure in the world when it opened.
Spot fires popped up. Guests fearing the worst, began throwing their valises out windows. But H.E. Bemis, vice president of the Florida East Coast Hotel Co. that owned the Royal Poinciana and The Breakers, had assembled an on-site crew that extinguished them, according to news reports.
Miraculously, the Royal Poinciana survived, as did its prominent wooden neighbor, the posh dining facility and gambling casino, the Beach Club, owned by Kentucky racehorse breeder E.R. Bradley.
Vault takes five days to cool
Close to midnight on March 18, 1925, the Palm Beach Hotel and The Breakers were reduced to glowing ashes.
The only thing left intact at The Breakers was its vault.
It took five days for it to cool enough to be opened: More than $300,000 in jewels and other valuables were unscathed.
Many guests from both hotels found refuge at the Royal Poinciana, private clubs or friends’ homes on the island.
“We found rooms at (the) country club there in Palm Beach,” then-Breakers employee Mary G. Markham wrote in a letter to the Historical Society of Palm Beach County in 1971. “But it was a dreadful sight to see that building burn down in a few hours. It housed many of the finest people in the country, but fire shows no discretion. Rich and poor all had to suffer.”
Throughout the fire zone, one death was attributed to the blaze. A man died after falling off the roof of a Sunset Avenue home as he doused spark fires.
New Breakers opens
The day after the fire, the Florida East Coast Hotel Co. vowed The Breakers would be rebuilt as a fireproof hotel.
Roughly eight years later, on Dec. 29, 1926, the new Breakers opened: a $7 million showpiece modeled after an Italian Renaissance palace. More than 1,200 men worked day and night to construct the reinforced concrete building.
Maddock of the Palm Beach Hotel didn’t rebuild and left the island. The Palm Beach Hotel property was replaced in 1926 when Maurice Heckscher built the $7 million, 12-story Alba Hotel, where the Palm Beach Biltmore stands today.
Meanwhile, stricter building codes went into effect in Palm Beach.
The reason: to minimize the possibility of a recurrence of the catastrophe that raged on March 18, 1925.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: The fire that leveled The Breakers in Palm Beach in 1925
