Singer Island, FL

Singer Island is named after Paris Eugene Singer, the famous developer of Palm Beach and the 23rd of 24 children Isaac Singer had. Isaac was a businessman who founded the Singer Manufacturing Company in 1851 and created the Singer Sewing Machine. Paris visited Palm Beach in 1920 and met Addison Mizner, an architect. He agreed to pay Mizner $6,000 a year retainer for life if he kept his work exclusive to the Palm Beach area. The team of Singer and Mizner created Palm Beach with its Spanish-themed architecture.

A well known fact about Singer is that he often took his friends on picnics to the beautiful located directly north of Palm Beach. Expecting a boom in the Florida real estate business, Singer and Mizner planned to create a luxurious resort which would have been called the Paris Singer Hotel. On the south end of the island. They also intended to develop a smaller modest hotel called the Blue Heron on the north end. A 36-hole golf course would have sat in between these two buildings. The estimated price for creating all this would be $4,000,000, an extravagant amount at that time.

However, the Florida land boom slowed down beginning in 1925, a hurricane tore through the Singer Island area in 1928, and the 1929 stock market crash stopped Singer from realizing many of his architectural dreams.

Approximately 1,000 feet of beach land on Singer Island would be bought by the city of Riviera in 1940, which led to the growth of tourism in Riviera and the eventual incorporation of the island. Tremendous growth came to Palm Beach County in the 1950s, and Singer Island became an integral resort area of hotels and condominium complexes for residents in the winter. A two lane draw bridge would be replaced with the current four lane Blue Heron Bridge in 1976 to accommodate the area’s growth.