Why Royal Poinciana Way Never Became Condos, and What Moved In Instead

For most of the past twenty years, if you drove north on Royal Poinciana Way past the Plaza, you passed a dark marquee and a chain-link fence and didn't think much of it. The old Playhouse had been closed since 2004, when its last tenant, Clear Channel Communications, walked away. Ballet Florida looked at the space and passed. The Palm Beach Symphony looked at it and passed too. For a building that once sat comedian Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and touring European royalty in the same room, it spent two decades as the thing residents stopped noticing.

What actually kept that building from becoming waterfront condominiums has nothing to do with anyone's good intentions. It comes down to a single clause in a 1979 agreement between the theater's owner and the town of Palm Beach, one that required the property be maintained as a performing arts venue in perpetuity. Years later, when a prior owner sued the town for the right to demolish it and build residential units instead, a judge ruled the covenant still held. He lost. That ruling, more than any preservation society or design review board, is the reason there's a stage and not a lobby full of mailboxes at 70 Royal Poinciana Way today.

The Fine Print That Built A Block

WS Development inherited that constraint when it took over the plaza and the Playhouse under a long-term lease in 2014. Rather than treat the arts requirement as a cost of doing business, the company brought in a nonprofit called The Innovate, founded by longtime Palm Beach residents Jill and Avie Glazer, to run programming inside a rebuilt version of the theater. Construction began in earnest after the redevelopment plan was announced in January 2022, and most of the original structure came down in 2023 to make way for a smaller, 400-seat house.

The Glazers ended up committing more than $15 million to the project, according to WLRN, and the venue that opened this year carries their name: Glazer Hall. It is the island's first new nonprofit arts organization in over sixty years. The first performance, on January 22, 2026, sold out. The opening slate leaned deliberately eclectic:

• Corinne Bailey Rae
• Matthew Morrison
• Chazz Palminteri in A Bronx Tale
• American Ballet Theatre
• Preservation Hall Jazz Band
• The Amazing Acrobats of Shanghai Circus

That range, a Grammy-winning R&B singer next to a Chinese acrobatic troupe, tells you the Glazers weren't trying to build a niche subscriber house. They were trying to give the island back a room people would actually show up for on a Tuesday.

What Else Moved In, And When

Twenty days before Glazer Hall's opening night, the restaurant space next door quietly started seating guests. Tutto Mare, from the husband-and-wife team behind the Hamptons' Tutto il Giorno restaurants, opened January 2, 2026, inside what used to be the Playhouse's Celebrity Room. The room's late-1950s ceiling mural, "Venetian Festival" by New York artist Robert Bushnell, survived the renovation. It still shows caricatures of more than a hundred stars who used to sit under it, Clark Gable and Joan Crawford among them, according to the restaurant's own listing.

At 200 seats, Tutto Mare became the Town of Palm Beach's first and only restaurant open to the public directly on the Intracoastal. That distinction matters more on this island than it would almost anywhere else. Waterfront dining here has historically meant a club membership or a boat slip. Here, it means a reservation, though not always an easy one.

"Glasses ranged from $50–$60 for modest pours, not Super Tuscans, just standard selections."

That line comes from a January review on shaneasavours.com, which also noted that a table at Sant Ambroeus, a few doors down in the same plaza, gets you more wine for less money and a warmer welcome. It's the kind of friction that shows up in a building's first season, when demand outruns service, and it's worth knowing before you go in with high expectations tied to the buzz.

Retail is still catching up to both. Cartier, which has operated an 1,800-square-foot store in the plaza for years, got town approval to nearly double its footprint with a new 3,700-square-foot boutique built into the Playhouse structure itself, a century after the brand's first Palm Beach shop opened on Worth Avenue, according to WatchPro. Loewe has also been named as an incoming tenant. A handful of spaces are still being finished.

Two Blocks South, A Different Landlord Had The Same Idea

None of this was coordinated with what happened two blocks off Worth Avenue, but the timing lines up in a way that's hard to ignore. Reuben Brothers bought the old Chesterfield Hotel, home for decades to the clubby Leopard Lounge, back in 2022. On March 2, 2026, it reopened as The Vineta Hotel, Oetker Hotels' first property in the United States, after a renovation led by Paris-based designer Tino Zervudachi.

The Vineta's signature restaurant, Coco's, works a version of the same trick Tutto Mare pulled off up the street: it keeps a physical trace of what used to be there, a concealed leopard motif tucked into the design as a nod to the old lounge, according to Forbes. The hotel trimmed its room count from the high 50s down to 41, all reportedly more spacious, and it offers guests complimentary bikes to get around the island, a small detail that matters given how much of daily life here still happens on two wheels along the Lake Trail.

The island's tourism numbers give some context for why hospitality groups are betting on this stretch at all. Visitation to Palm Beach rose 8 percent between 2024 and 2025, reaching a record 10.7 million visitors, according to AFAR. That growth was already underway before either of these buildings reopened. What changed is where some of that traffic can actually go once it's here.

What This Looks Like If You Already Live Here

If you've lived on the island for a while, the practical shift is this: an evening out that used to mean Worth Avenue, a private club, or the bridge into West Palm Beach can now start and end within a few blocks of Royal Poinciana Way. A show at Glazer Hall, dinner at Tutto Mare or Sant Ambroeus, a drink at The Vineta's seated-only bar two blocks south, all reachable on foot or by bike along a stretch that most people used to drive past without stopping.

None of it happened because a master plan decided the island needed a new town center. It happened because a preservation clause from 1979 outlasted a lawsuit, a nonprofit theater group decided that constraint was worth building around, and a separate hotel owner two blocks away happened to finish a three-year renovation the same season. The result is a piece of the island that spent twenty years being scenery and is now, for the first time in a long time, somewhere people actually go.

If you're curious what else is changing across the island, or want a longer view of how properties near Royal Poinciana Way have moved over the past few seasons, ISABELA keeps a close eye on the parts of Palm Beach that don't show up in the obvious searches. Schedule a consultation any time you want that context in more detail.