Est. 1873 · West Palm Beach
The History of Grandview Heights
A neighborhood that has held its character through booms and busts, through decades of change pressing in from every direction.
"There is a particular feeling you get when you turn off the noise of downtown West Palm Beach and step into Grandview Heights. The streets narrow and quiet. Canopy trees close overhead. The architecture — Craftsman bungalows, Mediterranean Revivals, graceful American Foursquares — lines the sidewalks in unhurried succession."
The city's cranes and towers are only blocks away, yet they feel like another world entirely. This is a neighborhood that has held its character through booms and busts, through decades of change pressing in from every direction, and it wears that resilience the way old wood wears a finish: all the more beautiful for what it has endured.
1873
Beginnings:
A Frontier on the Ridge
The land that would become Grandview Heights was first homesteaded in 1873, a full generation before West Palm Beach was anything more than a quiet outpost on Florida's lower Atlantic coast. For nearly two decades, little changed. Then, on April 2, 1895, Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway rolled into town and changed everything. The tracks — which still define the neighborhood's eastern boundary today — stitched West Palm Beach into the broader world, and the city's first real growth era began almost immediately.
That early economy ran on hospitality. Tourists flooded south to the grand Royal Poinciana and Breakers hotels on Palm Beach island, and the workers, tradespeople, and merchants who served them needed somewhere to live. The slightly elevated ridge just west of downtown, rising gently above the surrounding flatlands, offered exactly that: dry ground, cooling breezes, and long eastern views toward the Lake Worth Lagoon.
1912 — 1920
Three Plats,
One Community
The formal development of Grandview Heights unfolded in three acts. In 1912, two subdivisions were recorded side by side: the Palm Beach Heights Addition, platted by Clarence Edsall and Emil D. Anthony, and the Moss & Heisler Addition, recorded on September 14, 1912 by Lewis Heisler — a charter member of the Palm Beach Real Estate Board who would later help found the Port of Palm Beach. Together they laid out the grid of streets and narrow 50-by-100-foot lots that give the neighborhood its distinctive, walkable character.
The third chapter came eight years later. On January 28, 1920, John C. Gregory platted the Grandview Heights subdivision itself — and the public responded with remarkable enthusiasm. All 65 initial lots sold within three days. A nine-day sales event that followed moved more than 100 lots.
1910s - 1925
Building
the Boom
The neighborhood began filling in around 1910, its first residents a telling cross-section of early West Palm Beach: ministers, downtown shopkeepers, and the skilled craftsmen who had built the luxury hotels of Palm Beach island with their own hands. By 1916, the Tropical Sun was describing Florida Avenue as a beautifully parked, 80-foot-wide boulevard — a distinction the landscaped median along that street still preserves today.
By 1923 and 1924, the building pace was almost frantic. The Stiles C. Hall Building Company alone filled orders for 75 homes. Most historic homes were completed by 1925; by 1926, Grandview Heights was essentially fully built out. West Palm Beach's population climbed from 8,659 in 1920 to 26,610 by 1930. Total city property values rose from $12.6 million to $89 million in that same span.