M.M. Cloutier
Special to the Daily News
Imagine it’s the turn of the 20th century in then-mostly undeveloped Palm Beach and steps from The Breakers is a two-story yellow clapboard building filled with Florida flora and fauna, including a preserved dead alligator and a panther.
To see such exhibits, all you had to do was stroll from The Breakers to that yellow building, which was next door to today’s Breakers Beach Club.
Can you picture any of this in your mind? Good, because no known photos exist of this yellow building or its contents.
Yet it was Palm Beach’s first museum, an attraction whose animal and other contents must have elicited “Oh my!” from some of the wealthy Gilded Age visitors who had began flocking to Palm Beach, then a new resort destination.