There is a moment, somewhere between the first days of June and the long golden stretch of July, when West Palm Beach becomes its own truest self. The visitors have gone. The traffic thins. And the people who actually live here — the artists, the entrepreneurs, the community builders, the ones who chose this city and keep choosing it — step into the breathing room and take ownership of the place they call home.
That’s the issue you’re holding.
We built this one around a single, audacious question: What does it look like when someone refuses to shrink, when they show up in full color, on their own terms, and make something the world hasn’t seen before? The answers we found were varied, surprising, and — I think — genuinely worth sitting with.
Our cover story introduced us to Allie Kirschner, a West Palm Beach artist who builds her birds one magazine clipping at a time, layering color and texture into gilded portraits that are already finding their way into galleries and private collections. She’s been hiding in plain sight — running the art account and the woman account separately, honoring both, collapsing the old idea that you have to choose between the art and the life. She didn’t have to say much for me to understand what confidence looks like in practice. I watched it.
From there, we widened the lens into Lynora’s, not just a restaurant, but a fifty-year family story, built from recipes carried from a small Italian island and kept alive through two generations of the Abbenante family. Maria built something that outlasted a decade of retirement and came back stronger. That kind of staying power is its own kind of bold.
Downtown gets its own moment too. We visited the murals and street art that have quietly been turning West Palm Beach into an open-air gallery — and into the augmented reality layer the DDA has built on top of it, so the walls you’ve walked past a hundred times finally get a chance to talk back.
Elsewhere in these pages, we follow the flavors to CityPlace, where PopUp Bagels has turned a simple ritual — grip, rip, and dip — into something worth making a detour for. And our travel section this issue makes the case I find myself making every summer: that Florida is larger, stranger, and more rewarding than most of us have bothered to find out. Julia Harper went looking for the version of this state that hides a few hours up the road, and she found it.
Every story in this issue comes back to the same proposition: that being fully yourself, in this city, at this moment, is not just possible. It’s something to celebrate.
Bold and beautiful, West Palm Beach. You’ve earned it.
Enjoy summer.
Pedro…