Sotheby’s International Realty

The Estate Section is loosely defined as all residential Palm Beach houses south of Worth Avenue. It is so named as many of the town's earliest large estates, built here in the 1920s for some of the world's wealthiest families, often comprised entire city blocks spanning all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway. The Intracoastal, then called Lake Worth, was a freshwater lake prior to the time when engineers linked inland waterways common to the Eastern Seaboard through manmade inlets channeled to the sea. Locals still refer to the Intracoastal as the Lake. Today, few of the major estates remain intact. Most were subdivided over the past century into smaller parcels, yet the Estate Section still retains a certain cachet with the lowest density zoning on the island. Most Estate Section real estate comprises one-half acre or more in size with homes correspondingly larger, many having architectural pedigrees with such names as Mizner, Wyeth, Fatio and Volk.