Janis FontaineTheir gift of 18 oceanfront acres for a Palm Beach park preserves paradise in perpetuity.
So, who were the Phippses, the family who made one of the most significant real estate gifts in Palm Beach County history?
The question comes up because of a $31 million project to remake the oceanfront park they donated to the town of Palm Beach.
Henry Phipps Jr., the patriarch, learned how to work hard from his father, an English shoemaker, and how to recognize opportunity from his childhood friend Andrew Carnegie. As adults, the men became business partners, traveling the world to negotiate deals and build Carnegie Steel Co. into a behemoth over 40 years.
When Carnegie sold the company to US Steel in 1901, Phipps walked away with about $50 million from the $400 million deal.
Trusts and charities
In 1907, Phipps established the Bessemer Trust Co. to manage his real estate portfolio, which included significant holdings in Cape Cod, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Great Neck on Long Island in New York, and to provide for his five children through trusts and charities.
In 1912, Phipps and his wife Anne, while wintering at Rosemont, their lakeside Palm Beach villa, snatched up “1,000 feet of oceanfront along Palm Beach’s North End for $90,000.” Phipps split the tract into three parcels where his children built homes.
Henry C. built Heamaw; his daughter Amy Phipps Guest built Villa Artemis; and his son, John, built Casa Bendita in 1921 after the war. “Heamaw and Villa Artemis were known as the town’s earliest oceanfront mansions, designed before WW I in the Beaux-Arts style by Vizcaya architect F. Burrall Hoffman,” Augustus Mayhew, a Palm Beach social and architectural historian, wrote in 2010.
Mayhew, who received the James. R. Knott Award from the Historical Society of Palm Beach County in 2024, said the Phipps’ family had “a disinterest for the dazzle” of Palm Beach and a “corduroy, cotton and garden glove mystique.”
But that didn’t stop them from thriving.
Phipps’ holdings included 28 miles of oceanfront between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach.
“At one point in the 1940s, Bessemer Properties, a company related to Bessemer Trust, was reportedly the single-largest landowner in Florida and perhaps the Eastern Seaboard,” Julian Field, the longtime manager of Bessemer Trust, said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post in 1978.
Through the Bessemer Trust, the family continued to develop properties that became part of the fabric of Palm Beach, including Phipps Plaza, a venture started by John S. Phipps in 1924 that featured an elliptical green space and surrounded by 20 “Old World” buildings. The cul-de-sac became the town’s first historic district in 1974.
In 2024, a restoration effort by the nonprofit Top of Minds spearheaded by Dustin Mitzell, a landscape architect who serves on its board, overhauled the century-old property, now owned by the town.
The Gulf Stream Club
When polo came to South Florida in 1923, the Phipps family was there. Designed by Addison Mizner, the Gulf Stream Club had three polo fields plus stables for 150 horses and frame cottages for players and their families.
“The Phipps brothers built oceanfront mansions across from the polo fields and sold land to wealthy friends who wanted nearby mansions, too,” according to a story in The Coastal Star.
Over the years, other projects were completed, including Ibis Isle in 1953 and the Par 3 Golf Course, which was built by Michael Phipps in 1961.
The course was privately owned until 1973, when the town of Palm Beach bought it for $5 million. In 2009, the ocean-to-lake course was renovated and redesigned by Hall of Fame golfer Raymond Floyd.
But Phipps wasn’t just a savvy investor; he was a philanthropist who loved nature, establishing Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in 1893 in his native Pittsburgh.
Other benevolent work included paying for the Phipps Institute for the Study, Treatment and Prevention of Tuberculosis at the University of Pennsylvania and the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Phipps also advocated for low-income housing projects, donating $1 million in 1905 to build Phipps Houses in New York City.
Inspired by his charitable acts, the Phipps family donated 18 acres including 1,200 feet of oceanfront to Palm Beach in 1948 for a public park. Feeling the beachfront had been snatched up by an influx of private wealth, the family made this gift to ensure the community had access to this patch of paradise in perpetuity.
Phipps Park on South Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach is also built on land once owned by the family.
Henry and Anne’s children couldn’t conceive of the planning it would take or how much it would cost to turn Phipps Ocean Park into the magnificent outdoor oasis they imagined. But if all goes according to plan, in October 2026, Phipps Ocean Park will reopen, finally realizing the Phipps family dream.
