Arts & Culture
Three institutions that go past the usual civic-museum baseline: an art museum that became Florida's largest by collection size, a combined museum-library-garden campus that's been free to the public since the Depression, and a planetarium an astronaut personally dedicated.
Cox Science Center and Aquarium
Cox Science Center and Aquarium (formerly the South Florida Science Center), in West Palm Beach's Dreher Park, opened in 1959 and today draws roughly 310,000 visitors a year. Its planetarium was originally dedicated by astronaut Buzz Aldrin in 1964 and now runs full-dome digital shows alongside a 3,000-square-foot aquarium exhibit of native Florida species and a walk-through coral reef tank — a working planetarium-and-aquarium combination that's genuinely uncommon at this scale outside a major metro.
Norton Museum of Art
The Norton Museum of Art, founded in West Palm Beach in 1941 by industrialist Ralph Hubbard Norton and his wife Elizabeth, surpassed the Ringling Museum in 2003 to become Florida's largest art museum by collection size — it now holds more than 8,200 works spanning European, American, Chinese, and contemporary art. A 2013 expansion designed by Norman Foster added a 43-foot-high Great Hall and a 9,000-square-foot sculpture garden.
Society of the Four Arts
The Society of the Four Arts, founded on Palm Beach's Intracoastal waterfront in 1936, combines an art gallery in the Addison Mizner-designed Esther B. O'Keeffe building, two libraries that double as the Town of Palm Beach's own public libraries, and the Four Arts Botanical Gardens — open to the public seven days a week with no admission charge, a genuinely unusual combination of functions on one nonprofit campus.
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