What North Palm Beach Owns Outright

Most small coastal towns make you choose. You either pay initiation dues for a private club with a real golf course, or you settle for a county park with fields the same as everywhere else. North Palm Beach never made that trade. The Village itself owns the golf course, the clubhouse, the marina peninsula, and the park where half the summer's programming happens. None of it required a membership application.

That distinction matters more than any single amenity. A resident here can play a Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course, dock a boat at a working marina, and sign a kid up for a fishing derby, all without ever writing a check to a private club. The Village runs it, which means the calendar answers to residents rather than to a board.

A Golf Course Redesigned For A Dollar

The North Palm Beach Country Club has been Village property since 1962, when the Village of North Palm Beach purchased the club and its golf course and reopened them to the public in 1963. The course sat there quietly for decades until 2006, when Jack Nicklaus, who has lived in the Village for more than 35 years, redesigned it. He charged the Village exactly one dollar for the work.

"a very good, modestly priced golf course for the people of the Village"

That's how Nicklaus described what he wanted the result to be, and the accolades that followed suggest he got it. Golfweek ranked it the No. 1 municipal course in Florida and No. 27 in the country. The Palm Beach Post named it the top public course in the county. In 2021, GOLF Magazine placed it 20th among the top 30 municipal courses in America. When it reopened with Nicklaus's redesign, it became only the second municipal course in the United States to carry his Signature designation.

The clubhouse caught up to the course more recently. A four-year, $19 million renovation delivered a 37,000-square-foot building that reopened at the end of 2019, with an L-shaped 50-meter pool and interactive splash pad, ten lighted Har-Tru tennis courts, and dining now run by Lessing's Hospitality Group across three venues: a casual Grill Room, a poolside Snack Shack, and full-service dining at The Clubhouse.

Here's the detail most residents don't know. Beginning in fiscal year 2026, the golf operation started paying the Village $200,000 annually in rent for use of the clubhouse, calculated on occupied square footage. The club still functions like the community fixture it's always been, hosting the Village's July 4th fireworks and serving as the public viewing spot for the annual Holiday Boat Parade, but it now also pays into Village coffers the way any commercial tenant would. Public ownership here isn't just a legal fact. It's an active arrangement that funds itself.

Anchorage Park's Actual Calendar

If the country club is the Village's showpiece, Anchorage Park is where the daily texture of summer actually happens. It has docks, playgrounds, volleyball courts, tennis courts, and a dog park, plus a gazebo available for private rental and volleyball courts residents can book at $25 an hour with proof of residency. What sets it apart isn't the equipment. It's how often something is scheduled on it.

The park's marquee event is the Anchorage Aweigh Fishing Tournament, and the numbering tells its own story. Village staff call it the 19th annual running, even though it's technically the tournament's 20th year on the calendar. The only gap came during the pandemic, when one year's event was cancelled. The format hasn't drifted much in two decades: lines go in the water at 6 a.m., the weigh-in runs from noon to 3 p.m. at the marina, and a Kids Fishing Derby meets at the park gazebo at 1:45 p.m. for a catch-and-release hour aimed at anglers under 16. Everyone regroups for a cookout and awards ceremony at 5 p.m.

That's the anchor event, but the rest of the calendar keeps moving underneath it. In the past few weeks alone, the park has hosted a Dog Days of Summer morning and its recurring Storytime and Craft session, and it holds a standing Friday tai chi class through the recreation department. A short list of what recurs there in a given season:

• The Anchorage Aweigh Fishing Tournament, with its dedicated Kids Fishing Derby
• Dog Days of Summer, an early-morning event for residents and their dogs
• Storytime and Craft, run by the Village librarians on Saturday mornings
• A weekly tai chi class open to residents of any age
• Adult basketball and volleyball leagues that run through the summer months

None of this requires a membership card. It requires showing up, which is the point.

The Marina End Of Town

North Palm Beach's other public anchor sits on a 60-acre peninsula that's operated as a marina since 1973 and now runs as Safe Harbor Old Port Cove. Slips are open to the public, and the current listing accommodates vessels up to 200 feet, a scale that historically made it the largest marina facility in the northern Palm Beaches. For a stretch of coast known more for private docks than public ones, that's a meaningful exception.

Recent additions have leaned toward exactly the kind of low-key hospitality residents seem to want. Boaters and visitors have taken to describing the newest onsite dining option as a taste of Newport at the recently introduced Belle's Café, a description that shows up again and again in reviews of the marina.

The peninsula's residential towers, known collectively as Old Port Cove, run their own private yacht club with a pool and dining reserved for condo owners. That's a membership model, same as any private club elsewhere. But the marina itself, its public slips, and Belle's Café function as something distinct from that private layer, a public-facing anchor sitting right alongside the private one, in the same 60 acres.

The Pattern Underneath It

Put the three together and a pattern holds. A golf course a private club elsewhere would gate behind six-figure initiation fees. A marina where the public slips sit next to a private yacht club without either canceling the other out. A parks department calendar dense enough that missing one event just means catching the next one a week later. None of it depends on joining anything.

This is also the time of year the Village asks residents to think about less festive things. Its own site notes that hurricane season runs June through November, with the highest risk for storms typically landing in August and September, a reminder that even a town this oriented around public recreation still runs on a practical Village government underneath it. That combination, a real amenity base paired with real municipal attention, is closer to what actually distinguishes North Palm Beach than any single golf ranking or marina slip count.

If you already live here, none of this is news exactly, but the ownership structure behind it might be. And if you're the kind of person who ends up thinking about a place like this because someone you know is looking at property nearby, that's a conversation the Hasozbek-Garcia Team is glad to have, whenever it's useful.