The Fall El Cid Finally Gets Two Openings, and Only One of Them Is a Sure Thing
Walk down Belvedere Road toward South Flagler Drive this week and the scaffolding is still up. The building underneath is a 1930s modernist landmark designed by architect Belford Shoumate, and for well over a year now it has been the neighborhood's longest-running rumor: a members-only social club called BIBA, meant to reopen the old Hotel Biba as something closer to a French Riviera clubhouse than a motor lodge.
Two blocks away, on Barcelona Road, a much older institution is doing something quieter. The Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens has been open to the public, on and off, since 1977. It doesn't need a foreclosure lawsuit resolved before it can open its gates. It just needs October.
That timing, as it happens, is the real story this season. Both places are gearing back up within weeks of each other this fall. One has been doing this every year for nearly five decades. The other is trying to do it for the first time, and its own trail of permits, loans, and legal filings is a decent education in what it actually takes to bring a project like this to a historic waterfront block.
The short version, pieced together from public reporting over the past year: the entity behind the Hotel Biba property, Royal Palm WPB Hospitality LLC, defaulted on a $2.5 million loan, and a lender filed a foreclosure suit against it in January 2026. The suit was withdrawn not long after, reportedly because of a filing error rather than a resolved dispute, but the disruption landed on top of contractor issues that were already common in a restoration this involved. Earlier timelines had pointed to a late 2025 debut. As of this summer, industry tracking put the project at roughly four months from delivery, which lines up with an estimated fall or winter 2026 opening, if nothing else slips.
None of that is unusual for a historic renovation of this scale. What is unusual is how visible it's been to the people who live around it. Belvedere Road isn't a back alley. It's a route residents use to get to the water, and for well over a year they've watched the same building sit half-finished, its opening date sliding a season at a time.
When it does open, BIBA won't be a neighborhood coffee shop or a gathering spot anyone can walk into. It's an invitation-only club, and its own description of the concept is direct about what it's chasing:
"reimagine the members' club for a new generation"
Behind that line is founder Elizabeth Elghanayan's vision for the space: intimate guest rooms, rooftop and garden lounges, and a headline restaurant called MayaBay, a Monaco-based Thai-Japanese concept making its US debut inside the old hotel's walls. It's a genuinely interesting addition to West Palm Beach's hospitality scene, and once it opens it will likely pull a certain kind of traveler and member south from downtown.
But it's worth being clear about what it is not. It's not a public anchor. It's not somewhere a resident stops in on a Tuesday. For that, El Cid has never actually needed Belvedere Road to finish anything.
The Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens sits inside the same historic district, on a 1925 house designed by Marion Sims Wyeth, the same Palm Beach architect responsible for Mar-a-Lago. You can see that other Wyeth building's tower from across Lake Worth on Flagler Drive, which is a small, specific detail that tells you how tightly this stretch of waterfront has always been laced together.
The gardens themselves run on a public, seasonal calendar: Wednesday through Sunday, roughly October through June, with tickets running $15 for adults and less for seniors and students. Ann Weaver Norton founded the nonprofit in 1977 to preserve her own studio and the monumental sculptures she built from Mexican brick and pink Norwegian granite, and the foundation has spent the decades since layering in rotating exhibits from other artists. Recent programming has included a Picasso ceramics show and outdoor pieces from an artist in residence, alongside occasional live music on the main lawn.
The gardens are dark right now, as they are every summer. That's not a warning sign. It's the same rhythm they've kept for years, and it's the rhythm that makes the fall reopening feel like a return rather than a launch. Nobody in El Cid is wondering whether the sculpture garden will actually come back this time.
Six blocks north, the Norton Museum of Art, the largest art museum in Florida, is running its own current exhibitions through early fall, with public programs most weeks. Between the two Nortons, unrelated by name coincidence but tied by patronage history, El Cid residents have had a working arts calendar for longer than most Palm Beach County neighborhoods have had zoning maps.
The daily anchors in El Cid don't require an invitation either. HIVE Home & Cafe and Celis Juice Bar have functioned as the neighborhood's informal living room for years, the kind of places locals mention before they mention the historic district designation. A short walk south, in Flamingo Park, newer additions like the Michelin-recognized Emelina have added weight to the same stretch of Dixie Highway, though that's technically a different neighborhood's growth, not El Cid's own.
Saturdays belong to the West Palm Beach GreenMarket once its seasonal run resumes each fall, a couple miles north along the water. Readers of USA Today have named it the best farmers market in the country, and over a hundred vendors set up when it's running. El Cid's proximity means it's a walk or a short bike ride rather than a drive.
Flagler Drive itself is the connective tissue for all of it. It's the route to the Norton Museum, the route past the sculpture gardens, and, this fall, the route past a building that may finally have workers on the roof instead of scaffolding on the sidewalk. A short list of what's actually within a walk or easy ride of most El Cid streets right now:
The useful thing to notice this season isn't that a private club is finally close to opening. It's that El Cid's actual social infrastructure was never waiting on it. The neighborhood has had a public sculpture garden, a historic museum six blocks away, and a walkable stretch of local cafes for longer than most of its own homes have had current owners. BIBA, whenever it lands, will add something new and specific for members who want it. It won't replace what was already running.
That's a useful distinction for anyone trying to read this neighborhood accurately rather than through a press release. A stalled construction project can dominate the conversation on a single block for well over a year without actually describing how the neighborhood functions day to day. In El Cid's case, the gardens on Barcelona Road have quietly been doing that work the entire time.
If you're watching this stretch of West Palm Beach for reasons that go beyond the next exhibit or the next dinner reservation, from a renovation on a historic Intracoastal block to what a home in a National Register district is actually worth to hold onto, that's a longer conversation, and one grounded in the same local detail as everything above.
The Wolfe Team works this stretch of the Intracoastal every week. If El Cid's next season, or your own plans for a home inside it, are on your mind, reach out and get your home valuation.
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