Every weekday morning, Seth Hall pedals a RadWagon electric cargo bike up the North Lake Trail with his three kids strapped in behind him, on their way to Palm Beach Day Academy's lower school. He's been doing this commute for six years, and by his own account the bike keeps getting a little longer as the kids grow. That routine hasn't changed. What has changed, since May 12, is which streets that routine touches once it gets past Midtown.
If you've walked, biked, or run the Lake Trail this summer and hit orange construction fencing somewhere near the Royal Park Bridge, you already know the feeling of standing at a dead end you didn't expect. If you haven't been out there yet, here's what's actually different, because it's a lot narrower than the rumor mill suggests.
What May 12 Actually Changed
Construction crews broke ground that week on a $250 million renovation of the Society of the Four Arts, a project that will expand the O'Keeffe Building from roughly 20,000 to nearly 31,000 square feet while restoring its original Mizner-era detailing and modernizing the Rovensky Building next door. It's a big project on a 10-acre campus, and the town approved one specific consequence for trail users: the stretch of Lake Trail that runs through the Four Arts property is closed for the length of construction, with pedestrian and bike traffic diverted around it.
The detour is not complicated. If you're coming from the south, the instruction from the town and the Four Arts is to head to Cocoanut Row, go north, then cut west on Seaview Avenue to pick the trail back up. The north sidewalk along Royal Palm Way, on the south side of the construction site, is closed for the entire project and won't reopen until the work is finished.
What a lot of people don't realize is how little of the campus this actually touches. The east side of the property, including the King Library, the Dixon Education Building, the Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden, and the Four Arts Demonstration Garden, stays open to the public the whole time. Even Isamu Noguchi's pyramid-shaped sculpture "Intetra," the Four Arts' best-known piece of public art, hasn't gone anywhere. It's just wrapped in a protective structure for the duration.
How Long "Temporary" Actually Means
Here's the number that matters more than any detour map: construction is expected to run about 18 months, with completion targeted for late fall 2027, timed to have the campus ready for its 2027-28 season. That means this reroute isn't a summer inconvenience you wait out. It spans the entire 2026-27 winter social season and most of the following year before it wraps.
A quick reference, since this is the part people actually need to remember:
| What | Status |
|---|---|
| Lake Trail through the Four Arts campus | Closed for renovation, rerouted via Cocoanut Row to Seaview Avenue |
| North sidewalk along Royal Palm Way | Closed for the entire project |
| King Library, Dixon Education Building, Hulitar Sculpture Garden, Demonstration Garden | Open throughout construction |
| Construction start | May 12, 2026 |
| Targeted completion | Late fall 2027 |
Worth sitting with that: the part of the trail that's actually gone is one segment through one property. Everything else on the roughly nine-mile trail, depending on which map you trust for the exact length, is business as usual. The confusion residents run into isn't that the trail closed, it's that nobody told them how short the closed part actually is.
The Bike Shop That Already Made This Move
There's a detail in all of this that nobody planned around the construction schedule, but it lines up anyway. Palm Beach Bicycle Trail Shop, a fixture for cyclists on the island, relocated a while back to 50 Cocoanut Row, Suite 117, inside Royal Poinciana Plaza. That address happens to sit directly on the detour route the town is now pointing everyone toward.
So if you're renting a bike for a Saturday loop, or dropping off your own for a tune-up before the trail traffic picks back up this fall, you're not going out of your way. You're going exactly where the detour was already sending you. The shop didn't move because of the Four Arts project. It just turned out to already be in the right place when the project started.
The One Morning Everyone Still Shows Up
None of this touches the Town of Palm Beach United Way's Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot, which is worth knowing if you've penciled it in for November 23. The race starts and ends at Bradley Park, in front of the Biltmore Condo, well north of the Four Arts campus, and runs along the North County Road tree canopy and a stretch of the Lake Trail by the Intracoastal that has nothing to do with the current construction zone. More than 1,600 runners, walkers, and families turn out each year, and the event has a long history of raising money for holiday meals across the county.
One quirk worth knowing if you're a regular: in past years, organizers have moved the start time earlier specifically to beat high tide before it reaches the Lake Trail portion of the course. It's a small reminder that this stretch of trail sits low against the Intracoastal and always has, construction or not. That's just the rhythm of running along the water in the fall, not a reason to think twice about the race itself.
A Realistic Loop Right Now
If you're doing your normal out-and-back this month, the honest advice is to keep doing it. The trail north toward Bradley Park is untouched. The trail south toward Worth Avenue and beyond is untouched. The only adjustment is if your usual route takes you straight through the Four Arts stretch near Royal Park Bridge, in which case you'll pick up Cocoanut Row, head north, and cut over on Seaview Avenue, the same street the Palm Beach Day Academy sits on, the same street the Hall family's morning commute already runs close to.
It's a two-block detour on a nine-mile trail, in place for about a year and a half, around a project that's actually restoring rather than removing one of the island's oldest cultural buildings. The rest of the trail, the family commutes, the weekend bike rentals, the Thanksgiving morning crowd at Bradley Park, keeps running the way it always has.
If you're weighing what else has changed on the island this year, or thinking about what a home near this stretch of the Intracoastal is actually worth in today's market, the Greg Forest Group knows this trail, this construction schedule, and this island the way only people who walk it daily can. Request a private market consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
