Ask anyone who has lived on the island for more than a decade how to ride the Lake Trail and they'll give you the version they memorized years ago: park near the tennis center, head north past the Flagler Museum, cut through the Four Arts, swing out to Sunset Avenue for the water fountain, then loop back with a stop for a sandwich. That version of the ride does not exist right now. Two changes this year, one at the trail itself and one at the beach it runs beside, mean the loop you learned years ago is not the loop you'll do this month.
Neither change made national news. Both are the kind of thing you only know if you're the person who actually does this ride, or the person whose job depends on knowing this island block by block.
The detour that isn't going anywhere soon
The stretch of the Lake Trail that runs along the west side of the Society of the Four Arts has been closed throughout the organization's ongoing construction, according to the Palm Beach Daily News. This isn't a weekend closure with an orange cone and a chalk arrow. It's a standing detour that riders and walkers have had to build into the route for months, and it's holding through the Four Arts renovation rather than clearing on some short timetable.
If you haven't ridden the trail since before the closure went in, the fix is simple but easy to miss the first time: instead of continuing straight past the Society's grounds, you follow Royal Palm Road to the signaled crosswalk at Coconut Row, cross there, and pick the trail back up on the other side near the Society's gardens. It adds a few minutes and a road crossing that didn't used to be part of the loop. Longtime riders who try to muscle straight through on habit alone are the ones who end up backtracking.
The Town of Palm Beach's own planned traffic impacts page lists this alongside a handful of other active projects on the island this summer, from Clarendon Avenue pump station work running through October to sanitary and stormwater improvements elsewhere on the barrier island. None of it closes the Lake Trail outright. All of it means the walk or ride you do today should assume at least one detour, not zero.
What just reopened at the beach end of the ride
While the trail itself has been losing ground to construction, the beach it parallels just gained some back. The Town's Mid-Town Beach Renourishment project completed dredging on May 25, 2026, placing nearly 600,000 cubic yards of sand along the shoreline, according to the Town's coastal protection updates. Beach accesses at Sunset Avenue, Clarke Avenue, and Brazilian Avenue have reopened to the public as a result. As of the project's late-May update, the Chilean Avenue and Gulfstream Road accesses were still closed, since equipment demobilization was staged through Peruvian Avenue.
For anyone who treats the Lake Trail as a means to an end, a way to get to sand and water rather than the destination itself, this matters more than the detour does. The Sunset Avenue access, in particular, sits right near the trail's midpoint, close to where riders already stop for the water fountain and a break in the shade. For months that stretch of shoreline was closed equipment and dune work. It's back, and the dune restoration at Sunset is the last piece the Town flagged as ongoing.
The stops that still make the ride worth doing
None of this changes why people do the loop in the first place. The trail is roughly 5.5 miles one way along the western edge of the island, hugging Lake Worth with views across to the West Palm Beach skyline, and it still passes the same handful of places that have anchored it for years, plus one that's brand new this year.
Pizza Al Fresco, at 14 Via Mizner just off Worth Avenue, remains the go-to lunch stop for anyone doing the southern half of the loop. It sits in a historic courtyard section of Worth Avenue listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a few blocks east of the trail itself, and it's an easy detour for riders who want to sit down rather than eat standing up at a dock.
The bigger change to the food stops along the route is Tutto Mare, which opened this January at Royal Poinciana Plaza. It's the first restaurant in Palm Beach set directly on the Intracoastal, built by the team behind the Hamptons favorite Tutto il Giorno and designed by Gabby Karan de Felice. Riders who used to treat the plaza as a pass-through on the way to the north end of the island now have a reason to stop. The Palm Beach Bicycle Trail Shop, also at Royal Poinciana Plaza, is still where most people rent a bike if they didn't bring their own, and it makes sense to combine a rental pickup with a reservation if you're planning to eat there.
Further north, the trail passes Bradley Park, a 4.5 acre stretch that was once the site of an exclusive beach club operating from 1900 to 1946. It still has its original Tea House and the Artemis Fountain, along with benches and gardens that make it one of the few spots on the route with a place to actually sit down that isn't a restaurant. Beyond that, the trail runs past Bethesda-by-the-Sea, a former church now a private residence, and the Duck Nest, built in 1891 and considered the oldest standing house on the island.
At the north end, the trail winds down near the Sailfish Club, an exclusive members-only club, and the Sea Isles Estates Pier Park, which is as far as most riders push before turning around. The full out-and-back adds up to somewhere around eleven to twelve miles depending on where you start and how much of the residential detour at the north end you're willing to add.
Timing and parking, the parts nobody puts on a map
The trail has no public restrooms along its length, a detail that shows up in review after review from people who didn't plan for it and had to cut a ride short. If you're doing the full loop, plan around that rather than discovering it three miles in.
Morning is still the better time to go. The trail is shaded for a meaningful stretch in the early hours, and by midday in August the lack of shade on the exposed sections becomes the thing you remember about the ride, not the water views. Parking has shifted slightly with construction in play. Street parking near Whitehall Way, adjacent to the Flagler Museum lot, still works, and Sunset Avenue still has street spaces north of Royal Poinciana Way. The museum's own lot is enforced, so that's not a workaround.
Why this is worth knowing if you already live here
None of this is the kind of thing that shows up if you search for the Lake Trail and land on a five-year-old travel post. The detour around the Four Arts has been running long enough that it's simply how the trail works now, not a temporary inconvenience. The beach accesses that reopened in May are new enough that plenty of residents haven't noticed yet, especially if their routine kept them away from Sunset or Clarke Avenue during the closure. And Tutto Mare didn't exist the last time most people mapped out their stops.
Small, current details like these are usually the difference between a neighborhood guide written by someone passing through and one written by someone who actually tracks this island week to week. If you're weighing a move within Palm Beach, curious what a property near the trail is worth, or just want a second set of eyes on how a stretch of the island is holding up, the Matt & Nick Team spends as much time on details like these as they do on comparable sales. Contact Us when you're ready to talk about what's actually happening on the ground here, not the version of Palm Beach that's three years out of date.
