Two things have been happening to downtown West Palm Beach's waterfront this year, and most residents have only been following one of them.
The one everyone knows is the E.R. Bradley's Saloon fight. It has the ingredients local news loves: a beloved 42-year-old family restaurant, a billionaire developer, a mayor accused of threatening eminent domain, and a stretch of Flagler Drive that might disappear under grass. It has been covered by CBS12, WPTV, WLRN, and The Palm Beach Post since late April, and it is still, as of this writing, exactly where it was in late April: paused, with no resolution in sight.
The other thing is quieter, bigger, and already largely settled. It is the city's Downtown Master Plan update, its first in roughly two decades, and it just decided how tall buildings along that same waterfront are allowed to get. That question resolved itself this month while the louder fight over a saloon kept everyone's attention pointed somewhere else.
The Fight Everyone Followed
E.R. Bradley's Saloon sits at 104 S. Clematis Street, right where downtown meets the water. Frank and Gail Coniglio opened it in 1984, moved it to its current Flagler Drive-adjacent spot in 1999, and kept running it as a family business until Frank's death in 2020. Their son Nick now co-runs it with his mother, Gail, who also happens to be a former mayor of the Town of Palm Beach.
In April, The Palm Beach Post revealed a plan that had been developing quietly since 2025: developer Stephen Ross, through his firm Related Ross, offered $30 million to fund a waterfront park that would eliminate the existing lanes of Flagler Drive between Banyan Boulevard and Fern Street, replacing pavement with a green corridor stretching from Fern Street to Clematis Street, complete with a dog park, sand volleyball courts, and a reimagined amphitheater. The catch was that the plan needed the Coniglio family's Flagler Drive holdings, including the Bradley's site, the building housing Avocado Grill and 123 Datura, and an adjacent parking lot.
The Coniglios say they spent seven months under pressure to sell, that Related Ross offered to build them a new restaurant elsewhere on the water, and that when they refused, Mayor Keith James raised the possibility of eminent domain if they didn't cooperate. James has publicly denied threatening eminent domain. What isn't in dispute is the sequence that followed: Ross issued a statement on April 23 saying he had an "intention to work" with existing businesses, James followed with a video the next day insisting eminent domain was off the table, and by April 27, facing pushback at a city commission meeting, James paused the entire plan and promised a series of "visioning and listening sessions" across the city.
Commission President Joseph Peduzzi tried to lower the temperature at that meeting, saying the ideas floated so far were not formal proposals and that Bradley's mattered to the city. Commissioner Cathleen Ward was less patient, telling colleagues the process had already missed the mark and was now headed for more meetings, more consultants, and more backtracking.
Those listening sessions still haven't happened. A Palm Beach Post follow-up in mid-July found that nearly three months after James promised them, the city hadn't scheduled a single one. City communications director Kathleen Joy confirmed the dates simply hadn't been finalized. As of today, that's still the most current word on where the Bradley's fight stands: frozen, with the restaurant's future exactly as uncertain as it was the week the story broke.
The Plan Nobody Was Watching
While that fight held the spotlight, a separate and much larger process was moving through its own sequence of meetings. The Downtown Master Plan update, the city's first comprehensive rewrite of downtown development rules in nearly 20 years, had already logged 21 community meetings between January 2025 and May 2026, drawing roughly 50 attendees to each of the larger sessions according to Joy.
An early draft of that plan, prepared by planning firm Zyscovich, included something that got far less attention than the Bradley's saga at the time: proposals allowing buildings up to 25 stories along the waterfront, stretching from Datura Street to Lakeview Avenue. That's a meaningfully larger stretch of shoreline than the one at stake in the Bradley's fight, and a permanent zoning change rather than a single restaurant's lease.
When residents pushed back on the height allowances, James paused this process too, announcing in a July 7 news release that the city needed to "get things done right, not fast." At the same April 27 meeting where he paused the Bradley's-adjacent park plan, James also tried to separate the two issues publicly, telling commissioners there was "a conflation of issues" and that the Downtown Master Plan's reference to relocating Flagler Drive was more of an aspiration than a commitment.
What Actually Got Decided
That distinction turned out to matter. A Stet News report published September 4 confirmed that the city has withdrawn the 25-story building proposal from the Downtown Master Plan entirely. The plan is no longer paused. It's now scheduled to go before the city's Downtown Action Committee for an up-or-down recommendation, the next formal step before it reaches the full commission.
In other words, the question of how tall the buildings along West Palm Beach's waterfront can be, the one that will shape sightlines, shadows, and density from Datura Street to Lakeview Avenue for a generation, has already worked its way to a near-final answer. The question of whether one specific restaurant survives has not moved an inch since April.
| Track | What It Covers | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Flagler Drive / waterfront park | Rerouting Flagler Drive, Bradley's and adjacent Coniglio properties | Paused since April 27; listening sessions still unscheduled as of mid-July |
| Downtown Master Plan update | Building height limits, Datura St. to Lakeview Ave. | Paused in July, 25-story proposal withdrawn, now moving to Downtown Action Committee for a recommendation |
"There is a conflation of issues… the Downtown Master Plan… made reference to the relocation of Flagler as more of an aspiration." — Mayor Keith James, April 27 City Commission meeting
Why the Distinction Matters If You Live Here
It's easy to see why the two got tangled together in conversation. They surfaced in the same month, involve the same stretch of waterfront, and both trace back to Stephen Ross, whose footprint in downtown West Palm Beach already includes the $772 million construction loan behind the 10 and 15 CityPlace office towers, reported to be the largest construction loan in Florida history, along with his backing of a Cleveland Clinic hospital project near Clear Lake, a Vanderbilt University graduate business school downtown, and a tuition pledge at Palm Beach State College for graduates of two city high schools.
But they are different processes with different stakes, and right now they are resolving at different speeds. The one generating headlines, the one about whether a family restaurant with four decades of history gets to keep its address, is the one still stuck. The one that will actually determine what gets built along the water for the next twenty years has quietly cleared its most controversial obstacle and is headed toward a vote.
If you've been half-following this through group chats and Instagram posts, the useful update is this: nothing has changed for Bradley's since late April, and nothing is scheduled to change until the city finally holds those listening sessions. What has changed is the building-height fight nobody was tracking as closely, and it changed in a direction that removed the tallest towers from the table.
Worth watching next: whether the city sets a date for those overdue listening sessions, and how the Downtown Action Committee's recommendation on the Master Plan lands when it reaches the full commission.
For residents who care about how downtown's waterfront takes shape, whether that means what happens to a favorite bar on Clematis Street or what gets built along the water for the next generation, staying close to which fight is actually moving matters more than following the loudest one.
If a shift in downtown's waterfront, whether it's a paused park plan or a settled skyline, ever changes how you think about your own property here, Elizabeth DeWoody has spent her career reading exactly this kind of local signal for Palm Beach buyers and sellers. Work With Elizabeth when you're ready for that conversation.
