Roxy’s Pub in West Palm Beach to be crowned with 100-foot-long swimming pool, restaurant for ages 25 and older

South Florida’s coastline is already a playground for swimming on hotel rooftops, and now popular Clematis Street drinking den Roxy’s Pub will become the first non-hotel eatery in the region to offer its own first rooftop swimming pool.

The $17.4 million project, given the final greenlight this week by West Palm Beach’s Downtown Action Committee, calls for crowning Roxy’s rooftop with a 100-by-30-foot pool, 16 cabanas, a full-service restaurant-bar and a VIP lounge. Above the palm tree-lined pool deck, a retractable glass roof will shield revelers against stormy weather. Meanwhile, A new private elevator will grant access to an elevated VIP deck, where customers can order bottle service or swim in two other, smaller pools.

When finished, “It’s going to fill up quickly for pool parties,” Roxy’s Pub owner John Webb told the Sun Sentinel this week. “There’s no rooftop pools like this anywhere in the country. I just looked at it and had 100 percent confidence that it would be successful, no hesitation.”

Rooftop hotel pools are scarce in West Palm Beach, Webb adds, currently limited to Canopy by Hilton West Palm Beach and The Ben.

“Right now if you want to go to the pool at the Ben a block from Roxy’s, you have to pay for a day pass if you’re not a guest of the hotel,” he says. “Here, it’s going to be free.”

Still Webb won’t open the rooftop pool to just any bar-crawler on Clematis: Visitors must be at least 25 years old, he said.

“We’re looking for mature young adults, young professionals,” said Webb, adding that all visitors will be ID-carded. “They need adult entertainment and a place where they can go and enjoy themselves.”

Webb said he grew convinced that Roxy’s 15-year-old rooftop needed a pool as early as 2012, when he lived in Las Vegas and witnessed a booming business of summer pool parties on the Strip. But it was the recent post-pandemic migration of “wealthy hedge fund people” into downtown West Palm Beach that convinced him to start the project now.

“South Florida has a comparable climate and we like to party here a lot more than they do in Vegas,” Webb said. “It gives customers incentive to visit during the hot summer months. It’s not so hot when you have a pool.”

The swimming pool and pool deck is designed to stretch across Roxy’s rooftop at 309 Clematis St. and the rooftop of 313 Clematis St., a connected building next door. The multimillion-dollar price tag includes 313 Clematis, a building that has sat vacant for 10 years and previously housed nightclubs. Webb bought that building last October for $7.5 million, according to property records, for the purpose of connecting both rooftops with the pool deck.

All told, the 320-seat pool and dining deck will span more than 15,000 square feet.

Starting June 12, construction on both rooftops will shut down car traffic for roughly three months on Clematis Street between North Dixie Highway and Olive Avenue, Webb said. Because 313 Clematis St. is two stories tall, a third floor and rooftop will be constructed to match the height of Roxy’s Pub. Meanwhile, the owner’s office and pool supplies will be housed on the second and third floors below the pool.

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Roxy’s got the greenlight for construction at the city’s May 10 Downtown Action Committee meeting. The city’s board approved a pair of zoning-related hurdles that will allow Roxy’s to build, for the first time, a dining patio and seating in its alleyway behind the 313 Clematis building.

“It’s super-creative,” said Kim Do, a Downtown Action Committee board member, at the May 10 meeting. “I live down the block, and I’m excited to see more activation to the alleyway.”

Some construction already began earlier this spring to bring portions of the historic Roxy’s Pub building, built in 1896, up to modern building codes. Next-door 313 Clematis, built in the 1920s, also demanded much-needed upgrades, Webb said. Roxy’s Pub, born as a speakeasy in 1924, is old enough to be the first tavern in Palm Beach County to get a liquor license when Prohibition ended in December 1933.

Except for its rooftop, the rest of Roxy’s Pub’s existing Irish-accented restaurant-bar will stay untouched, Webb said. But as an homage to its intoxicating past, the 313 Clematis building will feature a new ground-floor restaurant called Moonshiners, and serve craft cocktails and American cuisine, although a menu is far from being finalized.

“He’s creating a bit of a resort on the rooftop,” Raphael Clemente, executive director of the city’s Downtown Development Authority, told the Sun Sentinel. “It’s an interesting, big-idea project to adaptively reuse two older buildings, and it will change the nature of that block into more of a destination.”