Loc Northlake Blvd at Mcarthur Palm Beach Gardens Fl Us

HOW JOHN D. MACARTHUR BUILT PARADISE

FROM DARKNESS A SUDDEN BRIGHTNESS floods: spotlight pooling across a stage, a morning's first full broach of Florida sunshine spilling across a landscape.

Our Town.

Anyone from Palm Beach Gardens who sees a production of Thornton Wilder's celebrated play of 1938 might feel haunted by a familiar figure in a familiar posture. Act I, Scene I: the Stage Manager steps out from the wings, to his audience. He arranges props, introduces the play and the cast (including "many others too numerous to mention") and sets the stage, just as dawn breaks on another day.

"Well," he says, "now I'll show you how our town lies."

John D. MacArthur, who stepped from Chicago onto the local stage in 1954, said something not far from that in his sales pitches. This city, he said, lies at the junction of promise and opportunity, and smart buyers and builders and investors will never find a better home.

John D. Mac- Arthur on the Florida Turnpike overpass, 1960s. In the background: Original construction of the PGA National headquarters.

Mr. MacArthur was, first, an insurance man, pioneer of the low monthly payment plan, and then an empirebuilder, expanding Bankers Life and Casualty and buying and pooling companies, then land.

Like others who transformed Florida, he trafficked in dreams.

The PGA Boulevard flyover at Alternate A1A is crowned with cupulas and sculptures.

"This will be real garden city, a place for everyone," he said in 1959, speaking of his latest enterprise. He would manage that enterprise down to the botanical names of its streets, its early landscaping and parks, its first city council, its power and water and sewers, its churches and schools, its first business and industry. Some would say he also created its ongoing ethos and character.

Palm Beach Gardens, Our Town.

First, His Town. Act I

John D. MacArthur saw himself as a man of action. To many, he still seems present, and his shadow falls across thoroughfares, housing developments, school and church grounds, industrial parks, commercial strips. The four parts of the city seal, which he designed, reflect his vision: in the upper left his Scots clan's tartan, across from it a palm leaning across a beach toward the sea, below that a billowing banyan tree, and finally a family of four, the son carrying a ball, the daughter a doll, the mother trim in a white (Jackie Kennedy?) sun dress, the father leaning on a golf bag.

A 1961 "Life Magazine" photo shows the larger of the two banyan trees being hoisted into place in Palm Beach Gardens.

They also reflect his audience. His customers.

Walt Disney, left, and John D. Mac- Arthur sparred over a number of development issues.

A cynical view of John D. MacArthur might be most popular, shared even by his grandson, John R. "Rick" MacArthur, who wrote in a 1997 op-ed piece in The Palm Beach Post that the old man was "first and foremost a ruthless and unsentimental real-estate developer and insurance man" who cared much for money and little for nature, including the beach. He left no instructions for it in his will. Were it not for the older man's son (and younger man's father) Roderick MacArthur, the grandson wrote, executives of Banker's Life and Casualty would have turned his favorite beach and what would become John D. MacArthur Park into a 600-unit condo development.

MacArthur never denied his love of profit. He was a salesman, plying the customers at hand, working long hours in his native Chicago to build and consolidate what became Banker's Life and Casualty and other companies, following his own Florida dream. When asked where the first stake was driven for the new city, travel company owner and local historian Don Kiselewski says, "Through his competitors' hearts."

No, Sherman Adler says, and offers another view. He worked as Mr. Mac- Arthur's executive assistant, lured away in 1965 from NBC in New York, where he was known for his marketing skills, at age 24.

"I joined Mr. MacArthur to help realize and implement his vision of South Florida and the ultimate creations of the cities of Palm Beach Gardens, North Palm Beach and Lake Park," Mr. Adler says, "as well as creating a studio and TV network nucleus that created and produced 'Flipper,' 'Gentle Ben,' 'Daktari,' 'Cowboy in Africa' and the daytime game series 'Treasure Isle.'

"This was the first and largest production unit outside of Hollywood, and it was financed by MacArthur and produced by Ivan Tors. I was the third part of this threesome as president.

"This is the genius of John D. Mac- Arthur, sending millions of pictures of the raw beauty of Florida to millions of living rooms in the U.S. and throughout the world, over the three networks by that time, NBC, ABC and CBS."

The man his assistant called Mr. MacArthur could be curt and irascible, could be randy and roving, could be blunt and self-serving, but whatever his shortcomings he was, Mr. Adler asserts, "a brilliant, decent, enormous visionh visionary

didltf d" who a lot of good."

He also appreciated the MacArthur family's verve and glamour, the writing and show business genius of John D.'s younger brother, Charles, co-author (with Ben Hecht) of "The Front Page" and "Twentieth Century" and husband of actress Helen Hayes, and the promise of visiting celebrity and eminence.

Mr. MacArthur himself took a simpler view. He explained his move into real estate, including developments in North Palm Beach and Lake Park, in 1965 to writer Stewart Alsop this way: "You see something coming out of the ground. You see houses and bicycles and kids, where there was nothing but palmettos and rattlesnakes. That gives you more of a thrill than anything else."

He first called his new enterprise Palm Beach City; after officials in Palm Beach objected, he changed it to Gardens, and that felt right. This, he said, would be a green city, a city of lawns and trees.

On a recent weekday morning, Mark Hendrickson is piloting a white municipal van out into

Palm Beach Gardens, into the whole wide reach of it, as he often does for visitors and new city employees, to show it off.

The name he invokes most often through the early stops is MacArthur's. Nearly 100,000 acres of northern Palm Beach and adjoining Martin counties used to be MacArthur's, too.

This stage is vast, nearly 56 square miles extending from eastern lobes to the Intracoastal waterway west across a rectangle, cut diagonally by the Beeline Highway, and beyond to farms and open land.

The urban east hums with activity. The script for much of its western expanse remains to be written.

As city forester, Mr. Hendrickson works among the crew, mostly behind the scenes, who carry out the stage directions, supply and maintain the shifting sets and scenery, furnish and secure and decorate the sprawling premises.

He predicts surprises on this tour, and the first is just 100 yards away.

From his office in the municipal complex, across a plaza encircled by flags where the original city hall stood, Mr. Hendrickson starts through curved parking areas and pulls up to a modest white wood-frame.

This, he says, was the city's first fire station, moved here from its original site at Northlake and Keating, now an ABC Liquor store. The man approaching turns out to be John Morrow, quartermaster of the city's fire-rescue department, who, as it happens, grew up in Palm Beach Gardens.

"When we moved here in '61," he says, "only half this street was here. My dad, Frank Morrow, was fire chief. The main drag was two lanes. I had to go to school in Riviera because there was no school here. Then finally the next year Gardens Elementary opened. There was nothing around here. Dairy farms. Woods and marsh."

He rests a hand, just then, on a 1958 Chevrolet 36 Apache fire engine. It was one of four donated for the city's crews, Mr. Morrow's boss, Lieutenant Shawn Reed, says, by John D. MacAr- thur. It cozies up to an older American La France. Both still run. "He knew people wouldn't want to come to an undeveloped area," Mr. Reed says, "unless it had some kind of protection."

He and Mr. Morrow are waiting, just then, for a pest-control truck. "You either have termites or you're going to get termites," he says. "It's just part of maintenance." This bit of history, he says, will NOT be chewed.

Out onto Burns Road and left on Military Trail, Mr. Hendrickson heads for the city's visual centerpiece, two great banyan trees screened above the city's letterhead. Around them, he says, you'll see a grassy oval splitting John D.MacArthur Boulevard, renamed from Garden Boulevard.

That modest island is Palm Beach Gardens' only historic district.

A city just 50 years old might seem starved for history, but Mr. Hendrickson gives its past a megaphone. He is big on connections, on where and how the city fits into a bigger picture. On this tour, he promises to connect Palm Beach Gardens to the fabric of Florida, as John D. MacArthur connected it to a universal dream, connected it and then sold it.

Unlike a shyster's Florida land pitch, his dream was more than the lure of sun, sand and surf and swaying palms, of moderate winters and tropical sins. It appealed to an American hunger, a craving for home, to a common desire for shelter and comfort, for security, for identity.

Mr. Hendrickson's path takes him along a corridor of early industry, contractors such as the DiVosta family and Sy Fine who helped build the core of the city, and then past Palm Beach Gardens Elementary School and a city youth center and Howell L. Watkins Middle School to a broad canal, greenways and a lake that showcases ibis and egrets and also both MacArthur's business skill and his environmental bent.

The new elementary stands on the site of the city's first grade school, just as early high schools gave way to better models. "They just flipped them," Mr. Hendrickson says. "Nothing here stays…old."

As he pulls into what is now Lake Catherine Park, past modest homes along Riverside and Holly and then Lighthouse Drive, a resident driving by zeroes in on Hendrickson's city vehicle and pulls alongside to express himself.

"How ya doin'?" he says. "Do you have anything to do with those bolts out there in the driveway? I called Theresa a couple times…I mean, I'll have to put a fence up."

Mr. Hendrickson blinks, listens quietly, says, "I'm just the city forester. Keep calling Theresa. You went to the right person." With a last urgent plea the man pulls away, and the forester looks out at the water and smiles wanly.

"I understand what he's saying," he says. "To keep the value and aesthetics in neighborhoods that do not have associations, we kind of PLAY the association as the city. So we've created codes, property maintenance standards, and people DO contact us regularly when somebody may not know the code or somebody may be violating the code. Tens of thousands of eyes. They'll call us or stop us to find out what's going on with their neighbors, turning their neighbors in."

He might, at that moment, prefer the company of ibis, but he goes on.

"DiVosta (Homes) built the Lake Catherine unit of development, and when he did he gave the city this area as a passive park. When I came on board there was a Little League field over there, but this was always an area that was dug out by MacArthur for the drainage of Palm Beach Gardens."

The canal, called the Thompson River, and Lake Catherine were excavated from shell rock and spoil, some of it dumped back to boost property elevations two or three feet above the road. The rest MacArthur sold, at a profit. What, he might ask, is wrong with that?

He'd like to say more, but just ahead, where MacArthur Boulevard Ts into Northlake Boulevard, the banyan trees loom.

Mr. Hendrickson parks in the adjoining lot at mixed-use Banyan Place and crosses the arc of northbound lane to a grassy island. He looks straight ahead, first, at thick gray trunk swathed in serpentine aerial roots, and then up. The leaf canopy nearly blots out the sky.

A photo from "Life Magazine," the May 19, 1961, issue, shows the largest of the two trees dramatically hanging in midair, suspended from a crane. The copy underneath chronicles misadventure:

"Fortunately for him, tree-lover John D. MacArthur of Lake Park, Fla. Is also a multimillionaire. When he decided to move a 75-ton banyan tree from one of his real estate developments (Mrs. Mima Hicks's yard in Lake Park, where it was due to be cut down) to another, Palm Beach Gardens, 10 scant miles away, the following things happened: A feed mill tank truck burst and spewed 10,000 gallons of molasses onto a roadway specially bulldozed to move the tree. The four feet of fill needed to cover this mess raised the roadway just enough to make the tree hit and snap several railway signal lines, causing all the crossing-gates to close for eight miles. A cable parted while the tree was being hoisted over 18-foot Western Union Lines connecting southern Florida with the rest of the world, and the tree dropped, cutting the lines and crushing an earthmover. Retrieved, it was placed on the tracks long enough to hold up three New York-bound trains until, about 1,009 man-hours and $26,000 later, it was replanted in a hole that was three times too big and had to be filled in."

From what Mr. Hendrickson has heard, MacArthur loved the publicity, if not the tone. The tree remains the stage manager's, and the city's biggest and oldest prop, and, thanks to the historic designation, it will not be moved by change in scene or season.

T The banyans testify tify to MacArthur's pa particular bent for sa saving trees, to hi his ego and also to hi his drive. He got th things done. He w wanted a mature tr tree, he said, so h i tTs he could enjoy it in his lifetime. The first tree was shortly joined b by a second, on M MacArthur's th theory that they ne needed company, and well beyond 120 y and, years old, they continue to flourish.

MacArthur's first neighborhood does, too. On his way there, Mr. Hendrickson offers the developer's credo.

Unlike older cities in Florida and across the country, jerry-built across decades by homesteaders and developers whose visions and interests often collided, he says, Palm Beach Gardens from the beginning has been PLANNED. Even fashioned from Mac- Arthur's "garden city" vision, though, it is not the simple abacus of a company town or a cookie-cutter community, not a Levittown or Sun City or Deltona.

This planning, he says, evolved during and after MacArthur's lifetime. The central idea is a clear separation of areas based on shared needs: places for homes, businesses, industry, education, parks and recreation, separated by walls or thoroughfares or foliage, buffered by landscaped green space. It is not, he says, anybody's lookalike tickytacky, and his case-in-point waits just ahead, off Northlake on Holly Drive.

Long-time residents still refer to this area as the Parade of Homes. It is the city's historic Eden, its place of genesis.

Lots and roads were platted but unbuilt when MacArthur bought the land in the late '50s. By June 1962, the first models were ready for inspection.

Newcomers might be most struck by the modesty of the houses. The names of the model homes marched past potential buyers during the Parade's opening walkthroughs sound like a mixture of tropical and Old English: the Williamsburg, the Beachcomber, the Pilgrim, the Continental, the La Fiesta, the Florida.

The homes themselves, as Mr. Hendrickson passes, look modest, practical, comfortable. Each also shows its own personality, its own colors and sidings and banks of windows, its varying garage or carport, its particular landscaping.

The houses rise from lawns without sidewalks; MacArthur had planned to put them BEHIND the houses, but, he was told, hidden walks could be a nightmare for law-enforcement. He relented.

On matters of business and principle, though, he was usually relentless. Until they took up permanent residence in the Colonnades Hotel, Mac- Arthur and his wife, Catherine, lived in a modest single-story home in Lake Park, in marked contrast to the mansions and ostentation of Henry Flagler, Florida's first and biggest developer.

MacArthur was notoriously frugal. He lectured the neighborhood's construction workers on the waste of a single nail, and, Hendrickson says, hired local children to walk around with a bucket collecting any that had fallen.

He excelled, though, the tour guide says, at the bigger picture, at the bold vision.

Some of his visions evaporated, the forester is saying as he heads west on Northlake. MacArthur had wanted to build a sprawling marina in Palm Beach Gardens to rival Fort Lauderdale's, and he championed an exotic animal park here. Neither attracted backers or capital. The capper was his effort to persuade Walt Disney to open his second Magic Kingdom, now Walt Disney World, in Palm Beach Gardens.

MacArthur was never afraid to borrow someone else's good idea, and he knew that he and Disney shared a passion and a vision for Florida.

Sherman Adler tells this story: "At then the end of a long, hot day, mostly in back of a truck with Mr. Mac touring Walt around Palm Beach Gardens, the Beeline Highway and what is now PGA Boulevard going through submerged land, palmetto islands and just general wilderness, we stopped at Layton's Marina and Fishing Camp on the shore of the Intracoastal in Lake Park, which he owned and treasured as a topical hideaway and oasis. He turned to Walt and asked if he liked to swim, then took of his clothes down his boxer shorts and dived.

"Walt looked at me and said, 'Hell, if he can appreciate nature so can I,' and he similarly took his clothes off down to the shorts, and they both laughed and like 12-year-old boys sprayed water on each other."

To Mr. Adler's thinking, the men weren't seeking the naturist's simple life but sharing a connection. The postwar boom of the early '50s percolated with utopian dreams of a better future, and among Disney's were an ideal community, a protected, self-contained town. He called it Celebration, and it exists today, not far from Disney World.

That World, of course, spins in Kissimmee and surroundings south of Orlando, not here. The project fell through. Most of his projects paid off.

He had a bigger problem with his residents. They sometimes stubbornly refused to follow the script or the blocking. Some bought into his dream and then wanted to make it their own. Contrary to image, MacArthur's correspondence with citizens and elected officials alike shows civility and restraint. He was not afraid to apologize or to promise help.

MacArthur imagined a city of 100,000 people and the robust tax base that would come with them. He didn't get it. While the population boomed from a single homesteader (or squatter, usually identified as black) in 1960 to nearly 7,000 in 1970 and an estimated 50,000 now, the Gardens still have some growing to do.

It DID draw notice as the fastestgrowing city in America, and the local reaction was to stop expansion, until a sewage treatment plant could be finished. After some jousting MacArthur followed through, and profited from interest on money he loaned. The treatment plant opened in 1975. A flood of development followed.

More interested in sales than social reform, MacArthur convinced others to plant their roots, and root their plants, here. His insurance empire brought him into dealings (and into stockholdings and on boards of directors) with major players. Residents, he knew, needed jobs, so he talked David Sarnoff and RCA into building their Information Systems plant here in the early '70s, joining the longtime anchor industry of Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, maker of rocket engines, followed through the decade by I.T.T. Semiconductors, Solitron Devices, N.C.I, Inc. and a stream of others.

On Jan. 6, 1978, MacArthur died in the Colonnades, of cancer of the pancreas. He was 80 years old. His wife, Catherine, died less than three years later. The city was on its own. Act II

Those left without their singular founder have adopted as their slogan, "Growing Together in the Gardens." How closely can only be puzzled out, but those working for and promoting the city, despite publicized in-fighting, speak often of shared effort and commitment.

Along the broad, landscaped expanse of PGA Boulevard east of I-95, now, passersby can still see how the city grew through the boom years of the late '80s and '90s. Business, commerce, retail, education, they all show in rooflines and grand facades, some tucked discreetly inside curtains of trees, flowers and hedge: the long, low, elegant stretch of PGA Commons with its shops and offices and restaurants; the Ed Eissey campus of Palm Beach State College; the upscale, cleverly bermedoff enormity of The Gardens Mall; the massive buildings housing the executive offices of banks and realtors and many others.

An overweening Mediterranean style in houses and condos, barrel-tile roofs and poured concrete walls, and the similar look of institutional structures, Mr. Hendrickson admits, might put off those who love funk and quirk, though they can find plenty of both within an easy drive.

To a newcomer, Palm Beach Gardens seems more a suburb than a city. Its Main Street is the multi-laned PGA Boulevard, a source of pride for many and a wide and open vista. "We have," Mr. Hendrickson confesses, "no downtown."

He also agrees with co-worker Ann Schilling, the city's resources manager, that the heart of the community is its municipal complex and, even more, the recreational facilities across from it on Burns Road, a place often teeming with activity.

What the city also doesn't have, he's happy to say, is high-rises. As he skirts the lake at a west-side condo development, Hendrickson points east past the Florida Power and Light water tower to the city's tallest building, the highrises of the Landmark condominiums. He hopes, he says, that they will not be copied.

The men and women who followed MacArthur, the mayors and city managers and members of the council, the leaders of industry, balanced carrying out his vision with their own careers and the public's sometimes conflicting demands and desires.

At risk of being called a "homer," Mr. Hendrickson points to the full gallery of public officials, many stepping in from business and industry, and to other community leaders, who kept the city on its course.

Creating and then keeping a community's character is an ongoing tugof war, in good times and bad. Some in the succession of city officials and managers are praised, some vilified, most both.

Some have endured and did more than others. Names and faces from public and private sectors jump out: Ron Ferris, Karen Marcus, Joe Russo, John C. Bills, Jerome

V. "Jerry" Kelly, Don Kiedis, Eric

Walt Jablin.

Mr. Hendrickson knows too well, he says, that public officials and politicians are lumped these days into a group about as popular as termites. But none of them is hiding.

Their signal achievement, current city councilman and former mayor Joe Russo says, was holding the line on the vision of a garden city, fighting for an elegant flyover bridge rather than a concrete eyesore on PGA Boulevard, persuading local business and industry to help pay for landscaping and public art; designing and following a plan, wielding city codes as instruments.

In the Department of Planning and Zoning, where he works with Mr. Hendrickson under Natalie M. Wong's leadership, Aries Page serves as GIS Manager and as minister of maps. He husbands multiple views of Palm Beach Gardens from the air, and the computer-savvy can find and explore them on the city website, www.pbgfl. com (look for Planning and Zoning).

The earliest map, 1953, shows mostly blank space. Where today's roadways crosshatch and scissor like Pick-up Sticks, the maps shows only three: the north-south lines of U.S. 1 and A1A and the diagonal of the Beeline.

The latest maps are an elegant interweave of intricate curving developments and multicolored industrial and institutional blocs and blue waterways. Mr. Hendrickson likes to take them down to the smallest detail.

Heading west on Northlake Boulevard, he is happy to point to sidewalks that work, to long, sinuous paths threading through wide spaces banked by hedges and decorative foliage. He counts green-space right-ofway among the city's great assets and achievements.

He's less enthused as he passes two stretches that show up as shadowy rectangles on city maps: unincorporated areas still part of Palm Beach County. At ground-level, they show up as the spangled showrooms and herringbone lots of car dealerships.

He is not complaining about the county and its role in Palm Beach Gardens – far from it. He can spend an hour saying how county government has helped here with public parks and facilities. Retail, though, can be a wideopen joust, a parade of strip malls and asphalt lots, tarted in high-def billboards and neon.

The city has held them off, through frequent argument, and the builders and bringers of business have bought in.

One major player has understood the environmental start from the get-go: the Professional Golfers' Association of America.

One stop on Mr. Hendrickson's tour offers a dramatically different landscape: PGA National. In MacArthur's time it became contested ground. Now, it is a national showpiece.

From its beginnings, even more than links-happy neighboring cities, Palm Beach Gardens took up, and took IN, the game of golf.

The original two 18-hole courses were flanked in condos and town houses, and they became the first of a continuing expansion of gated communities.

As a Scotsman, John D. MacArthur appreciated the game of golf, especially the allure of it. Hearing that the Professional Golf Association was looking for a headquarters, he donated building and course, for $2 million, bring national and world events here. A split with the PGA, their move to new ground farther west in 1972, gave him J.D.M. Country Club, now BallenIsles. The PGA built three new courses, kept its headquarters here and an annual tournament, too, currently the Honda Classic.

The more ongoing impact, though, came in lifestyle. Started in the '70s, it features gated, cleanly landscaped, almost self-contained living for adults to the end of life. Not far away, the Mirasol Country Club shows even more spectacular fountains and byways, and in developments beyond it the mansions can be eye-popping. Evergrene offers an environmental focus. Frenchman's Creek is an upscale fantasia.

Mr. Hendrickson drives through with a wave at each gate and soon out to the more western reaches of PGA Boulevard. Here, he says, the Palm Beach Gardens story will come fullcircle. Act III

The MacArthur name lingers on the local tongue. The triggering event in the latest surge of Palm Beach Gardens was the sale of some 5,000 acres by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1999, opening space for the Scripps Research Institute and a surge of high-tech optimism. Sites were mapped out east of I-95 for an expected parade of biotech companies, drawn by shared discovery and easy living, and the city would insist on contributions for proper landscaping, shared public facilities and art.

Then the twin towers fell.

At one point in Mr. Hendrickson's tour, two pillars of tortured metal had pulled him into a parking area in front of Fire Station No. 3. Memorial Plaza.

The metal is two massive girders, section C-89, South Tower, World Trade Center, Manhattan, twisted from impact and fire, now rusty and jutting against the sky.

Installed for a public opening this year on Sept. 11, received free of charge beyond shipping and arduous handling and laborious grounding, they are less about the city's history, Mr. Hendrickson says, than about a shared understanding. Nobody from Palm Beach Gardens died in the attack. But the people who brought the girders here made sure the names of all who died that day, those caught in the twin towers and those who tried to save them, were frosted onto Plexiglass panels curtained around the girders.

You can see Florida as a fantasyland, Mr. Hendrickson says, and you can also see it as part of America. Palm Bea Beach Gardens wa was meant to attract people f from all parts o of the country, t looking fo for a better, e easier, warmer li life. It's also a pl place where a

person matters, starting with a name. Some of those people, he knows, are under stress.

The events of 9-11-2001 sent the country reeling, and the wars that followed and a set of financial calamities hit this area, like all others and especially Florida, hard. The Enron collapse. The epochal Bernard Madoff swindle. Bank failures, mortgage foreclosures, plunging home values, collapsing credit, job loss, despair.

The tour brings Mark Hendrickson back east, into an industrial park beneath the span of the PGA flyover bridge and its steel flower-and-petal sculptures. He can point into the park at businesses hard-hit and struggling, businesses related to home furnishing and construction, to long-term and high-end investment, to expensive goods and services.

They might find solace, he says, as MacArthur did, in nature.

Just now, Mr. Hendrickson turns onto the boulevard's westward reaches and into Sandhill Crane Boat Access Park.

From an observation tower, the shimmering ribbon of the C-18 Canal stretches into the Loxahatchee Slough, flanked by a pair of dirt paths that reach, the forester says, to the Intracoastal Waterway. The park, like most projects in the city, he says, sprang from cooperation between the city, the county, South Florida Water Management, Florida Power & Light and property owner John Bills. He calls Sandhill "the core of our eco-tourism."

At that moment, three hard-hatted laborers leaning against railings are calling it a break room. Mr. Hendrickson calls it a recreational link to hundreds of miles of water and sand, marsh and woodland.

"Now," he says. "I have another surprise for you."

Off Prosperity Farms Road, he turns into a modest parking lot. The sign says Frenchman's Forest Natural Area, and a concrete walkways snakes into 158 acres of hushed woodland. "If we're lucky, we might bump into a gopher tortoise," he says. Stepping out onto a wooden pier, out to a railing and looking across a mangrove-skirted salt pond, he marvels at being less than two miles from The Gardens Mall.

He's glad to say that the city, amid all the pressures of commerce, is moving slowly and deliberately, too. Epilogue

Mr. Hendrickson has one more stop, all the way east just beyond the city limits to where PGA Boulevard becomes Jack Nicklaus Drive and, as A1A, curves away toward John D. Mac- Arthur State Park.

He pulls up before Golden Bear Plaza and points to his right, to a wellweathered historical marker. This, he says, is where the Miami-Dade Courthouse once stood, in the first decade of the 1900s. It is the area's only historical marker.

People such as MacArthur, and cities such as Palm Beach Gardens, he says, belong to a wider and deeper history, and the trick is to find and keep their own identity in it.

Driving up over the flyover bridge again, he looks west, beyond I-95, beyond the Turnpike to a blur of mottled dark green along the horizon. "That's the future," he says. "That's where we're going."

Nobody wants to go there in lockstep. Private ownership and enterprise built the city. Individual effort sustains it. But, Mr. Hendrickson says, however ad-libbed new ventures might become, he hopes that, as the curtain closes on each day, the players will remember the character and spirit that still informs what Palm Beach Gardens might call its soul. 

taylordinectich.blogspot.com

Source: https://palmbeach.floridaweekly.com/articles/the-vision-of-palm-beach-gardens/

Share this post