Opinion: Paramount, Wells Fargo offer Palm Beach way to improve look, retain spirit

When I spoke at the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach last month, I began by quoting one of my favorite lines, which comes from the Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel "The Leopard": “If we want things to stay as they are, then things will have to change.” In other words, sometimes the way to preserve the underlying essence of a place, to keep its character, is to allow some degree of change to occur. You can’t stop time, but you can manage its effects. Cities are like gardens: they are organic, but like all natural things they need tending and managing or they descend into chaos.

Palm Beach may be one of the most rarefied and beautiful towns on the planet, but it is a real town, nonetheless. It is not a museum. And neither should it be a Disneyland. How can it continue to be a place in which real people live real lives and yet retain not just its look, but its spirit and its soul?

Two important sites for which new projects have been proposed might end up showing the way. The first is the Paramount Theatre, designed by Joseph Urban. A building at once magnificent and understated, Urban here toned down his characteristic flamboyance to create a model for fitting a civic building into a residential neighborhood. Restoring the theater’s magnificent auditorium, chopped up years ago, could bring Palm Beach a much-needed new cultural facility. This is a great landmark that calls out for restoration and sensitive upgrading. Leaving it in its present condition is an embarrassment to Palm Beach.

A little bit to the south, the Wells Fargo bank site is bigger and more challenging, but here, too, the answer is not to do nothing: a huge parking lot does no one any good. The handsome mix of buildings fronting on South County Road deserves to be preserved in full, not just as a stage set, and is an ideal location for more of the town-serving businesses that Palm Beach needs. The parking lot behind these structures is the perfect place to give Palm Beach more housing in its downtown core — just not as much as the developers have proposed.

And, why not look more closely at some of Palm Beach’s greatest places, like Major Alley and Root Trail, and use them as a model to weave new low-rise streets into downtown?

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Opinion: Paramount, Wells Fargo projects offer Palm Beach options