For this assignment, I took Paloma Community and zoomed out to include the surrounding neighborhood. Within the City of Palm Beach Gardens, Paloma Community can not be considered the center of the community. While it is located rather centrally, most of the density of the commercial hub is located further east, more towards The Gardens Mall. Rather Paloma is more on the residential side of the neighborhood. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk defines corridors as the “connector or separator of neighborhoods and districts” (Plater-Zyberk 2013, 109). Paloma community sits in between two main corridors of this neighborhood: Interstate 95, and North Military Trail.
Interstate 95 is a major corridor in all of South Florida and is clearly emphasized in this map. Typically, I-95 is a socioeconomic dividing line among residents and commercial businesses. All of the communities to the east of I-95, like Paloma, are gated communities that are oriented around manmade lakes. I stress the importance of distinguishing that gated communities and non-gated communities are looked at very differently in Florida. Residents of a gated community feel as though they are safer from the outside world because they can clarify the internal roads, lands, lakes, and water as private. Non-gated communities cannot, and thus they reside on town roads. Just as Clarence Perry once said, “Residents may be unhappy with their neighborhood in a great city if they do not dare let their children play outside because of fast-moving traffic, their children cannot get to school without crossing a freeway, or there is no convenience store nearby to buy groceries” (Perry, The Neighborhood Unit, 486). While a little bit of an over-exaggeration in this case, Perry picks up on the key distinctions between west and east of I-95. With the majority of the better commercial commerce in the area on the east side of I-95, the west is forced to cross over I-95 to gain access, making it more difficult to live in the west.
Additionally, Perry mentions residents feeling wary about letting their children play outside because of fast-moving traffic. Residents in gated communities do not have this concern as their roads are private and have speed limits of at most 15 mph. Alternatively, non-gated communities have no such regulation and most of the time have transient through-traffic. Having public roads that anyone is welcome to use, makes residents of that community very wary to let their children play outside unsupervised whereas gated communities have no such concern. West of I-95 is primarily non-gated communities, while east of I-95 is primarily gated. Just as Plater-Zyberk says, “The neighborhood provides housing for a range of incomes...Houses and apartments for the wealthy may occupy the choice sites” (Plater-Zyberk 2013, 110). Having this distinction between private and public roads is exactly the socioeconomic dividing line that I-95 represents.
In relation to the neighborhood surrounding Paloma, North Military Trail is the corridor that connects the residential communities to the commercial areas. Heading South on N. Military Trail past the intersection of I-95 leads into a series of strip malls that contain both local and national businesses. East of North Military Trail is State Route A1A. On this road is entirely all commercial modernist strip maps with no enclosure. As can be seen on the southeast corner of the map, The Gardens Mall, one of the central hubs of the neighborhood. As one of the more high-end malls in South Florida, it caters only to middle and upper-class consumers. Another sign of the wealth gap in this area is the frequency of private golf courses such as can be seen in the northwest corner of the map. Both of these locations are major indicators of the type of consumers that reside in this area. It is important to note that, both of these example locations are on the eastern side of I-95. It would be extremely rare for any type of high-end business to be on the western side. While N. Military Trail is the corridor that separates commercial from residential areas, I-95 is still the social dividing line within the community.