Building Florida
LEVIN, MARTIN
Building Florida The colorful architecture of Addison Mizner. BY MARTIN LEVIN In the fall of 1999, a musical called Wise Guys ran for three weeks at the New York Theater Workshop. It had music...
...It was a heady complex of courtyards, towers, patios, and arches, walled in white stucco and topped with red tiles...
...They formed a society so upbeat that one dowager staffed her new mansion with a resident organist...
...Behrman for a play about the Mizners...
...Mizner's reputation wavers between two extremes...
...Along with the Mizner story, Caroline Seebohm's book offers a fresh slant on the cultural climate of the protean 1920s...
...For his own residence, Mizner designed a Spanish fortress, complete with a portcullis, moat, and drawbridge...
...Disillusioned" is the stereotype applied to writers such as Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford...
...Colorful Mizner certainly was...
...Two months after du Pont's denunciation, Variety ran a story under the headline "Florida Slipping," which amounted to an obituary for the biggest real-estate boom in history...
...A 1928 book celebrating his work had an adoring (and well-deserved) introduction by Ida Tarbell, the scourge of the robber barons...
...The first client out of the conduit was the Philadelphia financier E.T...
...This precipitated a collapse of confidence...
...Instead, Johnson dreamed up a stucco and tiled structure that would have been at home in Mizner's Boca Raton...
...Addison's intention was to build a military hospital...
...The mad run on Florida real estate that the Mizners precipitated ended in 1926, with a collapse as total as the Dutch tulip bubble...
...One biographer finds him a colorful con man, while another sees him as an architectural genius...
...William Jennings Bryan was a booster...
...The title referred to the brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner, luminaries of the 1920s—and it wasn't the first time musical theater had set out to chronicle their lives...
...Stotesbury, who commissioned a "villa...
...That didn't make it to Broadway either...
...On his drawing board, Mizner turned it into a cross between Venice and the Alhambra...
...The end was signaled by the resignation of T. Colem-man du Pont from the Boca Raton directorship...
...You couldn't miss him...
...Today, his mystique is more negotiable than ever...
...To help promote the Boca Raton development, Addison enlisted his brother Wilson, a prolific wit who originated "Never give a sucker an even break" and a bushel of other classic lines usually attributed to the likes of W.C...
...way the Pied Piper charmed rats...
...For Sond-heim the buildings were the message: "They were all that we had hoped: original, eccentric and humorous," Sondheim said...
...You can sense the fun he had in designing the place...
...He transformed Palm Beach," wrote Alva Johnston in a New Yorker profile that inspired Sondheim, "from a rich man's Coney Island to a perpetual world's fair of architecture...
...But they did have redeeming social value: They underwrote an original chapter in urban renewal...
...Addison was one of the few architects whom Frank Lloyd Wright admired, and you can see why as soon as you enter a Mizner creation...
...They may have expected a specimen of the glass box genre from this collaborator on New York's Seagram building...
...Though it swept away what was left of Addison's prospects, it failed to destroy his legacy...
...In the latest work, Boca Rococo: How Addison Mizner Invented Florida's Gold Coast, Caroline Seebohm inclines toward the genius category and supplies abundant evidence...
...Real-estate properties proliferate, bearing his name: Mizner Lake Estates, Addison's Country Club, Mizner Park...
...They were positive thinkers in a leisure class whose social goal was conspicuous construction...
...From Palm Beach, Mizner went on to design a paper city on the site of a neighboring sandspit...
...His clients bore the names of Vanderbilt, Belmont, Biddle, Dodge, and the whiskered icons of patent medicine...
...Mizner blew into Palm Beach in 1918, when the landscape was dominated by shingled frame buildings, usually painted "Flagler yellow" (the color favored by Henry Flagler, an earlier Florida developer...
...This was the Everglades Club, a stunning replication in the manner of fourteenth-century Spain...
...Damon Runyon called Wilson "the greatest man-about-town that any town ever had...
...A man of magnetic personality and volcanic talent, Mizner was a super promoter who attracted old money the Martin Levin is a writer in New York...
...These people were as exotic as the denizens of Planet of the Apes...
...But World War I ended before he could get started, and so, instead of a hospital, he designed a club, bankrolled by his friend Paris Singer, the sewing-machine heir...
...Addison was an architect, Wilson was a sometime writer and full-time wit, and the problem the playwrights faced was how to make a modern audience find them interesting...
...In the words of Singer, "the place took the town by storm...
...And for a short but spectacular interlude it looked as though he might reverse the tide and put beauty back in the budget...
...And among the watery network of canals were a host of race tracks, coliseums, casinos, and movie studios...
...In its natural state, Boca Raton was a mosquito-infested wasteland...
...Back in the 1950s, producer David Merrick had enlisted Irving Berlin and S.N...
...And as the author has it, it made Mizner "a conduit of rich people's caprices...
...And as if to forestall any chance of recovery, Florida was hit in September 1926 by one of the most destructive hurricanes of the last century, developing winds up to 138 miles per hour...
...Over six feet tall, weighing 250 pounds, he sometimes went about with a pet monkey on one shoulder and a macaw on the other...
...Mizner's clients marched to a different percussionist...
...He was followed by enough paying customers to fill a sumptuous coffee table book of photographs entitled The Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner...
...Addison Mizner arrived in Florida at the flood tide of the austere school of modern architecture as practiced by the likes of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier...
...His board of directors included a du Pont...
...He had discovered that the Mizners were using his name to underwrite blue-sky claims, and he went public with an assault on their integrity...
...It had music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a starring role for Nathan Lane, but it never made it to Broadway...
...The return of Addison Mizner was certified in 1977, when the governing commission of Miami invited Philip Johnson to design an office building...
...Intellectuals of the Jazz Age are usually regarded as bitter...
...It underlined Wilde's familiar axiom that nothing succeeds like excess...
...Fields and Dorothy Parker...
Vol. 7 • September 2001 • No. 2
