Addison Mizner

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Addison Mizner
Personal information
Name	Addison Mizner
Birth date	December 12, 1872(1872-12-12)
Birth place	Benicia, California
Date of death	February 5, 1933 (aged 60)
Place of death	Palm Beach, Florida
Work
Buildings	Everglades Club El Mirasol (demolished) Riverside Baptist Church Boca Raton Resort & Club La Guerida (U. S. President John F. Kennedy's "Winter White House")

Addison Cairns Mizner (December 12, 1872 – February 5, 1933) was an American resort architect whose Mediterranean Revival style left an indelible stamp on South Florida, where it continues to inspire architects and developers.^[1] Mizner was the visionary behind development of Boca Raton. He was the brother and sometime partner of businessman, raconteur and playwright Wilson Mizner. The brothers' series of scams and picaresque misadventures were the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim's musical Road Show (2008).

Contents 1 Early Career 2 Florida 2.1 Selected Buildings 3 Boca Raton Development 4 Last Years 5 Legacy 6 Gallery 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Early Career

Born in Benicia, California, he traveled as a child around the world with his father, Lansing Bond Mizner, a lawyer and the U. S. minister to Guatemala. Little is known about his sketches and artwork prior to his architectural career, but his subsequent work shows him to be a fine draftsman and an artist who painted beautiful watercolors.

Although he lacked formal university training, Mizner served a 3 year apprenticeship in the office of San Francisco architect, Willis Jefferson Polk, eventually becoming a partner.^[2][3] Later, while traveling in Hawaii, he co-authored a book with Ethel Watts Mumford entitled The Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1903 ^[4][5] and then later with her The Limerick Up To Date Book.

He eventually relocated to New York City, where he designed numerous country houses across Long Island and the region. In 1907, he and William Massarene designed White Pine Camp, a retreat in the Adirondack Mountains, later used by U. S. President Calvin Coolidge as his "Summer White House".

[edit] Florida

At age 46, Mizner moved for his health to Palm Beach, Florida, just at a time when the vast resort hotels were becoming less fashionable. His Mediterranean Revival designs won the attention and patronage of wealthy clients, who preferred to build their own individual ocean-front mansions. Constructed of stone, tile and stucco, his buildings were better suited to Florida's semi-tropical climate (and threat of hurricanes) than the wooden shingle-style resort architecture imported from the Northeast.

His houses were generally one-room deep to allow cross ventilation, with kitchens located in wings to keep their heat away from living areas. Other characteristic features included loggias, colonnades, clusters of columns supporting arches, French doors, casement windows, barrel tile roofs, hearths, grand stairways and decorative ironwork. In West Palm Beach, he founded Mizner Industries to manufacture the tiles, cast stone trim and columns, wrought iron and, eventually, furniture for his buildings.

The 6 foot 2 inch, 250-pound bon vivant epitomized the "society architect." Rejecting modern architecture for its "characterless copybook effect," he sought to "make a building look traditional and as though it had fought its way from a small, unimportant structure to a great, rambling house."

[edit] Selected Buildings

• Mizner's first major Florida commission was the Everglades Club, a Spanish-mission-style convalescent retreat built in 1918, that became (and remains) a private club. It stands at 4 Via Parigi (off Worth Avenue) in Palm Beach.

• Mizner designed the 37-room El Mirasol ("the sunflower"), completed in 1919, for investment banker Edward T. Stotesbury^[6], head of the town’s most notable family of the time. It included a 40-car garage, a tea house, an auditorium and a private zoo. The mansion stood at 348 N. Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach, but was demolished in the 1950s.

• La Bellucia at 1200 South Ocean Boulevard was built in 1920 for Dr Willey Lyon Kinsley^[7]. In 2009 it was Palm Beach's largest recorded sale at $24 million^[8].

• Another fanciful Palm Beach mansion, Villa Flora, was built in 1923 for Edward Shearson. It stands at 110 Dunbar Road^[9].

• La Guerida ("bounty of war") was built in Palm Beach in 1923 for Rodman Wanamaker of Philadelphia, heir to the Wanamaker's department store fortune. It was later purchased by Joseph Kennedy for a paltry $120,000 in 1933, and eventually would become President John F. Kennedy's "Winter White House". It stands at 1095 N. Ocean Boulevard.

• Mizner's own Palm Beach home was built in 1925. It was called El Solano after the hot, oppressive wind which blows off the Mediterranean Sea in eastern Spain, but also for Solano County, California, his birthplace. Sold to Harold Vanderbilt, the estate was later purchased by John Lennon. It stands at 720 S. Ocean Boulevard.

• He designed and built the Riverside Baptist Church in Jacksonville, completed in 1926. Because he promised to build it in honor of his mother, Ella Watson Mizner, the architect refused payment for his services. The church stands at 2650 Park Street, and is Mizner's only work of religious architecture.

• In 1928, he designed the original Cloister Hotel at Sea Island, Georgia. It was demolished in 2003.

[edit] Boca Raton Development

In 1925 Addison Mizner embarked on his most ambitious project, the creation of a fabulous resort at Boca Raton. Unfortunately, this was at the end of the Florida land boom and it ended in bankruptcy in little more than a year. He began by forming the Mizner Development Corporation, a syndicate of prominent investors including Rodman Wanamaker, Paris Singer, Irving Berlin, William Kissam Vanderbilt II, Elizabeth Arden, Jesse Livermore, Clarence H. Geist, and T. Coleman du Pont as chairman. In March the corporation quietly bought up two miles of ocean front property with an overall total of over sixteen hundred acres. On April 15, 1925 the syndicate announced this large development, labeled the "Venice of the Atlantic," which would feature a thousand room hotel, two golf courses, a polo field, parks, and miles of paved and landscaped streets which included a 160-foot (49 m) wide grand boulevard called Camino Real^[10]. In an address before 100 salespeople, the architect declared:

"It is my plan to create a city that is direct and simple... To leave out all that is ugly, to eliminate the unnecessary, and to give Florida and the nation a resort city as perfect as study and ideals can make it."

On the first day of selling lots, May 14, 1925, $2 million was taken in with a further $2 million within the first month. Seeing that the large hotel would take a long time to build, Mizner immediatly began work on a 100 room smaller hotel, the Ritz-Carlton Cloister Inn (now called the Boca Raton Resort & Club).^[11] Unfortunately for the development, problems with a railroad freight embargo and bad publicity began to appear over the summer. Investors began pulling out beginning with Du Pont in October. By the end of October over $25 million in lots had been sold. Although it was obvious to many that the boom had ended, Mizner doggedly carried on. The Ritz-Carlton Cloister Inn opened on February 6, 1926. Over the winter season an additional $6 million trickled in but sales came to a halt in the spring. Even worse, customers stopped making payments on their contracts and the cash flow ended. This led to Mizner's losing control of the corporation in July 1926 and to bankruptcy in September. The bankruptcy was resolved a year later in November of 1927. As well as the Cloister Inn, the corporation had built two large Administration Buildings, a radio station, and twenty-nine homes^[12].

[edit] Last Years

In 1927 Mizner built a house for John R. Bradley called Casa Serena in Colorado Springs. Several of Mizner's friends got together in 1928 to publish a folio monograph of his work. It was entitled Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner and featured 185 photographs of homes. Paris Singer contributed an introduction and Ida M. Tarbell wrote the text.^[13] After 1928 Mizner received several commissions but they came to a stop with the beginning of the world depression. In 1932 Mizner published The Many Mizners, an autobiography covering his youth, years in Alaska, and time in New York until the death of his mother. A second volume telling of his work in Florida was begun but never completed. Mizner died in 1933 of a heart attack in Palm Beach.^[14]

[edit] Legacy

Mizner's buildings were typically dismissed by Modernist critics for their eclectic historicist aesthetic. Many were torn down and redeveloped, but a number of those that survive are now on the National Register.

In March 2005, an 11-foot tall statue of the architect by Colombian sculptor Cristobal Gaviria was erected in Boca Raton at Mizner Boulevard and U.S. 1 to commemorate his visionary contributions to both the city and Florida architecture. In addition, an elementary school in Boca Raton was named for him in 1968.

September 2009: Mizner's only Mediterranean Revival mansion north of the Mason-Dixon Line, La Ronda in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, threatened with demolition.

Update: La Ronda was demolished on October 1, 2009.

[edit] Gallery

White Pine Camp, gatehouse, Paul Smiths, New York (1907). Designed with William Massarene.	Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida (1918).	Riverside Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Florida (1926).	The Ritz-Carlton Cloister Inn, Boca Raton, Florida (1926, expanded 1960s). Now Boca Raton Resort & Club.
Memorial Fountain, Memorial Fountain Park, Palm Beach, Florida (1929).	La Ronda, Great Hall.

[edit] References

Notes

Bibliography

[edit] External links

• A Boca Raton home by Addison Mizner
• El Mirasol and the Stotesburys
• The Ghosts of Palm Beach -- Mansions of Memory
• Boca Raton Historical Society
• Historical Society of Palm Beach County, Florida
• Society of the Four Arts: Philip Hulitar Sculpture Garden and the Four Arts Gardens - official site
• "The Cynic's Calendar 1904". http://www.books-about-california.com/Pages/Cynics_Calendar_1904/Cynics_1904_main.html. Retrieved 02 October 2009.