Last Act: Addison Mizner's Finale

Last Act: Addison Mizner’s Finale

By Augustus Mayhew

In the tradition of other visionaries before and since, Mizner discovered the perfect place to combine everything he had learned during his travels, a place he could imprint The Mizner Touch.

Last Act: Addison Mizner’s Finale

By Augustus Mayhew

Addison Mizner’s career and adventures in San Francisco, New York, and Palm Beach have been the subjects of numerous chronicles. The architect’s more difficult final years have garnered less reflection. Having attained an iconic stature for his architectural transformation of Palm Beach into an international resort, the demand for Mizner’s work dimmed following the collapse of his Boca Raton development. His loss of public standing was made worse by health concerns, legal tangles, diminished resources, and increased competition.

Everglades Club under construction, Palm Beach, 1918. Photo courtesy Mizner Library Foundation.

Addison Mizner (1872-1933), portrait. Photo courtesy HSPBC.

By an early age, Mizner was instilled with an indefatigable spirit that he called on to meet demanding challenges. He survived deathdefying accidents, crippling mishaps, and lifethreatening illnesses that might have otherwise permanently disabled him. He utilized each recovery as an opportunity to deepen and expand his talents that culminated with his Florida efforts. At Palm Beach, he popularized an uncommon architectural style, mixing California and Central American Spanish colonialism with European motifs. Rather than duplicate Beaux-Art formalities, Mizner’s mansions manifested the informalities of resort life. Instead of by-the-book prearranged formulations, Mizner houses were designed according to their scenic views or prevailing breezes with austere facades — frontispieces for courtyards, loggias, patios, balconies, arcades, and terraces.

After World War II, however, appreciation was downgraded for his achievements and skills. Several of Mizner’s significant mansions were demolished, supplanted by subdivisions. Additions and alterations obscured Mizner originals. His entrepreneurial talents were overlooked as Palm Beach’s most enduring architectural influence who revolutionized the area’s building industry.

Mizner place, Carmel Valley, California. Photo courtesy Mizner Library Foundation.

Typed letter from Paris Singer to Addison Mizner, 1926. "...money is scarce these days..." Courtesy Mizner Library Foundation.

Addison Mizner's social invatations. Mizner kept a noticeable social profile amid increasingly unsettled personal finances. Courtesy Mizner Library Foundation.

Alice Delamar, who Mizner called “my de Medici,” wrote of the legendary architect during these distressed final years: “Addison’s capacity for work was rugged in the years between the Everglades Club and Boca Raton, but after his involvement in the financial disasters that followed, the worry alone must have taken a toll. He was literally broke, and we may be surprised at all the humor he was able to express in his last manuscript, done in those last months of his life.”

The architect’s death made national headlines. The memorial service held at his apartment brought together craftsmen and millionaires, maids and matrons. The next day, the Palm Beach Town Council renamed Town Hall Plaza as Mizner Plaza, paying tribute “in memorial to the artistic debt that Palm Beach owes to the late Addison Mizner.” Mizner’s estate filed a writ of insolvency with assets valued at $2,000 and outstanding debts of more than $200,000. According to court documents, Addison Mizner’s personal assets included a gold frog stickpin, five gold collar buttons, assorted cufflinks, and a gold pencil ruler.

The Return to Palm Beach …

When the Boca Raton fiasco resulted in years of litigation, Mizner came back to his Via Mizner apartment to restart his architectural practice and focus on his manufacturing concerns. Considering the range of his activities, he might have experienced moments when he believed a comeback was possible, reviving interest in his work and restoring the favored position he once enjoyed. Mizner remained on Palm Beach, though he began spending more time with family visits to California.

Although the Mizner family played a leading role in Northern California’s cultural history and social life, Addison was at home with Palm Beach’s laissez-faire resort atmosphere. His family was described by a newspaper columnist as, “Those Mizners … these heroes of a thousand incidents of heart and hand, protagonists of innumerable dramas of life in all its fantastic phases.”

Regardless of his family’s prominence, Addison Mizner never concealed his aesthete leanings, bohemian lifestyle, or personal preference for the company of fellow “bachelors.” Column mentions often included the names of his gentleman companions. He was described as the “Beau Brummel of Honolulu.” Whatever his physical imperfections or public persona, Mizner’s confidence was built on the support of his family and friends who championed their differences. At Palm Beach, Mizner was valued for being “an originator,” as he was described when he lived in Hawaii. Then, The San Francisco Call newspaper reported, “Among San Franciscans who made things hum in Honolulu, Addison Mizner stands out as one of those best remembered for his originality. Why will Addison insist on being original in a peculiar way? He is an originator.”

In February 1911, Florence Brokaw Satterwhite hosted a New York dinner party where her friend Addison Mizner was not only positioned directly to her left but was seated, gasp, next to the gentleman with whom he had arrived. A newspaper columnist reported, “Usually, of course, men and women are alternated in places at dinner but at once it is clear why usage is here disregarded .…” The columnist explained this clique was composed of “resident members of society in New York and abroad … metropolitan and cosmopolitan.” Thus, Mizner was attuned to Palm Beach’s embrace for exceptional characters.

Thus, Mizner’s financial status did not affect his personal popularity. He engaged in civic and social affairs as well as hosted private dinners and his annual New Year’s Day open house. He rejoined the influential Art Jury that approved building plans for the town. Alice Delamar funded a limited-edition publication documenting his original Palm Beach houses and buildings with an introduction by Paris Singer, text by Ida Tarbell, and photographs by F. E. Geisler.

And yet, professionally, Mizner encountered an influx of rival architects vying for the same commissions. Although Harold S. Vanderbilt and Joseph Widener asked Mizner for proposed drawings, they selected the Treanor & Fatio firm to design their estates. Furthermore, interest grew for simpler, less expensive building styles rather than the palatial showcases identified with him. In 1927 Mizner only counted two commissions of note, becoming better known as a courtroom defendant than an architect. The following year, Mizner reorganized his remaining Addison Mizner Inc. holdings, placing his professional practice together with the various building supply companies.

Cloister Inn, under construction, Boca Raton, 1925. Since various financial problems threatened the Boca Raton developement. Plans for a larger resort were scrapped and the smaller lakeside 100-room Ritz-Carlton Cloister Inn was built, opening Febuary 1926, with 350 guests. Several monthes later, Mizner forfeited his interest to develop Boca Raton. Photo courtesy Mizner Library Foundation.

Mizner Revival

In 1928 the Mizner office designed several notable residences, albeit outside Palm Beach. In Montecito, California, he created a 40-room, 17,000-square-foot villa set on 17 acres for a former New York client. Near Philadelphia, he conceived a stylistic derivative of Playa Riente called La Ronda, a 17,500-square-foot, Gothic-inspired showplace. As developer Clarence Geist was redeveloping Mizner’s foreclosed Cloister Inn into the Boca Raton Club, Geist’s lawyer, Jerome Gedney, retained Mizner to design L’Encantada on an ocean-to-lake parcel in Manalapan.

Among other commissions during this period, Mizner drew plans for The Cloister resort at Sea Island, Georgia, named for his failed Boca Raton hotel. There were several projects for John F. Harris, a New York financier, in Miami Beach and Palm Beach. The September 1928 hurricane wreaked havoc on Palm Beach, causing the structural redesign of several Mizner mansions. At Playa Riente, a Mizner-designed cloister and oceanfront staircase were added. Floor levels were raised; roof lines and roofing materials were altered. Window styles were changed.

The Cloister opened October 1928 in Sea Island, Georgia, as a three-story, L-shaped, 46-room inn designed around a cloistered courtyard on more then 1,200 acres. Photo courtesy HSPBC.

Beach Club impresario Edward R. Bradley retained Mizner to proceed with plans for the lakefront Embassy Club on Royal Palm Way, next to the earlier Mizner-designed, Venetian-styled Singer Building. The Phipps interests hired Mizner for additional shops along South County Road. Mizner’s longtime patron and benefactor Edith Oliver Rea hired him to rebuild her gardens and make a loggia addition. For Nate and Frances Spingold’s Wells Road villa, Las Puertas, now known as L’Oiseau, Mizner’s exterior and interior additions and alterations included enlarging the drawing room and dining room as well as adding a new loggia, grille room, and bedroom suite. Yet another significant project was the Town of Palm Beach’s Memorial Plaza and Fountain. Constructed as an aesthetic focal point adjacent to the town’s civic buildings, Mizner was inspired as much by Spanish and Italian models as by the nearby fountain at Omar Berberyan’s Jardin Latin on Peruvian Avenue.

Despite the continuing unstable financial climate, Mizner began production of fossilized coral keystone, leasing a coquina rock quarry in the Florida Keys, near Islamorada. He transported the stone in large blocks to his West Palm Beach workshops, where a 50-horsepower saw cut the rock into building and paving stones. Mizner thought coquina would replace molded cement blocks as structural construction materials.

Again, his entrepreneurism was threatened by market conditions. He refinanced the venture before the Wall Street crash that curbed construction.

During the first week of January 1930, when the Memorial Plaza and Fountain were dedicated, Addison Mizner and Paris Singer lunched together at the Everglades Club. Meeting after a lengthy estrangement, the once-close friends shared simultaneous financial setbacks. At one point, Mizner filed a $100,000 lawsuit against Singer’s Ocean & Lake Realty Company, claiming the amount was due for his services and materials designing the 1925 additions to the Everglades Club.

Although Mizner’s plans for Jerome Kerns’ house on South Ocean Boulevard were never realized, Bessemer proceeded with blueprints for further additions to its Phipps Plaza development on South County Road. Ned (E. F.) Hutton tapped Mizner to design his new office building, composed with distinctive quarry keystone, at the corner of Phipps Plaza and South County Road. Although Mizner’s plans submitted for the Dodge- Dillman mansion in Grosse Pointe were outdone by Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer’s Beaux-Art chateau, Mizner did see his last mansion, Casa Coe da Sol, built in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1931 Mizner filed personal involuntary bankruptcy. Mizner Industries was placed in receivership by the court and sold to new owners, who renamed it Mizner Products Inc.

Last Words

That winter, Mizner was a guest speaker at Rollins College. He spoke of the need for a “betterment of taste.” The proliferation of the stucco-and-barrel tile-styled carpenter’s cottages had led to “hideous designs in the development of Mediterranean architecture.” Mizner believed they had “stepped over the bounds of good taste” by disregarding “the beauty of simplicity.” The following spring, plans were finalized for what became his last Palm Beach house, a one-story “Mexicantype” house on Brazilian Avenue for Kenneth Alexander.

“What’s become of Addison Mizner?” asked a nationally syndicated columnist in February 1932, only months before headlines reported Paris Singer’s death in London. Soon after, Mizner left for California. That fall, the Sears Publishing Company released The Many Mizners, a biographical memoir of anecdotes that Mizner was said to have dictated to his secretary. Rather than detail his influences and inspirations or his professional development, Mizner’s book was a pastiche of amusing sketches that established him more as a raconteur than an architect.

Shortly before Christmas Day, he returned to his Via Mizner apartment, but not before a visit to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. As concern for Mizner’s well-being increased, Irving Berlin checked out of The Breakers and moved into Mizner’s Worth Avenue apartment to supervise his care. More than a decade before, in 1919, Mizner had hosted the Everglades Club’s opening reception, where Berlin performed. Two weeks after Berlin’s departure from Mizner’s bedside, on February 5, 1933, the architect died. Although a century has passed since work began on the Everglades Club, Addison Mizner remains one of Palm Beach’s influential and legendary characters, leaving a legacy that outlives his misfortune.

About the Author Augustus Mayhew’s essays are featured online at The New York Social Diary. He is the author of Lost in Wonderland- Reflections on Palm Beach and Palm Beach: A Greater Grandeur. Recipient of the AIA-Palm Beach Historic Preservation Award, Mayhew was born in Cuba and grew up in Delray Beach. He is the guest curator of HSPBC’s exhibition Building Paradise: Addison Mizner’s Legacy.