Everything troublesome in Florida becomes trivial.
—Addison Mizner
When [Palm Beachers] . . . notice the bad weather at all, they blame it on the experimentation with the atomic bomb—which they claim has disturbed the Gulf Stream—or else on taxes, the younger generation or the late Franklin D. Roosevelt.
—Cleveland Amory, The Last Resorts, 1952
If Augustus found Rome a city of brick and left it one of marble, Henry Morrison Flagler and Paris Singer found Palm Beach an island of jungle and left it one of stucco. Every great place has an origin story: Rome had the twins and the wolf; New York had Peter Minuit and his wampum; Palm Beach has the wreck of the Providencia. As the story goes, in January 1878 a 175-ton brig, the Providencia, was sailing from the Caribbean island of Trinidad (or was it Havana?—the accounts conflict) to Cadiz, on the southwestern coast of Spain (or was it Barcelona? Cadiz seems likelier). Its cargo was twenty thousand coconuts. Running aground, the allegedly drunken crew thought they had landed in Mexico. In fact, they had arrived on a more or less uninhabited fifteen-mile-long barrier island in the wilds of south Florida (in 1873, the population of the island was counted at fewer than ten). William Lanehart, one of the pioneers who went out to meet the boat, recalled that he was
greeted by the mate of the vessel, with a bottle of wine and a box of cigars, as a sort of olive branch. There were 20,000 coconuts, and they seemed like a godsend to the people. For several weeks, everyone was eating coconuts and drinking wine.
Providencia, indeed. Lanehart bought the ship for $20.80, while his fellow pioneer H. R. Hammon (whose name survives in a street in the middle of the island) bought the coconuts, attempting to sell them for 2.5 cents each. When only a thousand of the coconuts sold through, the rest were planted, quickly resulting in an island covered in palms and a new name: Palm Beach (chosen because there was already a post office for “Palm City” elsewhere in the state).
The first hotel, the Cocoanut Grove House, was constructed in 1880 by Elisha “Cap” Dimick, later the town of Palm Beach’s first mayor after incorporation in 1911. What started as a family home on the intracoastal waterway (known to locals, in a pleasing bit of myopia, as “Lake Worth” or simply “the lake”) was later opened to guests, who would come to the island via flat-bottom boat down the Indian River. While visitors could expect to dine on local fish, green turtle, and venison, it’s not as if they found themselves in a bustling resort. The Cocoanut Grove House was at that time the only hotel between Titusville (on the coast east of Orlando) and Key West.
The fortunes of this sleepy island—with a “tropical rainforest climate” according to the official classification—changed with the arrival of a different kind of pioneer. Henry Morrison Flagler (1830–1913) was a fairly typical Gilded Age specimen, parlaying family connections (his mother was a Harkness, a mercantile family prominent in Cleveland) into a partnership with John D. Rockefeller that resulted in the creation of Standard Oil in 1870. Standard Oil brought astonishing wealth and a move to New York in 1875, but a cure for Flagler’s wife Mary’s ill-health was elusive. Their doctor suggested that Florida’s climate might help, and the pair hied to Jacksonville in the winter of 1878. The Florida weather was no use (and anyone who has been to Jacksonville in winter will not be surprised), and Mary died a few years later. In 1883, with a new wife in tow, Flagler visited St. Augustine, then just beginning to develop as a winter destination (recall that in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s, this is where May Welland’s family is accustomed to spending their winters). There he saw the newly built Villa Zorayda, a Moorish fantasia constructed by Franklin W. Smith, a Boston millionaire with many ideas, not all of them good (the house, constructed of a proprietary coral-concrete mixture, would make a real Moor blush).
It seems as if Flagler immediately understood the potential of southeast Florida as a resort destination, blessed with copious sunshine, warm winter days (but, crucially, cool nights), and sandy Atlantic beaches. Starting in 1885, Flagler financed the construction of St. Augustine’s Ponce de Leon Hotel, a 540-room behemoth, the first major project for the firm of Carrère & Hastings, the principals of whom had both studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts and worked at McKim, Mead & White. Opening in 1888, the hotel, now part of Flagler College, is a solidly built, vaguely Spanish concoction, with not a little of the Romanesque about it, especially in the arched loggie surrounding the interior courtyard. It was also in 1885 that Flagler began to acquire rail tracks on Florida’s east coast, hoping to extend them all the way to Key West, a goal eventually achieved in 1912. In 1893, Flagler moved himself to Palm Beach, settling at Sea Gull Cottage, a shingle-style house on the lake that had been constructed a few years earlier for a Denver businessman. The house, still extant, would not look out of place in New England, though with its large porches and construction of insect-resistant Dade County pine, it made certain concessions to the tropical climate. Now the parish house for the Royal Poinciana Chapel, Sea Gull Cottage gives an idea of what Palm Beach’s earliest resort days must have looked like, just fifteen years removed from the wreck of the Providencia.
If Flagler is known outside of Palm Beach mostly for his railroads, on the island his fame rests on his hotel-building. The Royal Poinciana Hotel (demolished 1935) was his first major project, described by that great chronicler of what used to be called society, Cleveland Amory, as a “six-story building, looking like a skyscraper lying down.” The architectural style was Georgian in the broadest sense, with a central portico and a series of hipped roofs with dormers. Green shutters adorned the windows, while its clapboard façade was painted pale “Flagler yellow.” At the time the largest wooden building ever built, the Royal Poinciana had space for 1,750 guests, and its construction created an economy overnight, leading Flagler to declare that West Palm Beach, just over his eponymous bridge, was the “city I am building for my help.” Amory wrote that “Flagler took no chances with [Palm Beach’s] early-day social promotion. The first train to cross Flagler Bridge to the Poinciana bore no less [sic] than four Vanderbilts—out of a total of seventeen passengers.” In 1896, Flagler doubled down on his bet on Palm Beach, constructing another hotel, this one directly on the ocean. Simply called the Palm Beach Inn, it soon became known as “The Breakers” for its proximity to the crashing waves. Postcards from the era show yet another yellow building, perhaps more American Colonial than strictly Georgian, with a series of two-story porches. That building, which burned in 1925, bears no relation to the site’s current Mediterranean structure. Leisure activities for Flagler’s hotel guests included golf, lawn tennis, fishing, bathing, and boating, which remain the favored pastimes of Palm Beachers today.
Other characteristic structures of the early days include the original Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, now a private residence, erected on the lake in 1894. Here we see shingles again, and a curious octagonal tower topped with a conical shake roof. One could be in Maine, save for the ubiquitous palms. The fact that parishioners could only reach the church by boat because of impassible swamps gives a sense of just how rustic early life on the island was. While Palm Beach was developing quickly under Flagler’s aegis, remnants of the pioneer days remained. At the foot of what is now Worth Avenue, today one of the world’s most elegant and expensive shopping streets, sat the thatched hermitage of one “Alligator Joe,” the nickname of Warren Frazee. For twenty-five cents, visitors could see various reptiles wrestle in mud pits. Archival photographs show a robust fellow with a Panama hat and a long pole amid a scrum of gators; others indicate just how jungly the island was, with groves of palms creating shady thickets.
Flagler had become the lord of Palm Beach’s manor, but the lord lacked a big house. To remedy this, he turned to his old associates Carrère & Hastings and instructed them to “build me the finest residence you can think of.” The result, called Whitehall, was a massive white-marble-columned plantation house with seventy-five rooms and a hundred thousand square feet of living space. The ground-floor façade features attractive Diocletian windows, and the rectangular windows above echo the mullions of the arched ones below. A hipped red-tiled roof is cut by mullioned dormers, and the exterior impression is one of solidity. Inside, the marble entrance hall employs seven different types of the stone, and the rest of the interior—still viewable now that the structure is open as a museum—is of such a grandeur that, upon the house’s completion in 1902, the New-York Tribune deemed it, in a fit of exaggeration, “More wonderful than any palace in Europe, grander and more magnificent than any other private dwelling in the world.”
Here was the first great Palm Beach house, the piece of architecture that announced the island as the winter equivalent of Newport. But because Whitehall was like something out of Newport, a decontextualized Beaux-Arts leviathan with little attachment to the specificities of its location, it remained an outlier. Palm Beach would need to look elsewhere for architectural models.
Elsewhere arrived in 1918, with Paris Singer (1867–1932) and Addison Mizner (1872–1933). Mizner was the product of a California pioneer family, one of eight rackety children. Singer was the son of Isaac Merritt Singer, one of at least twenty-four children in total, and the recipient of a good portion of his father’s massive sewing-machine fortune. Both men were physically imposing and full of life. The two had met in New York in 1917 while the architect was recuperating from an ankle injury, and while Singer was in a manic state building hospitals for wounded soldiers. Fed by tales from Mizner’s youth—when his father had been the U.S. minister to Central America—Singer suggested a restorative trip to Guatemala. As Mizner tells it in a previously unpublished memoir released for the first time last year, Guatemala was dashed when the old city was struck by an earthquake.1 Palm Beach, where Singer had bought a little bungalow some years prior, became the replacement destination: “We rattled over a rickety, old, wooden toll bridge into a jungle and onto Peruvian Avenue. There was the great Atlantic looking like a millpond swish-swashing on miles of perfect beach.” Mizner’s first work was to renovate Singer’s cottage, which the architect described, with characteristic wit, as “cotton-back Tibetan, for that is the only place in the world I have never been.”
But it was a lakefront site on Worth Avenue, in the center of the island, that became the focus of the Singer–Mizner partnership. Mizner, always with an eye toward the tale, says that Singer asked him what the place might become. He replied:
It’s so beautiful it ought to be something religious—a nunnery with a chapel built into the lake, with great cool cloisters and a court of oranges. A landing stage, where the stern old abbess could barter with boatmen bringing their fruit and vegetables for sale. And a great gate over there on the roof, where the faithful could leave their offerings and receive largess.
Mizner famously said that he “never design[ed] a house without first imagining some sort of romance in connection with it,” and this impulse was obviously at work in his designs for the Touchstone Convalescent Soldiers’ Club, now the Everglades Club. Singer intended a “hospital for shell-shocked soldiers down on the lake . . . . It’s so peaceful and quiet there that the boys couldn’t help get well in a jiffy.”
Three hundred thousand men were invited to the hospital, but only thirty-three accepted the offer. Within a year, Palm Beachers had done what they always do and turned the space into a club. Though much altered over the years, the Everglades gives a sense of Mizner’s true talent for creating a sense of place. The nun’s chapel became a dining room with paneling taken from a church in Spain; antique tiles were imported from Tunisia (Mizner maintained that Tunis was the Roman Empire’s Palm Beach); a colonnaded studio was created for the English society painter Oswald Birley, who had taken to the resort. The overall impression was somewhat Spanish, with a bell-tower at the far end and a taller central tower anchoring the picturesque composition, which is most attractive when viewed from the lakefront, since the structure presents as merely a sturdy mass from the street. Red-tile roofs complement the whitewashed exterior, confirming Mizner’s original vision: “It could be a mixture, built by a nun from Venice, added onto by one from Gerona, with a bit of New Spain of the tropics.”
Mizner was never afraid to mix his architectural metaphors, and his design for stores and apartments on Worth Avenue—with timbered terraces and stuccoed arcades and shaded alleyways that twist and turn behind the streetfront—are as much Venetian as they are Spanish. But, having traveled widely in both the Spanish world (both old and new; some of his childhood was spent in Antigua Guatemala, while some of his young adulthood was spent in Salamanca), Mizner worked best in a Spanish idiom adapted to local conditions. He understood that exact reproductions of Spanish antecedents would be useless in Florida:
[T]echnically the old Spanish house was a castle. The windows were high above the ground and usually barred. . . . Behind these heavy exterior walls the house was designed around a patio—the open court in the center of the building. Of course in Florida there is no need of designing a house in that way. There was nothing to do but to turn the old Spanish house inside out, so to speak; put plenty of openings on the outside walls to let the sunshine and air into the house . . . . The patio was retained so that people did not lose the openness inside the Spanish plan.
After the success of the Everglades Club and Worth Avenue, Mizner was much in demand to build Spanish villas on the island. Later in the 1920s, his business expanded to the production of decorative ironwork, pottery, and anything else that might give a house a Palm Beach air. Not just Palm Beach but all Florida was in a building frenzy. Mizner set his sights some thirty miles south of the island to Boca Raton, planning an entire town on the eclectic Mediterranean lines he had popularized. The Mizner Development Corporation was to create a city out of nothing, anchored by a Ritz-Carlton hotel and large neighborhoods of simple Spanish-style homes. It was not to be: a credit crunch doomed most Florida building, followed by a September 1926 hurricane. The Boca Raton project failed, and Mizner was effectively ruined, though he continued to work in Palm Beach until his death in 1933.
The Mizner myth has grown tangled as a kapok tree’s roots over the years. It is commonly supposed that he had no architectural training at all, and tales have proliferated about construction misdeeds. As the late architectural historian Donald Curl, who did more than anyone to reveal the truth behind Mizner’s myths, wrote, “According to these stories, only the façades interested him, and since he had little training in architecture, he often forgot to include bathrooms, kitchens and stairways.” The late Caroline Seebohm, in her 2001 book Boca Rococo, reissued last year in paperback, spent much time pleading for Mizner’s professionalism, though by quoting the architect’s own boasts also fed into the myth, thereby emphasizing what Curl calls the “impression of the sophisticated man-about-town, unbothered by the details of the profession.”2
Perhaps it’s only fitting that Mizner’s demise came at the hands of the Mizner Development Corporation’s Boca Raton project. For it is the eventual development of Boca Raton (not, it should be said, to Mizner’s design) and countless other careless suburban subdivisions that gave the Spanish Revival such a bad name in America. Clumsy orange barrel-tile roofs, half-witted loggie, crude stucco: all are the hallmarks of what many consider to be tasteless building. Curl contends that
often-ludicrous caricatures of Mizner’s houses, ill-proportioned and with garish decoration, dotted the Florida landscape. Fashionable Palm Beach believed they cheapened all work in the Spanish style, and a reaction set against its use.
In the shorter term, the Spanish Revival suffered for practical reasons. As John L. Volk (1901–84), part of the second generation of great Palm Beach architects, recalled,
When the market crashed and the Depression followed, there wasn’t a client in sight who wanted a Spanish house. Everyone was broke. Those who weren’t didn’t want to make a show of their money. It was a challenge for me. So I began designing British Colonial houses that could be built for forty-five cents a square foot.
Volk, a native of Austria who had grown up in New York, arrived in Palm Beach in 1926 and found the Spanish architecture of the resort appropriate to the character of the island. In 1928 he wrote that “Spanish architecture is incomparable and ideally suited to the climate, vegetation, and gaiety of this playground.” As a new book by Jane S. Day points out, however, it was Volk’s turn away from Spanish styles that made his career.3 While houses such as the E. B. Adams residence on El Bravo Way (1930) show Volk’s familiarity and comfort with Miznerian precedent—the circular tower with exterior staircase; the window grilles and lanterns; the grand stone-arch entryway—his ability to work in increasingly popular British-inflected designs ensured his continued patronage on the island.
La Tonteria, built by Volk for Colonel Edward S. Donovan on North Ocean Boulevard in 1935, features an imposing Georgian portico supported by four slim Corinthian columns, with an oeil-de-boeuf in the pediment. White-painted brick and green shutters next to sash windows, matched with a red-tile roof, recall Whitehall but on a more domestic scale. Even when working outside of Mediterranean styles, Volk was attentive to climatic concerns; his loggie may have round arches rather than pointed ones, but they are still there to capture cross-breezes. Day’s book ably tells the story of Volk’s long and varied involvement in new construction and renovation on the island, but those with a serious interest in this architect’s multifarious output will want to seek out John L. Volk: Palm Beach Architect, a monograph published in 2001 by the John L. Volk Foundation and exceedingly detailed thanks to the hand of Volk’s wife and collaborator, Lillian Jane Volk. That book, something of a collector’s item, features two pages on White Gables, the house Volk built for himself on South County Road in 1936. A symmetrical Bermuda-style house, white stucco with stepped roofs, it presents a single raised story to the street, with two stories to the rear and sides. The Anglo-Caribbean approach was a revelation for Palm Beach architects, who had now hit upon a style just as appropriate for island life as the Spanish Revival, but without any of the attendant baggage or costs.
Howard Major (1883–1975), another of the so-called Big Five Palm Beach architects, had made a close study of Spanish Colonial architecture and thought what passed for Spanish in Palm Beach was a sham:
In the architecture of Palm Beach . . . [a]usterity is lacking, walls are filled with a multiplicity of windows and a profusion of Spanish decoration borrowed from churches, monasteries, and houses. The dignity of the Spaniard has vanished. The spirit of his architecture has been lost.
As Major saw it, it was the climate of colonial (which is to say, tropical) Spain that Florida mirrored, not Spain itself. So the Florida architect should look to the Caribbean rather than Continental Europe. Major proved the point with his Major Alley development (1925), off the west end of Peruvian Avenue. Here he built a series of interconnected, squat Bermudian houses, simple in plan, with louvered windows and a curved, stepped gable at one end over a garage, giving a Dutch-Caribbean impression.
Marion Sims Wyeth (1889–1982) also, after an early Spanish phase, recognized the suitability of non-Mediterranean styles for Palm Beach. While Wyeth’s Hogarcito (1921), built for Mr. and Mrs. E. F. Hutton—with its white-stucco exterior, Spanish mission bell, and balustraded terraces—fit right in with its close neighbor the Everglades Club, Wyeth, like Volk, turned away from Mediterranean styles in the aftermath of the 1926 crash. A recent monograph on Wyeth makes clear his stylistic malleability, moving as he did between grand Greek Revival designs like the house he built for Mrs. Francis A. Shaughnessy in the late 1930s and simpler, though no less elegant, houses such as Southwood (1934).4 That home presents a Southern Colonial front, with decorative ironwork fronting a terrace meant to evoke the antebellum houses of Charleston. Wyeth also had a hand in Palm Beach’s most extravagant house, Mar-a-Lago, though he sought to distance himself from the design even while it was under construction. Mostly the work of the Ziegfeld Follies designer Joseph Urban, Mar-a-Lago is said to have led Mizner to remark: “I think Harry Thaw shot the wrong architect.”
That Palm Beach looks as it does now owes to the work of the ferociously fastidious Architectural Review Commission (arcom) and Landmarks Preservation Commission, which guard the island’s architectural patrimony closely. Though some residents chafe at what they view to be overly restrictive design guidelines—it’s not uncommon for a new house to go through many rounds of revision to please the committee; the arcom recently forbid a variance allowing artificial turf—Palm Beachers have seen the rest of Florida and tend to prefer their own version of the state.
Those architectural committees have only gotten busier as Palm Beach undergoes a boom second only to the 1920s. Long-term national population trends toward low-tax environments accelerated during the pandemic, leading to inventory shortages and higher prices in the real-estate market. It was ever thus: some reports suggest Henry Morrison Flagler’s initial Palm Beach bet was predicated on his move away from New York’s punitive estate taxes. What in other resorts would be accepted as merely a fine piece of architecture is treated in Palm Beach—owing to the architectural-review process and extremely strict building codes—as a possible point of contention. Commercial projects are subject to the same strictures. Recent skirmishes have involved the long-awaited renovation of the Royal Poinciana Playhouse, a Volk building from the late 1950s constructed as part of a shopping plaza. Choosing a stripped-down English Regency style, Volk sought to engage with the historical styles common to the island and avoid the monolithic modernism of the time. While Volk’s design succeeded aesthetically, the Playhouse went fallow, even as the rest of the plaza was recently renovated and has become a shopping destination to rival Worth Avenue. Owing to restrictive covenants, the Playhouse had to retain its performing-arts mission, leaving it commercially unviable. Now a new owner has taken over the space, promising both performing arts and the island’s only waterfront restaurant. When I saw the site—next to my family’s home—in April, all that was left of Volk’s original building was its shell; Landmarks Preservation Commission board members expressed shock at the extent of the demolition.
The next battleground will be the Paramount Theatre, designed by Urban in 1926 and most recently in use as a church. A landmark link to Palm Beach’s Mediterranean era, the theater is nonetheless in limbo as its new owners work through the various committees to try to reconstitute it as residences and a private club. One local attorney opposed to the project called it “ten pounds of you-know-what in a five-pound bag.”
In the 1950s, a seasonal Palm Beach resident remarked, “Today it is like Miami. It used to be poetic.” Palm Beach never became Miami, and it is still poetic: from the white Christmas lights that wrap the palm trees in December to the whimsical but not frivolous new houses going up, in styles from Anglo-Caribbean to Cape Dutch to the Palm Beach classic: Mediterranean details on a Georgian plan. But if the island is to remain recognizably Palm Beach, vigilance will be required by all. The town’s significant architectural heritage is a testament to a shared vision, one that seems as strong now as it has ever been.
Addison Mizner: A Palm Beach Memoir, edited by Augustus Mayhew III; Pineapple Press, 224 pages, $26.95. ↩
Boca Rococo: How Addison Mizner Invented Florida’s Gold Coast, by Caroline Seebohm; Pineapple Press, 336 pages, $24.95. ↩
Palm Beach Style: The Architecture and Advocacy of John and Jane Volk, by Jane S. Day; Rizzoli, 176 pages, $65. ↩
From Palm Beach to Shangri-La: The Architecture of Marion
Sims Wyeth, by Jane S. Day; Rizzoli, 256 pages, $75. ↩
