by Nick Wynne
Just as he had done in Tampa, Davis set about publicizing Davis Shores. Helen Wainwright, the Olympic swimmer, demonstrated her skills in the water; Will Rogers, the noted social commentator, appeared at the Alcazar Casino under Davis’s auspices; international golfers Archie Compston of England and Arnaud Massey of France participated in exhibition matches; and a large-scale model of St. Augustine and Davis Shores, sixty feet long and twenty-two feet wide, created by Fred W. Leist for $50,000, became the city’s latest tourist attraction. On January 20, 1926, Davis, true to his word, offered the second section of lots in Davis Shores for sale. Although $18,714,600 in subscriptions was tallied, the reality was that the new section did not sell out. The unsold lots remained on the market until they were removed on March 4.
As 1926 dawned, Davis seemed poised to outdo even his successful development in Tampa. What in the world could go wrong? Almost $30 million in sales had been recorded before the most basic improvements had been made to Davis Shores. The Florida boom continued.
CHAPTER 9
Addison Mizner
Addison Mizner was doing better than ever. Straight-faced critics were comparing his version of Palm Beach with Athens during the Age of Pericles. He was not only society’s pet and darling, but also its trendsetter. When he wore his shirttails out to cool his great girth in the warm weather, for instance, the sports shirt was born. Clients pointed with pride to items that Mizner had forgotten to include in their houses—like doors or stairways or bathrooms. It became such a status symbol to own a Mizner slip that people were known to invent them if they didn’t exist. He was the stuff of which tall tales were made—a veritable Paul Bunyan of the Palm Beach gossip circuit.
—David Nolan, Fifty Feet in Paradise: The Booming of Florida, 1984
When Addison Cairns Mizner arrived in Palm Beach in 1918, he was looking only for rest and respite from the after-effects of a beating he had received during a robbery. The scion of a prominent California family—his father was the U.S. minister to Guatemala—he had a number of adventures in the Yukon and Europe, all of which added to the Mizner mystique that figured prominently in his later career. After a three-year architectural apprenticeship in the offices of Willis Jefferson Polk in San Francisco and a short period as a partner in the firm, he spent the next decade touring the capitals of Europe. Fascinated by Spanish culture and the gracious style of Spanish architecture, he augmented his income by purchasing religious artifacts and architectural elements, which he shipped back to the United States. Before the outbreak of World War I, he established a practice designing country homes for the wealthy on Long Island. While this provided him with a modest income and a chance to liquidate the various treasures he had purchased in Europe, he felt restricted as an architect. More important for his career in Florida, his sojourn as an architect for the moneyed class in New York provided him with an entrée into the wealthy society in Palm Beach—and the money these elites had and were willing to spend made him the most prominent architect of the Florida boom.
Although a latecomer to development in the Sunshine State—he didn’t actually begin to develop his own properties until 1925—his almost total commitment to the use of Mediterranean Revival architecture for the houses he designed for the residents of Palm Beach made him the leading figure in the state. Fisher, Davis, Merrick, Ringling and a host of other smaller developers hired architects to imitate his style for their developments. Although some, like Glenn Curtiss, tried to differentiate the architecture of their developments by referring to it as Pueblo, Mexican Revival or California Mission, the truth was that only a trained architect or a well-informed layperson could detect the subtle distinguishing difference. For the public, the prevailing boom in architecture was simply called Mediterranean Revival, and Addison Mizner became the darling of Palm Beach society and the arbiter of boom architecture.
Like most things in his life, Addison Mizner just meandered into his career as the Florida architect. In his book The Legendary Mizners, Alva Johnston credits the washed-up boxer Kid McCoy—Norman Selby—with thrusting Addison into the mainstream of Palm Beach design. According to Johnston, Mizner’s friend Paris Singer, the heir to the vast sewing machine fortune, was involved in a tempestuous relationship with the famous dancer Isadora Duncan. While Singer was away on a business trip, Duncan discovered McCoy, who was teaching a physical culture class at Gus’s Bath, a gymnasium favored by Palm Beachers. McCoy, who had nine legal wives and a plethora of sweethearts, added Isadora to his long list of conquests. By the time Singer returned from his business trip, the boxer had replaced him in Isadora’s affections and, to make things even more painful, “had formed the habit of throwing big champagne parties and charging them to Paris Singer’s account.”
The McCoy episode was not the first time Isadora had played fast and loose with Singer’s emotions—there had been numerous other affairs with younger men—and usually the couple would break up for a short time when one of her momentary diversions came to light. Singer, an aficionado of architecture, would console himself with reviewing plans for this or that new building. After a short separation from Isadora, he would usually make amends by surprising her with some costly gift. (After one such separation, he bought her the old Madison Square Garden, which he planned to remodel as a dance studio. She rejected his gift.) This time, however, there was to be no reconciliation, and Singer turned his attention once again to architecture.
Summoning his friend Addison Mizner, Singer outlined his plans for the construction of a large hospital for wounded American officers. Rejecting the prevailing architecture as “institutional,” Mizner allowed his imagination to run free and, drawing on his experiences in Latin America, California and Europe, devised a grand building in a style he called Mediterranean Revival. Unable to purchase authentic tiles and other elements of style from Europe because of the German submarines that brought ocean trade to a standstill, he decided to set up his own workshops and manufacture faux replacements. Frustrated at not being able to import ornamental cast stone, he experimented with baking-powdered rock and glue, chilled in an icehouse, to get acceptable replicas. Inexperienced workmen were taught to mold clay tiles for the roof by shaping them on their thighs, while inexperienced roofers were hired to create the impression that the roof had been repaired and added to over hundreds of years. Furnishings, too, were created in new factories and aged by chemicals he purchased from local drugstores. Shellacs, varnishes, sooty candles and lamps, whitewash and a variety of other devices were used to add age and wear and tear to rooms and pieces of furniture. A local blacksmith was taught the intricacies of working with wrought iron to duplicate the railings for balconies. Whatever was needed, Mizner developed a way to produce. When Singer’s new building was completed, Mizner bought the small factories and organized them as Mizner Industries, Inc. They became an integral part of his housing business in Palm Beach and later Boca Raton.
Although the war ended and the need for a hospital disappeared before its completion, Paris Singer was delighted with his building and promptly opened it as the exclusive Everglades Club. Although the Everglades Club was an important and beautiful building, Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury, wife of the noted investment banker E.T. Stotesbury, a partner in the financial enterprises of J.P. Morgan, demanded that Mizner build her a winter palace that would be more beautiful than the Everglades Club. When her thirty-seven-room mansion, El Mirasol, was completed, it was the start of a new career for Mizner. Soon, he built an even larger home for the Joshua S. Cosden family and touched off an ongoing competition among the doyens of the town. Mrs. Stotesbury called him back to enlarge El Mirasol, and Mizner added a forty-car garage, a teahouse, a private zoo and an auditorium. The race was on. Mizner became the resident architect for Palm Beach society and embarked on “a career of money and glory.”
Wealthy heir to the famous sewing machine fortune, Paris Singer was the dominant force in the Everglades Club, Palm Beach’s most exclusive club. He alone decided who would be allowed
to become a member and who would be excluded. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.
Addison Mizner bought swamp property from “Alligator Joe” Campbell and quickly converted this marginal land into Worth Avenue and Via Mizner, where he maintained living quarters until his death in 1933. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.
With the financial backing of Paris Singer, Addison Mizner began to branch out. He purchased an alligator farm—opened in 1891 as a tourist attraction for visitors to Palm Beach—from Joseph “Alligator Joe” Campbell. He quickly converted the low swampy area into a small shopping district, which housed his offices and his showroom of antiques and reproductions. Worth Avenue became home to expensive, seasonally operated stores, while Via Mizner and Via Parigi provided space for small apartments and galleries. Even today, the Worth Avenue district is regarded as one of the most expensive shopping venues in the world.
Although Addison Mizner made a considerable fortune designing homes for the Palm Beach elite, he envied the glamour and public attention garnered by developers like Carl Fisher, George Merrick and D.P. Davis. Always desirous of being the center of attention, he cringed at the thought that these lesser lights—these builders—were capitalizing on his ideas and designs and being hailed as geniuses. No longer satisfied with amusing and abusing patrons in the limited arena of Palm Beach, where his architectural ambitions were always checked by the willingness of the wealthy to pay for new projects, he decided to cash in on the land boom and create his own town. His brother, Wilson, joined him in the scheme.
Wilson Mizner was a charismatic con man whose career carried him from the highest rungs of New York society to the depths of the nation’s underworld. Quick witted and immoral, he viewed society—particularly the wealthiest elements—as a playground to carry out his elaborate schemes. Like Addison, his personality and family connections offered the opportunity to move seamlessly into the fabric of high society. His inclination, however, was to mix with the lower rungs, an inclination that made him even more appealing to his wealthy friends. Talented in many ways, Wilson was a playwright, a musician/composer and a raconteur par excellent. He served as the model for several Damon Runyan characters, was a favorite party companion of the international set and always provided a quotable quip to fit any situation. Drug addict, shyster, con man, gambler and womanizer—all terms that aptly described him—he merely used these foibles to make himself more interesting. He joined Addison in Palm Beach and oversaw the sales force in his galleries, always operating with the motto, “Take the money; never turn it down!” He fit perfectly into the frenetic environment of the Florida land boom.
Determined to create an entire town built to his specifications, Addison Mizner envisioned a community that would be so magnificent and grand that the great mansions he had designed in Palm Beach would become “servants’ quarters” for the residents of his new Boca Raton. Out of low, marshy swampland several miles south of Palm Beach, the Mizner brothers set about creating the world’s most exclusive development. The Mizner Development Corporation planned a massive new community, accessible by the world’s broadest highway, the El Camino Real. Twenty lanes wide and lavishly landscaped, the El Camino Real was intersected by a canal that featured real Venetian gondolas and real Venetian gondoliers. Although the road ran for barely a half mile, it did what it was intended to do—create the illusion of wealth, luxury, exclusiveness and all Mizner. It was, in Wilson Mizner’s words, “a platinum sucker trap.”
Drawing on his fame as the architect of Palm Beach and on his connections with the upper class, Addison Mizner quickly assembled a gaggle of imposing personalities to lend their fame to his development. Marie Dressler, Irving Berlin, Elizabeth Arden and T. Coleman du Pont were among the first to pledge their allegiance to Addison and Boca Raton. Some, like du Pont, not only lent their names to the project but also invested heavily. The glitterati wanted very much to be part of the Mizner experience. Harry Reichenbach, the public relations director for the Boca Raton development, marketed the new community with the explicit idea of excluding the middle class through the review of all buyers by a select committee that would ruthlessly weed out the undesirables. Operating on the philosophy that nobody wanted to belong to the middle class, he spent millions of Mizner’s dollars fulfilling his mantra of getting “the big snobs, [so] that the little snobs will follow.”
When the first lots were offered to the public in 1925, the Mizner Company sold more than $11 million in property. In the first twenty-four weeks, sales exceeded $26 million. David Nolan’s description of the hullabaloo surrounding the sale captures the frenzy that attended the event: “Money was literally being thrown at them, as checks had to be gathered up in wastebaskets to await processing.” The Miami News, which chronicled the Miami boom development, noted that the rich stampeded into Boca Raton much like “the foot race of the original Okies into the Cherokee Strip when it was thrown open to homesteaders in 1893.” Although they were late entrants into the race for dollars, Addison and Wilson Mizner—overnight millionaires—moved immediately to the head of the class of promoters.
Awash with cash, Addison Mizner began to implement his plans for Boca Raton. Infrastructure—street paving, water mains, sewage systems—required large expenditures and so, too, did the construction of the one-hundred-room Cloister Hotel, the administration building for the Mizner Development Corporation and the model homes used to sell more lots. Although Wilson Mizner bragged to a friend that he and Addison had squirreled away some $50 to $100 million from the sales of Boca Raton property, this was just another case of his use of hyperbole.
The dining room at the Boca Club was as plush and opulent as Addison Mizner could make it. Movie stars, members of the ultra elite in America and European royalty wined and dined here. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.
The magnificent Boca Club was the sugar in the trap to catch the “platinum suckers” who came to Boca Raton to buy an Addison Mizner–designed estate and to be a part of the dazzling social scene. Even today, the Boca Club retains its glamour. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.
Wilson Mizner left the planning to Addison. He assumed the role of secretary-treasurer for the Mizner Development Corporation, a position he filled with relish. Quickly, he added a Miami office to market Boca Raton, managed to reroute a highway to provide oceanfront for property they owned in Boynton and generally brought disruption and chaos to the operations of the corporation. However, despite his interference, nothing seemed to be able to burst the Boca Raton bubble. The frenetic urge to own a piece of Florida brought millions of people to the Sunshine State, and Boca Raton was among the most desirable properties to own.
It appeared that 1925 would be the year when “the Riviera, Biarritz, Mentone, Nice, Sorrento, the Lido, Egypt—all that charms in each of these finds consummation in Boca Raton.” High praise for a development with a Spanish name that loosely translated means “the mouth of the rat.”
CHAPTER 10
Lesser Lights and Smaller Fry
Mr. Collier is spending yet other millions in development and draining [the] Big Cypress Swamp and the Gulf Coast lands adjacent, with the city of Everglade as the center of operations where, until recently, there stood a sign which gave a shock to every true Floridian who saw it: “No Land For Sale Here!”
In the normal course of Florida events he is due to become the first man to make a billion dollars from land. The Astors, the Rhinelanders and the Goelets made their hundreds of millions in New York City real estate, but the 1,050,000 acres which Mr. Collier bought in Florida for around three million dollars has a potential value of more than a billion dollars when it shall have been drained, cleared and made ready for settlement.
—Frank Parker Stockbridge and John Holliday
Florida in the Making, 1926
Barron Gift Collier was already a wealthy man when he first visited Useppa Island on Florida’s Gulf Coast in 1911. An avid fisherman, he soon bought the island and establish
ed a private club there for his friends. Mainland Florida also enthralled him, particularly the wild lands along the southern edge of the Gulf Coast and the Everglades. “Frankly,” he once explained, “I was fascinated with Florida and swept off my feet by what I saw and felt. It was a wonder land with a magic climate, set in a frame of golden sunshine.” He soon converted his fascination into land purchases, and by 1921, he counted more than one million acres of primeval wilderness as his personal property.
Barron Gift Collier was the single largest landowner in Florida in the 1920s. His 1.5 million acres in southwest Florida were eventually made into a separate county that bore his name. Courtesy of the Florida Historical Society.
Barron Collier was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1873, the scion of a prestigious southern family that claimed kinship with Virginia Dare, the first white child born to English parents in North America. He reportedly graduated from the elite Oglethorpe College in Atlanta, but a recent article in the Marco News (April 20, 2008) marking the eightieth anniversary of the opening of the Tamiami Trail asserts that he dropped out of school at age sixteen to go into business. As a young man, he worked first for the Illinois Central Railway as a sales solicitor. He quit the railroad company when he convinced the Memphis city government to install gasoline-powered streetlights and won the contract to do so. With the profits from this venture, he then purchased a half interest in a small printing company. One of the sidelines of the company was printing small advertising cards, which were displayed in the interiors of horse-drawn streetcars. When electric trolleys and subways became widespread in the major cities and even smaller towns in the United States, Collier organized the Consolidated Street Railway Advertising Company to provide ads for all of the cars. Within a few years, he had established a virtual monopoly on this form of advertising. Even through the minor recessions of the late 1890s and early 1900s, his company and its subsidiaries thrived. By age twenty-six, he was a millionaire many times over.