Addison Mizner

Born in Benicia, at the time "the educational center of California", As a young man, he visited China in 1893, Of his seven siblings, six of them boys, he was closest to his younger brother Wilson, though his disreputable behavior caused Addison many problems. He had a macaw parrot. and kept as pets a series of monkeys, which often rode on his shoulder; his favorite had a headstone at his grave, identifying him as "Johnnie Brown, The Human Monkey, Died April 30, 1927". According to Donald Curl, author of ''Mizner's Florida'', He was just completely outgoing and basically a really good guy. One of the things he was noted for was the kindness toward the people who worked for him and the courtesy he showed them. Some of the other architects of this era were almost the reverse; they saw the other architects as their employees, and they should have nothing to do with the design other than putting it on paper. Mizner was not that way. When the bust began in Florida, he actually helped some of the young architects get established elsewhere. The vast majority of Mizner's employees developed an affection for and allegiance to him: "It was a pleasure working for Mizner", one remarked. ==Mizner's Hispanism==

Addison accompanied his father when the latter travelled to Guatemala in August 1889 to begin his duties there. His father Lansing Mizner spoke fluent Spanish, as did his paternal step-grandfather, James Semple, also a U.S. diplomat in Spanish America. Addison, who became fluent, after some tutoring enrolled at the Instituto Nacional in Guatemala City, a clear reference to the Alhambra, which Mizner visited and commented on. The Mediterranean Revival style Mizner introduced to South Florida was not Turkish or Italian, it was Spanish, specifically of the hottest, southern part of Spain, Andalucía; colonial Guatemala had similar architecture. He taught workmen to make Spanish red roof tiles, appropriate for the climate. A scholar states that Mizner's mature style was "founded upon the architecture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain",) Streets east of the future Seaboard Coast Line Railroad line (where an "Addison Station" was to be constructed The different types of pottery produced by Mizner Industries each had the name of a Spanish city. ==Mizner the humorist==

In 1903 Mizner provided illustrations for The Limerick Up to Date Book of Ethel Watts Mumford (San Francisco: Paul Elder). It says something about Mizner that he would illustrate this poem: In 1902, with Oliver Herford and Ethel Watts Mumford, he published an annual illustrated The Complete Cynic. Being Bunches of Wisdom Culled from the Calendars of Oliver Herford, Ethel Watts Mumford, Addison Mizner. • The Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1903 • The Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1904 • The Entirely New Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1905 • The Complete Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1906 • The Altogether New Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1907 • The Quite New Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1908 • The Perfectly Good Cynic's Calendar (1908) • The Complete Cynic (1910) • The Revived Cynic's Calendar (1917) This produced such sayings as: "A woman's mind is cleaner than a man's. She changes it more often" and "Many are called but few get up".{{cite web ==Mizner the storyteller==

Mizner was a storyteller but not a reliable one. He invented stories, all set in foreign countries and thus in practice unverifiable. One the lack of veracity of which is documented is the tale of his visit with his father and other family members to the ruins of Copán, in Honduras. "No one knew exactly where it was", and they needed "a small army of carriers and machete wielders to cut our way in". John Lloyd Stephens was "the only other white man to set foot on the temple steps in three hundred and seventy years". Much later, Addison said several times that he enrolled "at some point during this time" in the University of Salamanca, in Spain, though the only known detail about his studies there, if they existed, is that he did not receive a degree. So much as available evidence indicates, he was never in the small city of Salamanca. However, because of its prestigious and mellifluous name, Salamanca was mentioned by Mizner repeatedly. • According to Mizner, the Spanish king, Alfonso XIII, came to his hotel, insisted on seeing him, and gave him paneling from "the private apartments of [fifteenth-century] King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in Salamanca." There were no such apartments in Salamanca. • Mizner also said that the entry to the Cloister Inn was through "a large Romanesque arch reminiscent of the entrance gate of the University of Salamanca". There is no Romanesque architecture in Salamanca. • The Cloister Inn had a "Salamanca Room". • The huge doors of the Cloister Inn were said to be "three-hundred-year-old originals from the University of Salamanca". In reality, these doors were made of Dade County pine in the workshops of Mizner Industries." • The ceiling of the house La Bienvenida was "inspired by a cloister ceiling at the library at the University of Salamanca". Mizner told this kind of story to his clients: in Playa Riente, its "ceiling was from the Chapter House in Toledo, Spain, and the tracery of the doors and windows from the Casa Lonja at Valencia." There was also a yellow carpet "reputed to have been woven by nuns for a cathedral in Granada." (There were no carpets at all, much less ones made by nuns, in Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries.) He never showed photographs or prints in books of the buildings he was allegedly imitating. A similar Hispanic tale told several times by Mizner is that his administration buildings (in 2017 the Addison Restaurant) was based on the house of the Spanish painter El Greco, in Toledo, Spain. As Mizner surely knew, El Greco's house was long vanished, little is known of it, and the house/museum of El Greco in Toledo, recently constructed and opened in Mizner's day (1911), made no pretense to even be in the same location as the original house. Mizner did not follow the somber architectural style of Castile, where Toledo was, and a similarity between the two buildings is difficult to see. Similarly, he invented the connection between the tower of the Cloister Inn, which is vaguely Spanish, with the Giralda tower of the Cathedral of Seville. The San Francisco Ferry Building (1892) — a project of his mentor Polk (see below) — does have a tower that clearly resembles the Seville tower. Two contemporaneous buildings in south Florida also contain towers based on the Giralda: the Freedom Tower (Miami) (1925) and the Miami Biltmore Hotel (1926), both products of the architectural company Schultze and Weaver, who in 1927 built the Boca Raton Club that Mizner could not. (The feature of the Everglades Club that is linked to the Giralda is the Patio of Oranges: that is the garden of the Cathedral/former great mosque of Seville, where the Giralda is.) Similarly, he said that he traveled with his father to San José, Costa Rica, by river,{{citation ==Mizner's buying trips==

He returned to Guatemala for a few months in 1904. His original plan, never implemented, was to buy coffee to sell in the U.S. (This turned later into a nonexistent coffee plantation that he bought.{{cite conference Relocating to New York in 1904, he filled his apartment with his Guatemala purchases: rich velvet and damask vestments, ornate carved church paneling, reliquaries, gilded candlesticks, and other rare ornaments. He made "good money" selling them to visitors. In 1905, Mizner visited Spain for the first time; after that, he visited Europe every year. After relocating to Florida, these visits occurred during the "off" season. In 1924, Mizner went on a buying trip to Spain, scouring antique shops, buying "furiously" thousands of items: wrought iron, tapestries, furniture, grillwork, and whole staircases. He was accompanied by one of his clients, Eleanor Cosden, who is reported to have recalled "the guide in the church in Toledo who, Addison pointed out, got several things wrong," and that "he even straightened out our host, the Duke of Alba!" (The Duke of Alba, one of the richest men in Spain, visited Palm Beach in 1926.) In 1926 he went on a similar visit, abbreviated by the financial crisis. ==Mizner's homosexuality==

Mizner has been described as "an early influential gay man in South Florida", "the gay father of South Florida architecture." He is portrayed as openly homosexual in the Stephen Sondheim — John Weidman musical Road Show. Mizner described himself as a "lifelong bachelor", after "a few unsuccessful relationships with women in California and New York". One modern researcher says that "Wilson loved women sexually; Addison cherished their friendship and companionship." One of these "young and handsome" men was Alex Waugh, who accompanied Mizner on buying trips and ended up manager of the antiques and reproduction furniture store for Mizner Industries. When Waugh sent recollections of Mizner to biographer Alva Johnston, they were "quite unprintable". Another was Horace Chase, his "wild, thoroughly-likeable" nephew, for two years the manager of the "virtually inoperable pottery factory, 'Las Manos' ['The Hands']", which he bought from Paris Singer.{{citation ==Early architectural career==

Little is known about Addison Mizner's sketches and artwork prior to his architectural career; he did brag in 1893 of having sold six pictures for $150. and the main house of the Hitchcock Estate in Dutchess County, New York. ==Florida==

In January 1918, aged 46, Mizner visited Palm Beach, Florida for his health, at the suggestion of Paris Singer, whose house guest he was. Mizner lacked the talent for making conventional plans and specifications. Everything was done off-the-cuff. Plans for one house were drawn in the sand on the beach. He was a pioneer in developing artificial or cast stone, a combination of coquina shell, lime, and a cement mixture. He also used "woodite", a composite material with a wood component, which could be poured and molded. ==Selected buildings==

(the Edward T. Stotesbury mansion), Palm Beach, Florida (1919, demolished 1950s). ," the Kennedy family winter retreat, located at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach. • An oceanfront Palm Beach estate was once owned by the late John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono Named El Solano. Located on South Ocean Boulevard, popularly referred to as Billionaires' Row, the house is next door to a property owned by author James Patterson, records show. • Mizner designed the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, New York, in 1912. • 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, 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 Kingsley. In 2009 it was Palm Beach's largest recorded sale at $24 million. • Also in 1920, Mizner built a grand Palm Beach estate home called Costa Bella ("beautiful coast") at 111 Dunbar Road for Elizabeth Hope Gammell Slater. Her father was Prof. William Gammell, and her grandfather was Robert Ives of the firm Brown and Ives. In a story published in The New York Times in 1882, her mother was "reckoned the richest woman in America, her property placed at twenty millions or more." Addison Mizner used his primary builder and contractor at that time, Cooper C. Lightbown, who later became the Town of Palm Beach's Mayor from 1922 to 1927. :In his book ''Mizner's Florida'', author and historian Donald W. Curl noted the home's "massive stone staircase" and that the home was more formal than Mizner's typical work. This formality is seen in such details as the pure Belgian black marble he used in the entrance foyer, and one of the first uses of terrazzo flooring for the 1920s showcased in the palatial dining hall. Furthermore, Curl notes the "stalactite" lighting fixture and gothic tracery for the dining room ceiling. It is believed that Mizner replicated the plasterwork in the dining room from photographs of the Alhambra that he had taken from his travels in Spain. Costa Bella's massive ballroom and dining hall feature grandiose palladian windows and french doors. Hence, historian Curl comments that, "the extensive fenestration created an open and light vacation house." Costa Bella is the quintessential example of Mizner's architectural majesty encompassing all the elements and building materials he is famous for: towering hand-stenciled wood beamed cypress ceilings, coral stone flooring, antique tiles, elaborate decorative columns and corbels, unique light fixtures, stone carvings and stone-carved fireplace mantels. • In 1922, Mizner built the William Gray Warden Residence (Warden House) at 112 Seminole Ave, Palm Beach, which is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. • Another fanciful Palm Beach mansion, Villa Flora, was built in 1923 for Edward Shearson. It stands at 110 Dunbar Road. • La Querida ("the dear one"), apocryphally conflated with 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 P. Kennedy Sr. in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression for $120,000, and eventually would become President John F. Kennedy's "Winter White House". It sold for $70,000,000 in June 2020. It stands at 1095 N. Ocean Boulevard. • As early as 1925, Mizner was commissioned by Dr and Mrs (Lillian) Thomas Dempsey to build a beautiful, diminutive Mediterranean Revival summer home (possibly the smallest structure Mizner ever built). The house has 22' ceilings, enabling the architect to install a "mezzanine-loggia," encircled by the hand-wrought iron railings for which a classic Mizner building is known. The house, at 100 S. Osborne Avenue, Margate, New Jersey (formerly 8704 Atlantic Ave) is on a beach block corner where Atlantic Ave intersects Osborne. (A stone's throw away, another architectural landmark, known as Lucy the Elephant, holds court at the corner of Atlantic and Washington Avenues.) Jeff Rosen of Spielberg Productions, who purchased the home from the Dempsey estate, later sold it to Marsha & Michael Birnbaum of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. It has since been purchased and is occupied by auteur-singer-poet Silkë Berlinn. • 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. • The clubhouse for the Wee Burn Country Club in Darien, Connecticut was designed by Mizner in his Mediterranean style in 1926. • A mansion of , with a guest house, was built at 1820 S. Ocean Blvd. for Paul Moore Sr. (completed 1926). After a two-year renovation-and-restoration project, the property was listed for sale in 2018 for $58,000,000. • In 1928, he designed the original Cloister Hotel at Sea Island, Georgia. It was demolished in 2003. • Mizner also built a Mediterranean Revival mansion in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1929, La Ronda. It was demolished on October 1, 2009. Some architectural elements were salvaged. ==Mizner Mile==

In Boynton Beach, Florida, between Palm Beach and the future Boca Raton, Mizner's first vision of a "comprehensive ocean city" was a mile-long resort. "Mizner Mile, situated on [what is today (2018)] Old Ocean Boulevard, was to include a club, polo fields, houses designed by Mizner, and a two-thousand-room hotel modeled on 'the lines of a Spanish monastery'." He planned to exchange the design of a new Boynton City Hall for city commissioners' permission to build his hotel and club. The project (1924–1925) went aground, and Mizner abandoned it, after locals strongly opposed the relocation of Old Ocean Boulevard – a new road was built and the original road was to be destroyed – to allow beachfront lots. He designed plans for a never-built Boynton Woman's Club without fee "in an effort to make amends to the city". ==Boca Raton development==

, Mizner Development Corporation, Boca Raton, Florida (1925). In 2018 The Addison, a venue for wedding receptions and similar celebrations. In 1925 Addison Mizner embarked on his most ambitious project, what he called his "culminating achievement": 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 sold, with a further $2 million within the first month. There was a traffic jam in front of his Miami office. Mizner ran buses to Boca from Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, and also used seaplanes to transport potential buyers to the site. It was constructed during late 1925 and opened in early 1926, ==Mizner's role in the land boom collapse of 1926==

Where Mizner was not strong was in planning. He built houses "off the cuff", without plans. He also had no financial plan, and tried to handle finance off the cuff as well. But the facilities he had announced — three golf courses, a polo ground, "a nasty split." A statement from du Pont's resignation was reported in The New York Times.{{cite news A statement during the bankruptcy proceedings outlined what the Mizner Development Corporation had accomplished as of December 4, 1926, besides building the Administration Buildings and the Cloister Inn: ==Bankruptcy ==

The bankruptcy was resolved a year later in November 1927, when Clarence Geist bought the Company's assets. As well as the Cloister Inn, the corporation had built two Administration Buildings, a radio station, WFLA, and twenty-nine homes. Geist, a utilities executive, saw to it that Boca got a fine water plant; Mizner was unconcerned about such infrastructure. Many people lost money through their investments in Boca Raton lots through Mizner; people who had purchased lots with the intention of quickly reselling them, very common during the land boom, found them worthless. After bankruptcy proceedings, creditors received 0.1% on the dollar; for example, the Andrews Asphalt and Paving Company received $93.36 of its $93,362 claim, and Riddle Engineering Company received $30.76 of its bill of $30,764. The Palm Beach Savings Bank, which had lent Mizner Development over 70% of its capital (the stockholders of Mizner were also officers of the bank), closed permanently in June 1926, because of the Mizner bankruptcy. After the bankruptcy, when credit typically improves, Mizner borrowed: • $99,636 from the Farmers Bank and Trust Company • $47,500 from the Commercial Bank and Trust Company • $101,689 from the First American Bank and Trust • $57,982 from the Palm Beach Bank and Trust Company • $99,500 from the Chelsea Exchange Bank Nothing was ever repaid of the last three loans. Mizner himself was hurt financially. He was not noted for his business acumen, and a recent biographer qualifies him as "naïve" and "in denial", but with no intention to defraud. No one has ever described Mizner as greedy or motivated by prospects of financial gain. Members of his board, it was learned after banking records were unsealed more than sixty years later, were engaged in criminal embezzlement through their partnership in the Palm Beach Savings Bank. Mizner apparently knew nothing of this and would likely have been horrified if he had learned of it. Mizner Industries was declared bankrupt four months after Mizner's death in 1933. The company had stopped paying federal tax and county property tax after 1928. The company emerged from the bankruptcy reorganization and continued operations. ==Late career==

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 by Frank Geisler. Paris Singer contributed an introduction and Ida M. Tarbell wrote the text. There was also an "Edición Imperial", limited to 100 copies, a leather-bound, gold-tooled version with slipcase cover. He designed and directed its creation from 1929 to 1930. The significant new Mediterranean Revival estate's budget was unhindered by the Wall Street crash of 1929. The naturalistic landscape and formal gardens were designed by atmospheric painter and landscape designer Lockwood de Forest Jr. (1850–1932). His water channels are replicas of those at Villa Lante at Bagnaia, near Viterbo in the Italian Tuscany region. Mizner integrated the principal indoor and outdoor rooms by a cloistered arcade with slender columns on three sides of a large courtyard. He linked that to the inclined axis with a pavilion in the form of a Palladian arch on a terraced stone pedestal at the vista terminus. Casa Bienvenida is extant and well maintained to the present day. The Spanish revival style here draws its forms and elements from medieval sources. Mizner used many high art details not generally found in this area ... while maintaining the Santa Barbara characteristic of pure design. ==Legacy==

(Percival E. Foerderer mansion), Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania (1929, demolished Oct. 2009). Mizner's buildings were typically dismissed by Modernist critics for their eclectic historicist aesthetic. Many were demolished and redeveloped, but a number of those that survive are now on the National Register. Architects and contractors alike copied Mizner's iteration of Spanish colonial architecture. Also in Boca Raton is Mizner Park, an upscale "lifestyle center" with shops, rental apartments, and offices. In March 2005, to commemorate his visionary contributions to both the city and Florida architecture, an statue of the architect by Colombian sculptor Cristobal Gaviria was erected in Boca Raton at Mizner Boulevard and U.S. 1. In addition, Addison Mizner Elementary School in Boca Raton was named for him in 1968. He was the brother and sometimes partner of businessman, raconteur, con man, professional gambler, and playwright Wilson Mizner, whom Addison termed "my chief weakness and dreaded menace". According to the Introduction by Isaiah Sheffer, three songs from that work were included in the 1996 sheet music album The Unsung Irving Berlin. In 1951 Theodore Pratt wrote a novel, The Big Bubble, which is a thinly veiled biography of Mizner. In 2014 Richard René Silvin published his book Villa Mizner: The House that Changed Palm Beach, chronicling the life of Addison Mizner though a story about Mizner's own home on Worth Avenue and Via Mizner, Palm Beach: Villa Mizner. Mizner's Lounge was the name of the tavern at Walt Disney World's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa from the hotel's opening in 1988 until 2019. Mizner's Lounge closed on April 12, 2019, to be replaced by a Beauty and the Beast-themed bar and lounge. ==Award==

The Addison Mizner Award was created in 2013 by the Florida Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art for Excellence in Classical and Traditional Architecture. During the early period of Florida's urban development, the standards of excellence in composition and craftsmanship were defined by Mizner's civic and domestic works in classical and traditional design. The awards are presented yearly in the multiple categories. ==Gallery==

File: Fred C. Aiken House Main Facade.jpg|Fred C. Aiken House, Boc Paul Smiths, New York (1907). Designed with William Massarene. File:EvergladesClub.jpg|Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida (1918). File:Rbcfromparkandking.jpg|Riverside Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Florida (1926). Image:PalmBeachMemorialPark2.JPG|Memorial Fountain, Memorial Fountain Park, Palm Beach, Florida (1929). File:La ronda.jpg|La Ronda, Great Hall. File: ColebrookCT RockHall.jpg|Rock Hall in Connecticut ==Archival material==

The Mizner design scrapbooks and his complete library are available at the Society of the Four Arts Library in Palm Beach, Florida and available digitally from the Internet Archive. Material relating to Boca Raton may be found at the Boca Raton Historical Society; many are available on their Web site. A large number of architectural drawings are in the collections of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. Sketchbooks, photo albums, and some letters are at the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California. A scrapbook from Guatemala is in the library of the University of Miami. ==See also==