Palm Beach

Florida. Paris E Singer, developer. Addison Mizner, architect. 1917

Palm Beach might more appropriately be considered a 'winter suburb' of Chicago and New York than a suburb of West Palm Beach, the town across the bay to which it has banished most of its business and problems. In fact, it is the lack of a large, nearby city that has kept Palm Beach from developing into a true suburb, as the residential resorts of Tuxedo Park and Coral Gables did. And the banishment by Palm Beach of manufacturing and poverty from its realm conjures up the worst possible image of suburbia as elitist, exclusionary and socially reprehensible. Physically, however, Palm Beach represents the dream to which many suburban residents aspire.

Palm Beach began to develop as a resort in 1894, as a result of Henry Morrison Flagler's development of the East Coast Railway and the Royal Poinciana Hotel, designed to promote travel on the railroad. But Palm Beach as we know it dates from 1917, when Paris E Singer, heir to the sewing machine fortune, travelled to Palm Beach in the company of the flamboyant, self-taught architect Addison Mizner. World War I had effectively stopped trans-Atlantic travel, and Singer decided to develop Palm Beach as a residential resort similar to Newport, where familes would

move for 'the season'. His money, and Mizner's vision, were to transform totally the swampy, overgrown island that greeted them on their first trip to Palm Beach.

The existing architecture was in the shingle style typical of northeastern seaside resorts, but Mizner recorded that it 'didn't register'.¹ Drawing on the cultural conditions and climate of the region, his own travels in Latin America, and a nostalgia for the inaccessible European resorts, he produced a synthesis of Mediterranean motifs that soon symbolised Florida architecture in the popular imagination. Mizner used the style to evoke a sense of place: on a large scale its consistent application established a sense of community, but the romantic style worked equally well on a smaller scale, where its loose rules of composition allowed numerous intimate spaces.

Mizner's first commission was the Everglades Club. Its design fulfilled Mizner's avowed architectural ideal of a building 'based on Romanesque ruins that had been rebuilt by triumphant Saracens, added to by a variety of conquerors bringing in new styles from the Gothic to the Baroque; and picturesquely cracked up by everything from battering rams to artillery duels between Wellington and

Napoleon's marshals'.² It was full of comfortable loggias opening on to patios set with tables surrounded by glazed-tile fountains, flowers, and palms, and was both grand and cozy at the same time. His nearby 'vias', located between the arcaded shops he and Singer built along Worth Avenue, were extraordinarily skilful transformations of their style into commercial enticement. After those successes Mizner was besieged by commissions, despite the fact that his houses could cost up to $2000000.

Mizner's Worth Avenue development inspired another, sadly only partially built. Called 'Houses of the Palms', it was commissioned by Singer and planned by the New York architects C Howard Crane, Kenneth Franzheim, and Charles H Bettis.³ Mott Schmidt and Maurice Fatio, both prominent New York architects, also built in Palm Beach, as did Joseph Urban, Howard Major, and Marion Sims Wyeth.

Notes

1. Christina Orr, *Addison Mizner: Architect of Dreams and Realities*, Norton Gallery, Palm Beach 1977, p. 18.

2. Barbara D. Hoffstot, *Landmark Architecture of Palm Beach*, Ober Park, Pittsburgh, Pa. 1974, p. 11.

3. "'Houses of the Palms', Mr Paris E Singer, Palm Beach, Fla., *The Architect* 5, March 1926, pp. 624-634.

1. Crane, Franzheim and Bettis, Barrio de las Palmeras, 1926

2. Bennett, Parsons and Frost, improvement plan, 1929