The “Boutique-ing” of Joe’s Alligator Farm: Addison Mizner and the Origins of Palm Beach Style

The Boutique-ing of Joe's Alligator Farm: Addison Mizner and the Origins of Palm Beach Style Susan Southworth In the early decades of the twentieth century a boom in Florida tourism followed the automobile down dusty roads. Local entrepreneurs soon found that the exotic native animals could be sold to the swarms of passing tourists as pets or entertainment, so alligator farms and parrot jungles became a primary roadside business in many parts of the state. N o t only did the customers prowl about the edges of fenced-in ditches, gawking at alligators slithering over each other in muddy water, but they could take home living souvenirs, the tiny baby alligators sold in small jars or cups of water. Joe's Alligator Farm was virtually the only entertainment for cold northerners staying in several large but unprepossessing hotels thrown up in the center of the barren island newly named Palm Beach. In the space of a few brief years the alligator farm was transformed into the epitome of haute resort life by a charming adventurer who gave the name Palm Beach an elite cachet it has retained to this day. The middle-aged unemployed Addison Mizner viewed this new resort island with distaste but accepted the invitation to spend January there with his friend Paris Singer at the end of World War I. After a decade of effort, his hopes of becoming the fashionable architect of New York and Newport society had foundered, but not before he had created mongrel Mediterranean style villas, witty Chinese teahouses, and an Alaskan mining camp for an Adirondack retreat of baronial scale for millionaires charmed by the tales of his adventurous life. During his brief New York career, a Mizner house was as likely to owe its aesthetic parentage to Siam as Byzantine Venice. By the Christmas holidays in 1917, the insolvent bon vivant was ready to go anywhere to escape his forlorn existence on wintry Long Island but found the sparsely inhabited Palm Beach devoid of social and aesthetic attractions. To relieve his boredom while enjoying the balmy climate, Mizner undertook his first commission on the island that would soon be dominated by his architecture, a whimsical conversion of his host's mundane bungalow into a Chinese villa. When the Chinese villa drew attention from Joe's Alligator Farm, Mizner became intrigued by the notion of creating the image of an entire settlement. He temporarily dropped much of his globe-trotting architectural cornucopia and settled into a Spanish vocabulary of tiled roofs, stucco walls, paneled ceilings, and tiled floors and courtyards, evoking his memories of Antigua, Guatemala, as much as Salamanca, Spain. He designed dozens of houses that set the Spanish revival style in the early years of this fashionable resort. Yet his new stylistic self-discipline did not prevent him from straying into decidedly Venetian variations of his standard tile roof and stucco theme. Casa de Leoni, the Leonard Thomas house, was set with Lake Worth lapping at the balustrade. Its St. Mark's lion in an ogee arched doorway and trefoil windows with cast stone projecting balconies were overshadowed by Mizner's final touch, the gondola slip at the base of the house. He was casual about mixing Spanish doorways, Venetian balconies, and gondola slips with Byzantine or Norman stair towers and Pompeian murals. It was precisely this theatrical, one could say, irreverent, quality that fired the imaginations of his clients. The unfettered exuberance of his architectural fantasies gave full expression to their wish to express newly acquired wealth in a tangible manner. The style he introduced in Palm Beach was a drastic change from the meager bungalows and barnlike hotels lightly sprinkled on the island when he arrived. Nor did his exuberant stucco and tile haciendas bear any resemblance to the architecture of other important resorts of Mizner's era. Shingle style architecture dominated the major Atlantic coastal resorts, such as Bar Harbor, Maine, and Newport, Rhode Island, during the flush of enthusiastic resort development beginning in the 1850s. The brilliant, iconoclastic Boston architect, William Ralph Emerson (1833-1917) filled Bar Harbor with his witty interpretations of the shingle style vocabulary. (His virtuoso visual plays on architectural theory make the twentieth-century puns of Post- Modernists almost flat-footed by comparison.) Richard Morris H u n t (1827-1895) held sway in Newport with considerably less wit and soon abandoned the shingle style for vast ponderous piles of high Gothic or heavy Italiannate embellished stone to provide the dignity his Newport clients craved. Places/ Volume 2, Number 3