made them unnecessary.

Mizner would meet clients during the winter social season, sign a contract before they left, design the house, and have it built, landscaped, and furnished before they returned the following season. He liked to have total control over all the details of construction, even to the point of buying the linens and hiring the domestic staff. To meet the needs of his rapidly expanding business, the architect established Mizner Industries, which manufactured the decorative ceramics and tiles for roofs and floors; cast the stone for arches, capitals, and corbels; wrought the iron for gates, window grilles, lanterns, andirons, and light fixtures; and produced carved and imitation wood paneling, period furniture, stained glass, and wicker furniture. He regularly went on buying trips to Europe to find Spanish antiques.

In the increasing frenzy of Florida real estate speculation in the 1920s, lots were bought and sold for double their prices in a matter of weeks. Then options on lots were traded, and options on options were sold. Fabulous stories abounded, like the one of a cabdriver who took a couple the thirteen hundred miles from Manhattan to Palm Beach and, with his fare and tip, invested in real estate and made a million dollars. Or the man who was down on his luck until he got up early one morning to be first in line at a realtor’s office and then sold his place in line and made enough to make a down payment on a lot—plus some change for breakfast. If all the tales weren’t exactly true, they were told often enough to make people believe that they were at least possible. Of this antic atmosphere William Jennings Bryan said, “You can tell a lie at breakfast that will come true by evening.”

By 1925 even Addison Mizner had begun to believe some of his own inventions. In that year he planned the city of Boca Raton, featuring a luxury hotel, the Cloister Inn, and the Camino Real, advertised as the widest street in the world (it was also one of the shortest). Mizner’s scheme included private homes, office buildings, and a town hall—all in his signature Spanish style. On the first day his sales office opened, Mizner’s firm signed contracts for eleven million dollars.

Before the year was out, however, the Boca Raton project was deeply in trouble. Contractors went unpaid and major investors became wary. Smaller investors who had made the first low down payments failed to make the second installments. Some attributed the collapse of the Florida real estate market to the failure of Mizner’s Boca Ra ton. It had seemed to be one of the most secure investments in the state: if that could go down, nothing was safe. Before the end of 1926 a series of events contributed to the definitive end of the Florida land bubble. Railroads hard pressed to supply food to Florida’s expanding

population placed an embargo on the transportation of building supplies. In January the sea route into Biscayne Bay was blocked when the Prins Valdemar , an old Danish warship that was intended to be transformed into a hotel, capsized in the channel. Nature added the final touch when hurricanes lashed the coast later in the year. Nobody suspected then that Florida’s problems were only a dress rehearsal for the Wall Street crash of 1929.

Mizner, now bankrupt, his development firmand industries broken up, continued to work, and in fact he did some of his best commissions for clients in Colorado, Georgia, California, and Pennsylvania; but both his health and his spirit suffered, and he died in 1933.

Daniel Carstairs sold his splendid house at the first sign of trouble in 1926. In 1935 the house and its contents were sold at auction when a later owner was convicted and sentenced to fourteen years in prison for embezzlement. In 1960, after several years of deterioration, the building was renovated by a misguided preservationist who painted the exterior stucco green and the interior woodwork white. Only recently has it been faithfully restored by its current owner to its nearly original form. The dramas continue in Florida, but Mizner’s buildings now are a part of a picturesque past that was newly old when he helped to invent it some seventy years ago.

A Style of Many Names Crafting Icons of the Past