California Dreaming

California Dreaming:
Sothwestern Influences in the Architecture of Miami

The development of South Florida's architecture has closely followed the exuberant whimsy of buildings in Southern California. The two regions are linked by their sunny, balmy climates, histories of Native American, Latin, and Anglo cultural collisions, remote, romantic geographic positions, and ambitious expansion early this century. The decade of economic prosperity and feverish mobility that followed World War I solidified the umbilical relationship between the southwestern and southeastern coasts. Miami developers and architects catalyzed the famous land boom of the 1920s by mimicking the intense self promotion and idiosyncratic architecture of prosperous Los Angeles.

The various California styles that blossomed early this century wistfully recognized the tumultuous natural, cultural, and geographic extremes that shaped the American Southwest. The Mission Style fantasized about the simple adobe churches that punctuated the arid desert landscape. The Pueblo Revival yearned for a structural marriage between Native American, Hispanic and Anglo forms and technologies. The Spanish Colonial movement commemorated the area's Mediterranean heritage by inventing a climatically sensitive architecture "more Spanish than Spain." Finally, California bungalows adapted local materials into a stylized version of popular English colonial houses. As Southern California's growth leveled off by 1920, its buildings, developers and architects moved to the Florida frontier, transplanting their architectural prejudices to the Sunshine State. The landfilled mangrove islands and newly drained Everglades swamp, which surrounded Miami, seemed like the perfect tabula rasa to create a new Los Angeles. Fanciful California land boom architecture began to embellish the South Florida imagery, far removed from its western origins.

Fantastic, flashy resort metaphors controlled the architecture of both regions until the twenties. Dramatic social unrest, tremendous immigration, and dynamic economic maturity tested the maternal relationship between Orange County, California and Dade County, Florida. In the 1950s, Los Angeles captured the North American imagination with its enthusiastic fashion, and its vigorous media. By this decade, Miami had become the city of the future, severing its historic reputation as a "poor man's" Los Angeles.

Both Florida and California are isolated from the rest of North America by their formidable topography. The swamps and savannas to the west of Miami, and the deserts and mountains to the east of Los Angeles made large areas of each region's hinterlands uninhabitable. In the 1910s, sophisticated canal systems drained the Florida wetlands and irrigated the California wilderness, opening vast tracts of their interiors to settlement. Irving Gill described the newly claimed terrain as a "white page, turned for registration."²

The first Europeans to settle in both California and Florida were Spanish missionaries intent on converting the Native Americans to Catholicism. The California proselytizers built a series of rustic adobe churches along the arid coast between 1780 and 1820. The lesser known Florida missions were constructed from fragile "wattle and daub." The Spaniards also built a series of forts and other government buildings in both territories, protecting their trading rights and religious communities. Later, as Manifest Destiny drove more opportunistic North Americans to the southwestern and the southeastern corners of the United States, crossroad towns became architectural laboratories for developing hybrid architectural styles. Seductive promotions of Southern California by landowners, business people and the railroads led to a phenomenal growth in the prosperous decade following World War I. In a five year period beginning in 1920, the population of Los Angeles doubled from a half million to over one million people.³

South Florida's boosters, impressed by the California advertising successes, modeled their efforts on their distant rival's efforts. The chief advocates of Miami, the Sewell brothers (assistants to Henry Flagler), inaugurated Dade County's first national tourist campaign. The Sewell's store envelopes sported small maps comparing the Florida coast to the California shoreline.⁴ Between 1923 and 1926, the population of the Miami increased from 30,000 to approximately 150,000. This boom closely followed the real estate fury in Los Angeles. One author points out that many Los Angeles developers and speculators moved to Dade County when construction activity began to slow down in California.⁵

Coral Gables developer George Merrick hired William Jennings Bryan, a former Democratic presidential nominee, to advertise the new suburb:

We can expect that Florida will, in time, duplicate the progress that Southern California has made during the last quarter of a century...

Los Angeles is a great city and has enjoyed an astonishing growth. The experience of Los Angeles will be more than duplicated in the growth of Miami... Miami is on the bay and near the ocean, while Los Angeles is some fourteen miles from the Pacific at the nearest point and still farther from her seaport. Miami already has eighteen feet of water in her harbor and will, before long, have a channel deep enough for all the ocean steamers...

While the summer climate of Los Angeles is cooler than Miami's, it is more variable, and her winter season does not compare with that of Miami. In fact, there is not a place in the world where the weather, during the cold months, is more genial than here.⁶

The southeastern and southwestern booms shared many of the same catalysts--prosperity in the Coolidge era, construction of all-weather roads, and the attraction of a warm climate. But the example of Southern California "with its self-advertising and enviable life style" profoundly affected the self created image of South Florida. The manufactured rivalry between the two regions, during the early 1920s, firmly established Miami as an alternative Los Angeles.

Will Rogers poked fun at the growing rivalry between California and Florida in a Saturday Evening Post article he wrote in 1926:

	Florida:
	We have the longest seacoast of any state in the union. We have 1145 miles, and that is 100 miles more than California.
	California:
	...They must outdo California... If you look at the map, it will show this finger of Florida...is pointing due west to California, the land of great development... We take Florida oranges to California, dry them, and use them as golf balls...
	Interrupter:
	We have sat patiently and listed to you two birds. America couldn't pick up a magazine without looking at a picture of...sunny California or balmy Florida... You are not really in America, you're on the ragged edge.⁷

At the turn of the century, reactions against intense industrialization and urbanization inspired a wave of nostalgia and nationalism throughout the United States. Southwestern architects began to base designs on the humble Spanish vernacular structures that punctuated the desert landscape.⁸ Southeastern designers, working with a sparser architectural heritage, followed the lead of the Californians. John Pohlman concurs, "Desire for history and tradition has been one of the more notable aspects of American civilization, especially in regions not blessed by either." ⁹

Several major historical styles flourished during the early twentieth century California booms before being relocated to the feverish Miami real estate market. The Mission Style adopted form and structure from the recently restored Spanish churches. The Mediterranean Revival movement borrowed directly from European and North African precedents. The Pueblo Style imitated the intermarriage of Spanish and Native American technologies. California bungalows copied the simple affordable shelters of the English colonies. These styles became intimately associated with the fantasy of balmy resort architecture. It was natural, therefore, for Florida builders to transport these ideals as they attempted to rebuild the California dream in the East.

The Mission craze lasted in Los Angeles from 1890 to 1905. Charles Lummis, the California newspaper editor, launched the restoration of the few remaining Spanish Colonial church compounds by writing a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times. "Missions are worth more money, and are a greater asset to Southern California than our oil, our oranges, our climate," Lummis proclaimed.¹⁰ He also wrote about the suitability of Spanish Colonial traditions as a foundation for southwestern architecture.
The railroads helped spread the Mission style throughout the western desert by adopting it for their train stations. These simple structures provided the first architectural glimpse of the Southwest to most visitors. The typical Mission style building employed flat roofs with curved or scalloped parapets in a pattern loosely similar to the ancient churches. Rough stucco surfaces finished the concrete block or wood frame structures.¹¹

California architects, such as Arthur Benton, used the style in numerous hotels, museums, railroad stations, schools, city halls and houses. "Give me neither Romanesque, nor Gothic; much less Italian Renaissance, and least of all English Colonial--this is California--give me Mission,"¹² wrote one architect. Irving Gill extolled the missions as "an expressive medium of retaining tradition, history and romance with their long lines, graceful arcades, tile roofs, bell towers, arched doorways, and walled gardens."¹³

Extensive publication and celebration of the restored California church compounds popularized the Mission Revival style in Miami. Thousands of miles removed from the original Spanish Colonial adobe structures, the style thrived in Miami from 1910 to the 1930s, even after California designers had lost interest in the revival. Although Florida's own Spanish missionaries preceded the California padres by at least a century, the structures they built were much more fragile. They did not survive as models for modern historicism.

Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss, and his partner James Bright, planned to have an extensive Mission style theme in their development of Hialeah. The city's water plant, from 1924, was built from local limestone and remains the best example of that type of architecture in Miami. Land boom architects designed hundreds of economical Mission houses through the Dade County suburbs, giving the sprawling city an exotic California flair.

The Mediterranean Revival, popular in California from 1915 through the 1930s, evolved as an outgrowth of the Mission style.¹⁴ The interest, however, grew out of a manufactured history. As early as 1896, the Southern California chapter of the American Institute of Architects formed an alliance with the Pasadena Loan Association for "the purpose of collecting and maintaining public exhibitions of all that is best in architectural design...in older Spain and Italy."¹⁵

Probably the first Mediterranean style buildings in the United States were actually constructed in Florida. The New York firm of Carrere and Hastings used Spanish imagery in two St. Augustine hotels built for Henry Flagler in the 1880s--the Ponce de Leon and the Alcazar. They believed that the "logical expression of the semi-tropical climate and historic background was in some form of Spanish Renaissance style."¹⁶ Bertram Goodhue's California building, at the 1915 San Diego Exposition, pushed the style into vogue. The structure inspired a flurry of similar buildings throughout Southern California during the land boom. Mediterranean style houses by architects such as James Craig, Lilian Rice, John Beyer and Wallace Neff, were widely published in popular magazines and professional journals, and showcased in Hollywood films.

The Mediterranean Revival is a composite of ideas embracing many periods and many regions. "It borrows, copies, synthesizes and adapts architectural forms and details into a contrived language. Spanish, Italian, Moorish, Byzantine...are under this orchestrated process merged...into a sun loving style which, while eminently American in its plan and utilities, is never-the-less distinctly Mediterranean in its origins and spirit."¹⁷

South Florida builders, sensitive to the loose similarities in climate and ethnicity between Florida and California, adopted Mediterranean architecture as their favorite land boom architecture. "Thus has California, and recently Florida, capitalized upon her history, romance and lore... "¹⁸ The 1916 mansion El Jardin, designed by Kiehnel and Elliott for steel czar John Bindley, is the earliest project of this type in Miami. The courtyard villa is modeled after Renaissance palazzos, while its ornate facades embrace Spanish Churrigueresque compositions. Burrall Hoffmann's designs for Vizcaya, a 1917 mansion on Biscayne Bay, incorporated actual Italian details--ceilings, doors, gates--that had been collected by his client, James Deering. August Geiger built the Alamo at Miami City Hospital employing fashionable Mediterranean forms and fragments. That 1915 project, and his later Miami Beach golf course clubhouse, were inspired by buildings in California and New Mexico.¹⁹

The flamboyant Palm Beach architect Addison Mizner thrust Spanish architecture into the South Florida vanguard. The son of California pioneers, Mizner studied at the University of Salamanca, Spain, before working for Willis Polk--the San Francisco architect who is credited with the invention of the California Mission style. Mizner practiced in New York for ten years before moving to Palm Beach in 1918. His designs for the Everglades Club firmly established the Mediterranean Revival as an appropriate style for Florida. Mizner said that in Palm Beach, "the history, romance, and setting were all Spanish."²⁰

In 1925, an article in House Beautiful wrote, "To say that the new Florida architecture lacks seriousness is...to compliment its architects... They do not mean it to be serious. While they do not intend it to be frivolous, they definitely intend its picturesque informality to express the spirit of a land dedicated to long carefree emotions."²¹ Florida architects, like their colleagues in the Southwest, used elaborate manuals as references for their Mediterranean designs. Some were published by trade organizations while others were written by scholars. "The trade books were published [in California] while the intellectual defenses of eclecticism were sponsored on the East Coast." One book, Spanish or Adobe Architecture of California (1800-1830), so influenced Miami Beach architect Russel Pancoast that he donated the volume to the University of Miami.

Florida builders also invested in city planning methods similar to those developed in Southern California during its land boom. George Merrick modeled Coral Gables, built on his family's orchards outside of Miami, on the same romantic images of northern Italy that lured the California developers two decades earlier. The "American Riviera" used sensuous canals, elaborate boat landings, and gondoliers to complete an enduring image of a somnolent resort. Beautiful city boulevards, lagoons, fountains and plazas decorate the verdant terrain. Hundreds of Mediterranean style homes and public buildings--with an "antiquity in picturesque design"²²--were constructed before the Depression.

Another developer, Joseph Wesley Young, who had made and then lost his fortune on the West Coast, arrived in Miami as the land boom was just starting. He found some undeveloped marshy wetlands near the city and decided to create a "Hollywood-by-the-Sea," to be named after the illustrious Pacific movie capital (only built since 1880). Between 1920 and 1925, the population of Hollywood, Florida, grew from zero to 20,000 people. Another entrepreneur, D. C. Alexander, arrived in Florida in 1909, after attending Stanford University. He established Fort Lauderdale Beach because he believed that the South Florida beaches were more beautiful than California's. Finally, a nearby venturer, Charlie Rodes, decided to create another American Venice, this time in Fort Lauderdale. His community's finger peninsulas maximized waterfront property. Rodes imported gondolas (like Abbot Kinney, the developer of Venice, California) with "beautiful Italian girls to run them."²³ The waterfront boardwalks, tight beach front alleys, systematic canals, and Mediterranean architecture of these three developments evoke images of Venice, California, even to this day.

The Pueblo Revival, another popular 1920s style, began with the restoration of the Governor's Palace in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1909. Like the palace, the numerous civic and private structures that were built afterwards were modeled after multi-storied adobe villages of Pueblo Indians. The Santa Fe Railroad used the pueblo as a symbol and as a model for the design of its train stations and hotels. It sponsored the construction of pueblo structures in the two California expositions in 1914 and 1915, complete with Native American women weaving rugs.²⁴ The Pueblo Revival became fashionable throughout Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Southern California. The style emphasized the sculptural form and natural characteristic of adobe buildings and was also able to mediate the hot, dry weather of the Southwest.

Glenn Curtiss opted for Pueblo Revival architecture in his development of Country Club Estates (now Miami Springs) outside Miami. About 150 "adobe" houses, hotels, stores, apartment buildings and offices were built on the newly drained Everglades before the end of the boom. Curtiss had become enamored with the ancient pueblos, as a counterpoint to his progressive airplanes, during his frequent flights to his West Coast flying schools. The thick walled buildings, built with wood frame or concrete block instead of adobe, proved to be inappropriate in the hot and humid Miami subtropics.²⁵

During the early twentieth century booms, the California bungalow also developed and prospered. This economic, climatically sensitive house-type blossomed on the Pacific coast primarily between 1895 and 1920. The bungalow grew out of the English Arts and Crafts movement and evolved from British Colonial cottages built in India. California architects invested the borrowed forms with American sensibility and materials. The open, practical plans encouraged casual "indoor/outdoor" living. Architects like Greene and Greene elevated the bungalow to a high art. Their buildings in Pasadena mediate between Spanish-Mexican adobe, New England timber and oriental craftsmanship.

Florida real estate speculators, again inspired by various books, magazines, and mail order catalogues, favored the California bungalows in the 1920s. Some national magazines offered complete building plans and specifications that were easily adapted to Miami's landscape, climate and life style. Books such as All American Homes offered the California dream to South Floridians. Many of these houses, built from native South Florida wood and stone, still line the quiet suburban Dade County streets. A 1989 Miami Herald article exaggerates when it claims that bungalows exist only in Southern California, South Florida and India.²⁶ The cottages flourish in the sibling rivals of Miami and Los Angeles.

The real estate markets crashed throughout the Sunbelt in the late 1920s. A tremendous September 1926 hurricane ripped through South Florida's construction euphoria. Building activity in Southern California had been slowing down since 1924, but almost stopped completely after the stock market crash in 1929. The architectural links between Miami and Los Angeles, however, were concretely established during the first thirty years of this century and would remain connected through the 1980s.

The movie and television industries were leaders in establishing portraits of the blossoming Sunbelt cities. While novels, paintings, and travel books colored the nation's image of the southern states through the early twentieth century, a rapidly developing Los Angeles film industry began transmitting fanciful images of Southern California to the nation. The primitive lighting technology of early cinematography required that most films be shot outdoors in sunny weather. Florida and California competed with each other to attract movie makers, but by 1915 the film industry was deeply entrenched in Hollywood, California. The region offered not only weather and light, but a "geography that gathered seacoast and desert, with mountain and desert, forest land and prairie...."²⁷
South Florida maintained only a modest film industry because film producers did not appreciate what they perceived as a lack of variety in its landscape. In 1922, Miami Studios, a motion picture company, did open a large studio in the Mission style suburb of Hialeah. D. W. Griffith, who is largely responsible for the founding of the Hollywood movie industry and for the propagation of the California mission myth, filmed the classic "The White Rose" in the Dade County Building. Like Los Angeles, Miami based its buildings on exported Hollywood images. George Merrick constructed architectural theme villages throughout the otherwise Mediterranean styled "City Beautiful." Film sets and movie star homes inspired the Chinese French Provincial, Dutch South African and American Colonial styles of these villages. Glenn Curtiss modeled his subdivision of Opa Locka, north of Hialeah, on the Arabian stage sets of the enormously popular 1924 movie, "The Thief of Baghdad." The movie maker's architectural fantasy had become the California dream to a Miami builder.

Los Angeles appeared to the world as a Spanish Colonial paradies, "mansioned in complexes of poole arcades, atria and balconies."²⁸ Movie theaters throughout the country imitated the thrills of Southern California architecture with "exotic names such as the Alhambra, Alcazar, and Granada with architecture to match."²⁹ Los Angeles, on the other hand, began imitating its movie sets. The cityscape, by the late 1920s, was "enlivened by medieval castles, Hansel and Gretal cottages, Dutch windmills...and other fantasies that were directly inspoired by the movies."³⁰

After World War II, the exploding television industry began broadcasting the seductive Southern California landscape into the nation's living rooms. Military veterans and their growing families precipitated a 1950s land boom in the "City of Angels" "Los Angeles, not Miami, was America's new city of the future... Out west the surf was up, Ventura highway beckoned, and all America was ÔCalifornia Dreaming.' In comparison Biscayne Bay was a boring puddle."³¹ California's Disneyland, which opened in the 1950s, embraced all the architectural eclecticism of the twentieth century in one convenient package.

A popular "cops and robbers" television program finally helped South Florida discover its own language, its own architecture. Miami Vice first aired in 1984 to capitalize on a series of significant events that had recently taken place in Miami. The Mariel boat lift, the drug epidemic, the violent ghetto riots and new buildings designed by the architecture firm Arquitectonica, all steered the nation's attention to the southeastern resort city in the 1980s. The television series "...reinvented the look of Miami, too, reinvented the way Miami was perceived by the world. And we in Miami liked what we saw. And we began to replicate it."³² The Miami Vice style became the Miami style. Beth Dunlop, architecture critic, notes that the show demonstrated "with remarkable clarity what is truly amazing about this place, the juxtaposition of land and water, the near tropical landscape, ...the romance of Mediterranean Revival architecture, the caprice of Deco."³³ She adds a familiar comparison, " ...Miami's skyline may not be as full blown as L.A.'s, but it is certainly more interesting: Just watch L.A. Law's opening and compare it with Vice's."³⁴

The movie industry is beginning to thrive in modern Florida, partly because Miami Vice demonstrated that there is a poetry to the state's flat landscape. In 1989, MGM opened a huge studio in Orlando. Unfortunately, the complex, like its Disney World neighbor, reinforces the "L. A. envy" which has continued to mold Florida's self image--its main street is a faithful reproduction of California's Hollywood Boulevard.

Full Site | Text Only Site