Perceptions of Florida in the Gilded Age
Tamara Morgenstern
Florida-based architectural historian Tamara Morgenstern - one of the contributors to ‘The New History of the American Renaissance’ - recounts the steps that led her from the shores of Lake Worth to the pages of Architectural History.
Fig 1: Pleuthner, W. K., Panoramic view of West Palm Beach, North Palm Beach and Lake Worth. [S.I, 1915], Library of Congress
An architectural historian residing in South Florida has only the relatively recent past to consider when examining the history of the built environment in the American tropics. The long and multi-layered history of places I once called home – most notably Providence and nearby Newport, Rhode Island and then Paris, France – simply did not exist in Miami and Miami Beach, where I lived in the 1980s. However, investigating the Mediterranean Revival architecture and town planning from the early twentieth century, which remained largely intact in those years, revealed a concerted effort to create a distinctive regional aesthetic.
Fig 2: Whitehall, Palm Beach, Florida, Carrère & Hastings, 1900–02, entrance (east) facade, photograph of 2019 (Flagler Museum Archives)
After fifteen years in Los Angeles, a return to Florida for part of the year brought me closer to Palm Beach. The dramatic and all-pervasive Mediterranean Revival work of Addison Mizner dominated the architectural landscape. Yet, standing apart from Mizner’s Worth Avenue and the similar mansions poised along the Atlantic Ocean, the classical form of Henry Flagler’s Gilded Age mansion, Whitehall (now the Flagler Museum - www.flaglermuseum.us), called to mind an earlier history and a different notion of life in the tropics, developed as part of a nationwide effort to create a classicizing American identity.
When Horatio Joyce, through the auspices of the SAHGB, proposed a session on the architecture of the American Renaissance at the (American) Society of Architectural Historians’ annual conference in 2019, I welcomed the opportunity to probe deeper into an area of architectural history that had been disparaged for all too long. The role of Henry Flagler in transforming the forbidding landscape of Florida not only into an exotic resort destination, but also into a thriving state – a fact that is rarely understood or appreciated today - was a crucial element in understanding his ‘white palace’ on the shores of Lake Worth.
At the SAH conference the reception by architectural scholars to our session, ‘Fantasies of Aristocracy: England and the American Renaissance’, was nothing short of spectacular, with standing room only. This was a topic whose time had clearly come! Exploring the architectural treasures of Providence and the Gilded Age monuments of Newport during the conference with Richard Guy Wilson (also a contributor both to the session and to the subsequent publication in Architectural History) as our guide heightened our commitment to this long-neglected field of study.
Transforming the seminal work from the SAH conference into published form as ‘The New History of the American Renaissance’ was an intriguing and thought-provoking process. Examining the integral role of Henry Flagler in launching the careers of the architects Carrère and Hastings – best known perhaps for the New York Public Library of 1897-1911 - was particularly illuminating. Through numerous peer reviews I was encouraged to probe deeper into the social, political and economic climate of the era. What were the legal and political intricacies of distributing large swaths of Florida land to individuals and corporate entities? What role did gender play, not only in Mary Lily Flagler’s involvement in building Whitehall, but also in the multifaceted society of Gilded Age resort life? Who were the workers who built Flagler’s resort extravaganzas? How had the once-thriving Native American tribes become reduced to a handful of Seminoles living in seclusion in the Everglades? The complexities of Gilded Age society were many, not unlike those of the United States in 2021.
This study of one man’s material contribution to the buildings of the American Renaissance is a microcosm that may assist in understanding the role of the men and women who amassed unprecedented wealth, built personal monuments to their success, and then contributed enormous assets to build a nation by creating the institutions - the museums, libraries, schools and universities - that provided the framework of American culture, evident in cities and towns across the whole of the United States.
Tamara Morgenstern received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in architectural history from the University of California, Los Angeles and her B.A. from Brown University. Her areas of interest include early modern architecture and urban planning under the Habsburgs in southern Italy and Sicily, and early twentieth-century architecture in Los Angeles and South Florida. Tamara’s research on Louis I. Kahn’s unbuilt project for the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem appears in a recently published book by Routledge. In addition, she is active in historic preservation, and serves on the Board of the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and StandWithUs Southeast.