Flagler’s Whitehall: Beaux-Arts Grandeur in the American Tropics

ABSTRACT In a second career begun in his retirement, Henry Morrison Flagler (1830–1913), the cofounder of Standard Oil and one of the wealthiest citizens in the United States, embarked on the development of the tropical wilderness of Florida. Starting in St Augustine, he built a network of luxury hotels and railroads that became the infrastructure for modern Florida. Creating a counterpart to the premier summer resort of Newport, Rhode Island, Flagler transformed Palm Beach, an undeveloped barrier island, into a winter playground for the new American aristocracy, starting with the Georgian-style Royal Poinciana Hotel. It was Whitehall, however, the mansion built for Flagler in 1900–02 as a wedding gift to his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, that became the resort community’s monumental showplace. Designed by the New York firm of Carrère & Hastings in the Renaissance-derived classicism of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the stately white palace fronting Lake Worth embodied Flagler’s cultural aspirations as a patron of the arts. As the first major client of Carrère & Hastings, Flagler was critical in launching the career of one of the most prominent architectural firms of the Gilded Age. This article examines Whitehall in the context of Flagler’s business practices and personal goals, consistent with Andrew Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of Wealth’. Architectural opulence not only boosted Flagler’s mercantile purposes, but also reflected a belief, nurtured by his relationship with Carrère & Hastings and other close associates, about the importance of classical architecture and the arts in the development of society.

‘Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from?’: Englishness and the Search for an American National Style, 1850–1900

ABSTRACT The identification of the American elite with the Renaissance in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as seen in the extended Capitol Building and National Mall in Washington DC, can be traced back to architectural, historiographical and cultural trends taking place in Britain. The writings of John Ruskin, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds framed the debate in the United States. At first Ruskin’s antipathy towards the Renaissance was exacerbated by the Nativist Party’s opposition to Catholic immigration, but then the writings of Pater and, particularly, Symonds achieved what Wallace K. Ferguson described as ‘the thorough naturalization of Renaissancism in the English-speaking world’. Symonds’s Hegelian interpretation of the historical era as a ‘spirit of self-conscious freedom’ enabled Americans from the 1870s onwards to post-rationalise the Renaissance as a national style. Symonds dethroned the Ruskinian cult of the Gothic and celebrated Renaissance classicism and secular individualism. His image of Italian despots as ‘self-made men of commerce’ and an ‘aristocracy of genius and character’ appealed to US capitalists, while his admiration for the sumptuous palaces built by these Renaissance ‘men of power’ reinforced the evolutionary theories of the British sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose principle of ‘the survival of the fittest’ became the creed of American plutocrats as they built their own palatial houses. Finally, his frequent references to the discovery of America by Columbus came to legitimise the image of the US as the heir of Renaissance culture, as proclaimed at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

The Watchdog of the Lakefront

This chapter discusses the role of the Michigan Avenue property owners (or the Prairie Avenue owners) in opposing the ambitions of the Illinois Central Railroad on the lakefront. It examines how they became instrumental in blocking plans to locate the World's Columbian Exposition in Lake Park, and helped scuttle any number of settlement possibilities that would have allowed an expansion of the railroad's harbor facilities in the lake. The chapter highlights the Michigan Avenue owners' efforts to preserve the value of their property, and introduces the antagonists they had to contend with as Lake Park began to grow through additional landfilling and proposals proliferated to fill the lakefront with exhibition halls, armories, libraries, and museums. It investigates how the Michigan Avenue owners employed a legal tool called public dedication doctrine against proposed buildings in the park. The chapter refers to the public dedication doctrine as the right of a private landowner to enforce statements on publicly recorded plats and maps that certain lands will be devoted to public uses, such as streets, public squares, or parks. Ultimately, the chapter describes a growing number of precedents endorsing the public dedication doctrine from other jurisdictions — including several prominent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Spectacular Work: Labor as Entertainment at the World's Columbian Exposition Fairgrounds

Night is falling in the city. Holiday shoppers bustle down the sidewalk, some pausing to gaze at a colorful billboard publicizing the delights of an upcoming exposition. A few crafty rats scamper along a tall wooden fence, stalked by a sinister ratcatcher of the Dickensian mold. Children frolic, fight, and tease one another in front of the fence, the familiar syncopated strains of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker overture underscoring their exuberant street play. This is not, however, the early 1800s Germany of the upper-class Stahlbaum family. It's 1892 Chicago. In the Joffrey Ballet's 2016 production of The Nutcracker, the story of Clara Stahlbaum's innocent Christmas Eve dalliances with an anthropomorphic nutcracker and their journey to the Land of Sweets becomes the story of Marie, the daughter of a Polish immigrant single mother, whose fantasyland is the future Chicago World's Fair. Marie's mother, we learn, is a hired artist working on the fair's sculptures. Marie, Fritz, and their mother inhabit a wooden shack in the heart of the construction site, surrounded by the skeletal structures that will become the White City's buildings. Drosselmeyer is now “The Great Impresario,” a character of vision and magnetism inspired by the fair's Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham, and Marie's working-class mother transforms in the second act into the embodiment of the fair's golden Statue of the Republic, a less saccharine substitute for the Sugar Plum Fairy. The mutual affection of Mother and The Great Impresario spans both acts, and though the ballet leaves unclear the outcome of their budding romance, in it young Marie sees the promise of her American dream: a contented nuclear family.

The Racial Challenge

After the US Civil War, African American musicians and intellectuals had increasingly turned to European classical music as a tool of socioeconomic advancement while acknowledging the importance of antebellum vernacular music for defining racial identity. Violinist and composer Will Marion Cook (1869–1944) used the platform of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to demonstrate Black achievement in the arts. Meanwhile, Jeannette Thurber and Antonín Dvořák had opened the National Conservatory to Black students free of charge, thus expanding educational opportunities for talented Black musicians. The premiere of the New World Symphony in December 1893 reignited a widespread and vicious public debate about the place of Black music and musicians in American national life.