LODGING: The Roots of Rock Hall

 

Imagine it’s 1912. America’s Gilded Age raves on. Civil war rages in Mexico. U.S. Marines infiltrate Cuba. The Titanic sinks. W.C. Handy publishes the sheet music to “Memphis Blues.” Polish scientist Casimir Funk (no kidding) identifies vitamins. To win the World Series, the Boston Red Sox go into extra innings against the New York Giants in a game that will go down in history as one of baseball’s greatest ever.

 

As the vivid hues of autumn in the Berkshire foothills fade, Woodrow Wilson is elected president, defeating incumbent William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt in his bid for a third term; American women do not yet have the right to vote. Soon, the United States will enact a national income tax.
In Colebrook, Connecticut, shipping heir and Wall Street bond trader Jerome Alexandre—who surprised his family six years earlier by marrying his stepfather’s stenographer, Miss Violet Adelaide Oakley—taps New York society architect Addison Mizner to create Rock Hall, a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion with distinctive rock walls and Mediterranean flair.

 

Considering their similar backgrounds, Rock Hall’s original owner and its architect seem kindred spirits. Alexandre’s million-dollar inheritance (serious money in those days) came from his father, who in 1867 started the Alexandre Line, providing regular steamship service for freight and U.S. mail between New York City, Havana, Cuba, and Mexican ports on the Caribbean. Mizner grew up in California and lived in Guatemala while his father was U.S. minister there. After apprenticing as an architectural draftsman in the San Francisco office of Willis Jefferson Polk, he translated his international viewpoint into design, pioneering the Mediterranean Revival style in the United States.

 

While little has been written about Alexandre, much has been said about the larger-than-life Mizner and his brother, Wilson, of whom Addison once observed: “He would shoot me just to see which way I’d fall.” While in their twenties, the two roared through Alaska, mining a mother lode of gullible gold miners to make fast cash. In 1904 they moved to New York, where Wilson, 29, married a wealthy, much older widow; sent packing by her lawyers, he went to Hollywood as a screenwriter, summing up the experience as “a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.”
 

Notorious bon vivants, the Mizner brothers were known for their bons mots, including:
 

—The wages of gin is breath.

—Be held truthful that your lies may count.

—Misery loves company but company does not reciprocate.

—People who love in glass houses should pull down the blinds.

—Two ideas in his head at once would constitute an unlawful assembly.

—Be nice to people on the way up because you’ll see [them] on the way down.

 

Six years after creating Rock Hall, Addison Mizner moved to Palm Beach, where he designed homes for wealthy clients, setting the style of Florida’s Gold Coast and creating the resort architecture that predominates to this day. In 1926, Mizner’s plans to develop Boca Raton as “a resort city as perfect as study and ideals can make it” were leveled by a hurricane, and he went bankrupt. By 1933, his health was declining. Wilson cabled from Hollywood: “Stop dying. Am trying to write a comedy.”

 

Ironically, both brothers died that year. In 2008, their story was made into the off-Broadway musical, Road Show (aka Bounce), by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman. Many of Mizner’s buildings are no longer standing. [SEPTEMBER 2009]