Editing Addison Mizner (section)

==Mizner the storyteller==
Mizner was a storyteller but not a reliable one.<ref>{{cite news
|url=http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/sfl-addisonmizner_main-story.html
|newspaper=Sun-Sentinel
|date=January 18, 2002
|access-date=November 10, 2017
|title=Addison Mizner: A new biography [that of Seebohm] dispells many myths that swirled around the famous architect
|first=Charlyne Varkonyi
|last=Schaub
|archive-date=October 26, 2017
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171026071747/http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/sfl-addisonmizner_main-story.html
|url-status=live
}}</ref> He invented stories, all set in foreign countries and thus in practice unverifiable. One the lack of veracity of which is documented is the tale of his visit with his father and other family members to the ruins of [[Copán]], in [[Honduras]]. "No one knew exactly where it was", and they needed "a small army of carriers and machete wielders to cut our way in". [[John Lloyd Stephens]] was "the only other white man to set foot on the temple steps in three hundred and seventy years".<ref name=Many>{{cite book
|first=Addison
|last=Mizner
|title=The Many Mizners
|year=1932
|publisher=[[Sears Publishing Company]]}}</ref>{{rp|55}} However, at least six other white men visited and wrote about Copán in the 19th century, not counting the expeditions of the [[Peabody Museum of Harvard University]].<ref>{{cite book
|last=Kelly
|first=Joyce
|year=1996
|title=An Archaeological Guide to Northern Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador
|publisher=[[University of Oklahoma Press]]
|isbn=978-0806128580}}</ref>{{rp|278–279}} His well-informed father, the U.S. ambassador, surely knew about some of these visitors. Mizner also omitted embarrassing information: he said his father retired as ambassador because "father's health broke down",<ref name=Many />{{rp|62}} when in fact [[Lansing B. Mizner#Minister to Central America|his father was dismissed by Secretary of State]] [[James G. Blaine]] after a diplomatic incident.<ref name=Curl />{{rp|8–9}}

It was on this journey that he received his first monkey, named [[Deuteronomy]], who drowned, on the return voyage from Nicaragua to Guatemala, after she was hit on the head with a trombone ([[nota bene|n.b.]]) and fell overboard.<ref name=Many />{{rp|52}}

As he told it in a totally fictitious tale, he laid out the town of [[Dawson Creek, British Columbia]], with no tape measure.<ref name=Ohr />{{rp|47}} He told a story about how, in 1892, [[Argelia Benton de Reina|Argelia Benton]] ([[:es:Argelia Benton]]), the American wife of Guatemalan dictator [[Jose Maria Reina Barrios]], invited him to build a new palace for her in [[Guatemala City]]. He was to receive a retainer of $25,000 in gold, but Barrios was assassinated before Mizner received any of the money. Mizner's dramatic story is not evidenced by the chronology: her residence/palace, Villa Argelia, already existed in 1892, and Barrios was assassinated in 1898.<ref>Seebohm 2001. p. 63.</ref>

Much later, Addison said several times<ref>Orr 1977. p. 13 n. 5</ref> that he enrolled "at some point during this time" in the [[University of Salamanca]], in Spain, though the only known detail about his studies there, if they existed, is that he did not receive a degree.<ref name=Seebohm />{{rp|48}} There is no confirmation that he ever studied there (and [[Salamanca]]'s isolation makes it an unlikely choice for a foreign student). The only cities in Spain that it is documented that he visited are [[Seville]], [[Granada]], [[Toledo, Spain|Toledo]], and [[Burgos]].<ref>{{cite web
|page=76
|title=Finding Addison Mizner: His Scrapbook Testimony
|first=Suzanne B.
|last=Kane
|year=2014
|url=http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1151&context=archthesis
|quote=M.A. thesis, [[University of Nebraska–Lincoln]]
|access-date=September 3, 2018
|archive-date=July 7, 2021
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210707120622/https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1151&context=archthesis
|url-status=live
}}</ref>

So much as available evidence indicates, he was never in the small city of Salamanca. However, because of its prestigious and mellifluous name, Salamanca was mentioned by Mizner repeatedly.
* According to Mizner, the Spanish king, [[Alfonso XIII]], came to his hotel, insisted on seeing him,<ref>Seebohm 2001. p. 185</ref> and gave him paneling from "the private apartments of [fifteenth-century] [[Catholic Monarchs|King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain]] in Salamanca."<ref>Seebohm 2001. p. 191</ref> There were no such apartments in Salamanca.
* Mizner also said that the entry to the Cloister Inn was through "a large Romanesque arch reminiscent of the entrance gate of the University of Salamanca".<ref name=Boomtime />{{rp|66}} There is no Romanesque architecture in Salamanca. 
* The Cloister Inn had a "Salamanca Room".<ref name=Curl />{{rp|157}}
* The huge doors of the Cloister Inn were said to be "three-hundred-year-old originals from the University of Salamanca". In reality, these doors were made of [[Miami-Dade County|Dade County]] pine in the workshops of Mizner Industries."<ref name=PerkinsCaughman />{{rp|259}}
* The ceiling of the house La Bienvenida was "inspired by a cloister ceiling at the library at the University of Salamanca".<ref name=PerkinsCaughman />{{rp|287}}

Mizner told this kind of story to his clients: in [[Playa Riente]], its "ceiling was from the Chapter House in Toledo, Spain, and the [[tracery]] of the doors and windows from the Casa Lonja at Valencia."<ref name=Silvin />{{rp|40}} There was also a yellow carpet "reputed to have been woven by nuns for a cathedral in Granada."<ref name=PerkinsCaughman />{{rp|195}} (There were no carpets at all, much less ones made by nuns, in Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries.) He never showed photographs or prints in books of the buildings he was allegedly imitating.

A similar Hispanic tale told several times by Mizner is that his [[Administration Buildings (Boca Raton, Florida)|administration buildings]] (in 2017 the Addison Restaurant) was based on the house of the Spanish painter [[El Greco]], in [[Toledo, Spain]]. As Mizner surely knew, El Greco's house was long vanished, little is known of it, and the [[El Greco Museum, Toledo|house/museum of El Greco in Toledo]], recently constructed and opened in Mizner's day (1911), made no pretense to even be in the same location as the original house. Mizner did not follow the somber architectural style of Castile, where Toledo was, and a similarity between the two buildings is difficult to see. Similarly, he invented the connection between the tower of the Cloister Inn, which is vaguely Spanish, with the [[Giralda]] tower of the Cathedral of Seville.<ref name=Boomtime />{{rp|64}} The [[San Francisco Ferry Building]] (1892) — a project of his mentor Polk (see below)<ref name=Curl />{{rp|10}} — does have a tower that clearly resembles the Seville tower. Two contemporaneous buildings in south Florida also contain towers based on the Giralda: the [[Freedom Tower (Miami)]] (1925) and the [[Miami Biltmore Hotel]] (1926), both products of the architectural company [[Schultze and Weaver]], who in 1927 built the Boca Raton Club that Mizner could not.

(The feature of the Everglades Club that ''is'' linked to the Giralda is the Patio of Oranges: that is the garden of the [[Cathedral of Seville|Cathedral/former great mosque of Seville]], where the Giralda is.)

Similarly, he said that he traveled with his father to [[San José, Costa Rica]], by river,<ref name=Curl>{{citation
|page=7
|first=Donald W.
|last=Curl
|title=Mizner's Florida
|publisher=The Architectural History Foundation and the MIT Press
|year=1992
|quote=First published 1984
|isbn=978-0262530682}}</ref> which is impossible: San José is at {{convert|3800|ft|m}}, and is not even close to a navigable river. He embellished it further by adding that they had missed a steamer and had to travel by [[dugout canoe]];<ref name=Curl />{{rp|7}} there have never been dugout canoes in Costa Rica. He said that he based a dining hall, with multiple wash stations, on a "[[Hospital#Late medieval Europe|hospital]]" in [[Vic, Spain|Vic]], Spain; there is no such building in Vic. He also invented a prize fight in Australia;<ref name=Federal/>{{rp|229}}<ref name="Seebohm"/>{{rp|65–83, 93, 125}} he had a lifelong leg injury<ref name=Curl />{{rp|6}} and could not possibly box. But he said he fought the boxing champion of Australia to a draw after twenty rounds ("he was slow and ... I was fast"<ref name=Many />{{rp|203}}), and in a rematch knocked out and probably killed his opponent.<ref name=PerkinsCaughman />{{rp|73}} He had to escape out the back door with his share of the gate, head for the harbor, and board a ship whose gangplank was conveniently just being drawn up.<ref name=Many />{{rp|205–206}} One wonders what to make of his claim that he was "as good a bricklayer as any man I ever had. I can plaster as well as any plasterer I have seen. I am a fairly good carpenter, a better than ordinary electrician. I know how to wipe a joint in plumbing."<ref name=Curl/>{{rp|10}} Similarly, "I had to go into the nursery business and build a tree-moving machine. What fun it was teaching men how to stucco, teaching others how to cure pip in chickens, clearing jungles, killing land crabs, catching alligators. It was all like a game."<ref name=Silvin />{{rp|14}}