[Backstage-list] FW: Nelson on Braden, _The Architecture of Leisure_

[Michael Zinganel]

> eine Buchrezension zum Thema Architektur und Tourismus


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Florida at h-net.org (August, 2004)

Susan R. Braden. _The Architecture of Leisure: The Florida Resort Hotels
of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant_. The Florida History and Culture
Series. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xxiii + 394 pp.
Illustrations, notes, bibliographical references, index. $34.95 (cloth),
ISBN 0-8130-2556-7.

Reviewed for H-Florida by Dave Nelson, Department of History, Florida
State University.

Constructing Paradise in the Gilded Age

Just days after the multiple terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, many
within Florida's media circles began asking what would be the effect of
the attacks upon Florida's tourist trade. Although on the surface these
concerns may appear off-target, their worries had historical roots.
Throughout the twentieth century, Florida's prime industry had been
leisure and tourism. For most non-Floridians, Florida represents sandy
beaches and exotic locales, Walt Disney World and Silver Springs, race
tracks and alligator farms, and numerous other leisure outlets. The
tourist industry has long exerted political, cultural, and economical
influence over the state's affairs, affecting matters as diverse as the
fishing industries, exotic species introduction, and race relations. And
yet only a few scholars have investigated the leisure trades within the
Sunshine State. Among the few works include studies of Florida's Seminole
peoples and tourism, the environmental impacts of development and leisure,
and a few histories of specific tourist attractions.[1] But to date, no
one has investigated the physical, built landscape that fed that image and
trade. With her book _Architecture of Leisure_, architectural historian
Susan R. Braden has started the process with a study of Gilded Age resort
hotels. Joining a distinguished line of Florida architectural historians,
Braden has also expanded the focus of Florida architectural studies.

For Braden, the resorts represented the introduction of Gilded Age
values--complete with theatrical resorts, architectural designs meant to
attract the nation's wealthiest, and ample opportunities for conspicuous
luxury--to the then relatively undeveloped Florida. Henry Flagler and
Henry Plant, in their desire to create a "Newport of the South" (p. 107),
"transported urban cultural ideas to Florida, transforming a sparsely
inhabited, scraggily beautiful near-wilderness into what they promoted as
the 'American Riviera'" (p. 1). More than just a catalog of hotels and
resorts, Braden's study integrates the architectural developments with the
social and cultural worlds of Gilded-Age Florida.

Originally a dissertation at Florida State University, the book is divided
into two parts.[2] The first part, approximately a third of the book,
discusses the social and cultural contexts within which these resorts were
built. The second is an architectural analysis and summary of the
construction of the hotels. It is the book's first half that will be of
most interest to Florida historians.

Braden starts her study with a chapter tracing the lives and careers of
the two developers. Although offering little new information, Braden does
a good job of summarizing the earlier biographical works on Plant and
Flagler. Both men were wealthy New York business leaders--Flagler with
Standard Oil and his Florida East Coast Railroad, and Plant with the
Southern Railroad--with Florida interests. Each began their affairs in
Florida through trains, and later expanded their involvement with hotels
to serve their rails. Infrastructure--supplies, workers, public utilities,
even entire towns--followed, as did tourists. As Braden points out,
railroads "reshaped" Florida's land, separating the East coast for the
elites from the lower classes. By 1913--the year of Flagler's death--the
East Coast Railroad served nine hotels and the entire Florida east coast.
But Braden's study is not a mere repetition of Flagler's and Plant's
capitalist exploits in Florida, but rather looks at what effect the
architecture and designs sanctioned by the two men had upon the state's
cultural and social make-up.

For Braden resort hotels possessed specific criteria: use of "historic and
contextually meaningful architectural styles;" physical and functional
autonomy; and "blatantly conspicuous (often decidedly feminine) luxury"
(p. 11). Resort hotels offered "interesting scenery, amusements or ... a
salubrious climate" (p. 55). Transcending the goals of mere hotels, these
resorts functioned more as proto-amusement parks. Unlike inns and hotels
before or since, the hotels built by Flagler and Plant served as
stand-alone experiences, the end destination of thousands of Florida
tourists. Braden argues that in the nineteenth century, the ability to
partake in these experiences--especially in the winter, a time when most
are unable to travel--represents conspicuous leisure; a social marker
separating the elite from the common workers.

In chapter three, Braden traces the development of hotels in the US.
Braden outlines the changing architectural styles of hotels, and the
evolution of travel and leisure those changes reflected. Today's hotels
began as simple taverns and inns--offering little more than a room and
food--as well as rented rooms in private houses. As Braden demonstrates,
the hospitality trade in the present United States has deep roots. For
instance, the first inn in North America opened in 1610 in Virginia. But
until well into the nineteenth century, travel within the US (aside from
residential relocations) was primarily an occupational pursuit, and
remained a male-dominated activity. Because the nature of travel was more
of necessity than desire, the architectural styles of inns and hotels
leaned towards the vernacular as well as local aesthetics. However, by the
1850s, as expendable wealth grew and transportation and roads improved,
the nation's first resorts appeared, utilizing neoclassicism and romantic
styles to attract venturous tourists. But it was only after the 1880s, as
conspicuous consumption increased, that there was a market for conspicuous
leisure. And men like Flagler and Plant were more than happy to
accommodate this new wealthy, mobile class. By the late 1800s, six
architectural styles dominated the burgeoning hotel and resort industry:
Stick, Queen Anne, Shingle, Renaissance Revival, and neo-Georgian. But as
Braden points out, while the resorts targeted the nation's elites with
their furnishings and architectural styles, many middle-class tourists
also registered as guests--partly to gawk at the hotels and partly to
experience a few days living as the "other half" did. Chapter four
continues in this vein, tracing the development of hotels, resorts, and
leisure in the Sunshine State. Braden does an admirable job describing how
a typical resort hotel in Florida looked and operated. Although her focus
is the hotels of Plant and Flagler, it would have been nice for Braden to
have ventured into a detailed discussion of a few of the other,
non-Flagler/Plant hotels here. Such a discussion would have further
bolstered her arguments for Plant's and Flagler's introduction of Gilded
Age hotels to Florida.

Despite Braden's thorough work throughout the book, it is chapter five
that will prove to be of most value to Florida historians-- as well as,
perhaps, cause the most aggravation. Here she delves into the social
aspects of resort hotels, using the filter of gender, race, and class. It
is often mentioned that book reviewers must continually remind themselves
to review only the book at hand, and not the one the reviewer wished to
see in the proverbial perfect world. Such reminders were necessary while
reading Braden's skillful, yet all too brief, analysis in this chapter.
Still one cannot help but wonder what sort of book would have emerged had
she flip-flopped the book's emphasis--expanded this chapter, and truncated
the entire second half of the book. As she only touches upon here, the
social, racial, and gender implications behind the hotels' design and
operation, as well as the cultural and economical changes brought about by
the money and the tourists these properties attracted, is fertile ground
for study. In one of the book's more intriguing discussions, Braden
suggests that because of the higher number of the female guests, the
hotels targeted them with the hotel's specific designs and motifs,
including gendered spaces, such as sitting rooms and parlors, enabling
women to maintain the gender-specific activities common at the time.
Likewise, there were also available male-centered spaces, including
billiards and smoking rooms. And then as women began to join the men in
public activities by the early twentieth century, and as inter-gender
social activities grew increasingly popular, the hotels shifted their
designs and operations accordingly. However, Braden goes too far when
suggesting that these adaptations revealed progressive tendencies among
the resort planners and managers, when the evidence she presents suggests
they were instead simply good capitalists adjusting to an evolving market.
But alas, such an analysis was not the aim of her book, and her inclusion
of this discussion, no matter how brief, within a work of architectural
history is to be commended. Along with the book's outstanding visual
presentation, Braden has with her social analysis raised the bar for
future Florida architectural scholars.

The book's second half is concerned primarily with architectural styles
and design, and therefore may prove of less interest to many of the
subscribers to this listserv. Here Braden delves into the minutiae of the
construction and operation of Flagler's and Plant's Florida resort hotels.
For each property, Braden traces the architects who designed them, the
architectural styles and motifs represented, and their construction, use,
and ultimate demise or destruction. (Only a few of the hotels are still in
existence, such as Flagler College, which originated as the 1888-built
Hotel De Leon.) Through maps, architectural plans, advertisements, and
photographs, Braden is able to reconstruct for readers the many sites that
no longer exist. Most valuable are her descriptions of some of the
lesser-known resort properties, such as Plant's Hotel Kissimmee, the Ocala
Hotel, and Flagler's Hotel Continental in Jacksonville and the Long Key
Fishing Camp. As any scholar who writes about the past--Florida's or
otherwise--can attest, the ability and means to visualize the cultural
landscape of the past is one of the most important but yet elusive tasks
to complete. Braden's work has made that task easier for historians of
Florida's Gilded Age a bit easier. And as scholars devote more attention
to material culture, the politics of built environments and public spaces,
as interest in historic preservation builds, many historians may yet find
much in the book's second half useful.

This book will be of use to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Florida
historians, academic as well as public, historic preservationists, and
local historians. And with its handsome presentation--the book contains
twenty-seven color photographs and over a hundred images and diagrams--the
book can sit just as easily on the coffee table as upon the bookshelf.  My
only substantial criticism is the lack of in-depth Florida, Southern, and
Progressive Era historiography. While Braden has obviously read far and
wide on architectural and material culture (Braden has included an
eight-page bibliographic essay), a greater familiarity with related works
on the South and Florida might have proven fruitful. For instance, more
discussion of how the development of leisure architecture and the tourist
industry fit within the wider New South narrative would have been
desirable. Was there a similar move towards conspicuous leisure in other
southern states? For Florida studies, linking Plant's and Flagler's
development of Florida with the scholarly debates over the extent of the
southern-ness of Florida would have also been worthwhile. Did elements of
Florida's cultural heritage affect the resort's architectural styles, or
were they imported whole-cloth into the state? And finally, works such as
Grace Hale's _Making Whiteness_ and Kathy Peiss's _Cheap Amusements_ would
have added greatly to her analysis of the social impacts of resorts.[3]
For instance, what role did leisure play in marking racial and gender
boundaries?

While many fine works on Florida architecture has appeared over the past
forty years, Braden has managed to shift the focus from strictly material
culture to include not only social context, but also the interplay between
architecture and culture.[4] Although not completely successful in all
aspects, she also delves deeper than most architectural historians,
blending architectural studies with social history to explore the social,
political, and cultural worlds in which these luxurious resorts resided.
While its stated aim was only an exploration of Florida resort
architecture of the Gilded Age, its execution achieves much more than
that.

[1]. Patsy West, _The Enduring Seminoles: From Alligator Wrestling to
Ecotourism_ (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Mark Derr,
_Some Kind of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man and the Land in Florida_ (New
York: W. Morrow, 1989); Tracy Revels, _Watery Eden: A History of Wakulla
Springs_ (Tallahassee: Sentry Press, 2002); Cory Gittner, _Miami's Parrot
Jungle and Gardens: The Colorful History of an Uncommon Attraction_
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); and Richard Martin,
_Eternal Spring: Man's 10,000 Years of History at Florida's Silver
Springs_ (St. Petersburg: Great Outdoors, 1966).

[2]. Susan R. Braden, "Florida Resort Architecture: The Hotels of Henry
Plant and Henry Flagler," (Ph.D. diss: Florida State University, 1987).

[3]. Grace Elizabeth Hale, _Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation
in the South, 1890-1940_ (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Kathy Peiss
_Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New
York City_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

[4]. Works include Albert Manucy, _The Houses of St. Augustine, 1565-1821_
(St. Augustine: St. Augustince Historical Society, 1962;
_Sixteenth-Century St. Augustine: The People and Their Homes_
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Ronald W. Haase,
_Classic Cracker: Florida's Wood-Frame Vernacular Architecture_ (Sarasota:
Pineapple Press, 1992); Alex Caemmerer, _Houses of Key West_ (Sarasota:
Pineapple Press, 1992); Elsbeth Gordon, _Florida's Colonial Architectural
Heritage_ (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Wayne Wood,
_Jacksonville's Architectural Heritage:  Landmarks for the Future_
(Jacksonville: University of North Florida Press, 1989); Donald Walter
Curl, _Mizner's Florida: American Resort Architecture_ (New York:
Architectural History Foundation and MIT Press, 1987); and William N.
Morgan, _Precolumbian Architecture in Eastern North America_ (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1999).


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