At Home - Bill Bryson [128]
Despite his idiosyncrasies, Mizner was widely admired. He sometimes had as many as a hundred projects on the go at once and was known to design as many as two houses in a day. “Some authors,” wrote Alva Johnston in The New Yorker in 1952, “have classed his Everglades Club, in Palm Beach, and his Cloister, in Boca Raton, among the most beautiful buildings in America.” Frank Lloyd Wright was a fan. As time passed, Addison Mizner grew increasingly stout and eccentric. He was often seen shopping in Palm Beach in his dressing gown and pajamas. He died of a heart attack in 1933.
The Wall Street crash of 1929 brought an end to most of the more notable excesses of the day. E. T. Stotesbury was hit particularly hard. In a futile effort to calm his bank balances, he begged his wife to limit her expenditures on entertainment to no more than $50,000 a month, but the redoubtable Mrs. Stotesbury found that a cruel and impossible restriction. Mr. Stotesbury was well on his way to insolvency when, providentially, he too dropped dead of a heart attack on May 16, 1938. Eva Stotesbury lived on until 1946, but had to sell jewelry, paintings, and houses to keep herself modestly afloat. After her death a property developer bought El Mirasol and demolished it to put more houses on the same piece of land. Some twenty other Mizner houses in Palm Beach—the greater part of what he built, in short—have since been torn down as well.
The Vanderbilt mansions with which we began this survey didn’t fare much better. The first having been built on Fifth Avenue in 1883, the Vanderbilt mansions were already being demolished by 1914. By 1947, all had gone. Not one of the family’s country houses was lived in for a second generation.
Remarkably, almost nothing was saved from inside the buildings either. When the eponymous head of the Jacob Volk Wrecking Company was asked why he didn’t salvage the priceless Carrara marble fireplaces, the Moorish tiles, the Jacobean paneling, and other treasures contained within the William K. Vanderbilt residence on Fifth Avenue, he gave the questioner a withering look. “I don’t deal in second-hand stuff,” he said.
* Commodore Vanderbilt was also intimately acquainted with the frailties of iron mentioned in Chapter IX. In 1838, a train he was riding on the Camden and Amboy Railroad derailed when an axle broke. Vanderbilt’s carriage was sent crashing down a thirty-foot embankment. Two passengers were killed. Vanderbilt was seriously injured but survived. Also on the train but uninjured was the former president John Quincy Adams.
* Edison’s family was also in Canada till shortly before he was born. It is interesting to consider how different North American history might have been if Edison and Bell had both stayed north of the border and done their inventing there.
• CHAPTER XI •
THE STUDY
I
In 1897, a young ironmonger in Leeds named James Henry Atkinson took a small piece of wood, some stiff wire, and not much else, and created one of the great contraptions of history: the mousetrap. It is one of several useful items—the paper clip, the zipper, and the safety pin are among the many others—that were invented in the late nineteenth century and were so nearly perfect from the outset that they have scarcely been improved on in all the decades since. Atkinson sold his patent for £1,000, a very considerable sum for the time, and went on to invent other things, but nothing that secured him more money or immortality.
Atkinson’s mousetrap, manufactured under the proprietary name Little Nipper, has sold in the tens of millions, and continues to dispatch mice with brisk and brutal efficiency all over the world. We own several Little Nippers ourselves, and hear the dreadful snap of a terminal event far more often than we would wish to. Two or three times a week in winter we