Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

You are passing one of the most improbable buildings in America. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens sits right on Biscayne Bay, a full-blown Italian Renaissance villa dropped into a South Florida hammock, and the story of how it got here is as extravagant as the building itself.

James Deering made his fortune through International Harvester. In nineteen oh two, the banker J.P. Morgan brokered a merger that brought the Deering family's harvester business together with the McCormick Reaper Company and several others to create the largest agricultural machinery firm in the country. Deering became vice president, overseeing the Illinois manufacturing plants, and by the time he was done he had more money than he knew what to do with. He decided to spend some of it on a winter retreat in Miami.

Construction began in nineteen twelve. At its peak, Vizcaya employed more than one thousand workers, which at the time represented something close to ten percent of Miami's entire population. The architect was Francis Burrall Hoffman. The landscape was shaped by Diego Suarez, who had trained in Florence and adapted formal Italianate garden design to the heat and humidity of South Florida. But the guiding aesthetic force was Paul Chalfin, a painter and former museum curator who served as artistic director. Chalfin traveled through Italy between nineteen twelve and nineteen fourteen buying up antiques, architectural fragments, and decorative objects for a house that had not yet been built. The collection that fills more than seventy rooms today was assembled before the walls were poured.

The main house opened on Christmas Day, nineteen sixteen. Offshore, a stone breakwater was sculpted by Alexander Stirling Calder, the father of the mobile artist, to look like a permanently anchored ship, its hull decorated with carved sea creatures and mythological figures. It is still there. The nineteen twenty-six Miami hurricane wrecked the rose garden when saltwater flooded in, but the house survived.

Deering wintered here every year until his death in September nineteen twenty-five, when he died aboard the steamship Paris crossing back to the United States. He had used Vizcaya for fewer than ten seasons. In nineteen fifty-two, his heirs sold the main house and formal gardens to Dade County at below-market value, and it opened as a public museum. Today it is a National Historic Landmark, and the stone barge still rides the bay as if waiting for a tide that will never come.