Vizcaya: The Villa and the Labor That Built It

James Deering was the vice president of International Harvester, one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world, and he spent ten weeks a year in his house. The other forty-two he spent in Chicago, managing the business that paid for it.

The house he built on Biscayne Bay between nineteen fourteen and nineteen twenty-two is Vizcaya, a seventy-room Mediterranean Revival villa with Italian Renaissance gardens on a thirty-acre property south of downtown Miami. It required more than one thousand workers to build over five years, a workforce drawn primarily from the Bahamian and African American labor community centered in Coconut Grove. These were skilled carpenters, stonemasons, plasterers, and decorators. They built the stone barge that anchors the bayfront, the formal gardens with their fountained axes, and the rooms Deering filled with European antiques spanning five centuries. Deering died in nineteen twenty-five. The house passed through several owners before becoming a museum.

For most of the museum's history, those workers did not appear in the interpretive narrative. The tour told the story of Deering, his architect Paul Chalfin, and the European craftsmen who produced the interior ornamental work. The Bahamian and African American labor that constituted the bulk of the workforce was simply not in the story. The museum has worked in recent decades to correct this, naming workers where records survive, explaining the Coconut Grove labor economy, and framing Vizcaya as a South Florida story rather than a European transplant story. The transformation in what the museum tells you is itself a historical document about how American institutions have chosen, across a century, whose labor counts.

Deering occupied the finished villa for approximately ten weeks per year. It was the most labor-intensive season home ever built in Florida. The workers who built it lived in Coconut Grove and were paid wages that placed them above the lowest tier of South Florida labor and nowhere near the wealth their work created. Vizcaya is now a National Historic Landmark. Their names are in the archive, if you ask.