Second Fire
On March 18, 1925, The Breakers burned again, the fire started by an electric curling iron left on. The architectural firm of Schultze and Weaver modeled its 550-room replacement after the Villa Medici in Rome, this time working with New York based Turner Construction Company and a local well known Palm Beach contractor Eugene Hammond who worked on the Kennedy Estate and built the first theater in West Palm Beach. The contractors decided to abandon the wooden construction for fireproof concrete. Built by 1,200 construction workers, the hotel reopened on December 29, 1926 to considerable acclaim. The lobby's ceiling was painted by Alexander Bonanno, a classically trained New York City artist who taught at Cooper's Union. Today, the hotel and grounds occupy 140 acres (57 hectares) beside the Atlantic Ocean.
This Hotel influenced the Hotel Nacional in Havana Cuba.
The Breakers Hotel Complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. In 1973, the 105-acre (42 ha) listed area included 15 contributing buildings and one other contributing object. On April 18, 2012, the AIA's Florida Chapter ranked the Breakers seventh on its list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places.
The hotel is located at South County Road.
Read more about this topic: Breakers Hotel
Famous quotes containing the word fire:
“As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting
Neither fire nor water,
Vibrating to the distant pinch
And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a case like the present.”
—William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879)