1927 | Architecture, Real Estate
Architecture, Real Estate
A housing estate designed by J. J. P. Oud is completed at Hoek van Holland. The rows of two-story buildings have curved shop windows at their ends.
The 47-story American Insurance Union Citadel at Columbus, Ohio, is completed at the corner of Broad and Front streets.
New York's Graybar building opens on Lexington Avenue adjoining Grand Central Terminal. Named for the 2-year-old Graybar Electric Co. (whose employees will buy it in 1929), the 30-story building has upwards of 1 million square feet of rentable floor space—more than any other office building in the world.
Mar-a-Lago is completed at Palm Beach, Fla., for Postum Cereal head Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, E. F. Hutton. Shaped like a crescent with a 75-foot tower and surrounded by 17 acres with guest houses, staff quarters, cutting gardens, and a nine-hole golf course, the 115-room mansion has taken 4 years to complete, three ships from Genoa have brought the Dorian stone for its outer walls, the ancient red roofing tiles have come from Cuba along with black and white marble inlay for the floors, Post has picked up 38,000 antique Spanish tiles for indoor wall decoration and has helped Palm Beach survive an economic depression by hiring all available local craftsmen to work on the $7 million project.
Contractor Kate Gleason, now 62, builds a concrete community at Sausalito, Calif., based on principles of Indian adobe construction (see 1921). Suburbs all over America have begun to follow her example.
Boston's Ritz Hotel opens May 18 at the corner of Arlington and Newberry streets, opposite the Public Garden, with a dining room that will be famous for its scrod breakfast.
Boston's Statler Hotel opens with 1,150 rooms on 14 floors.
Washington's Hay-Adams Hotel opens on Lafayette Square. Armenian-born architect Mihrail Mesrobian, 38, has designed the hotel to replace the Romanesque Hay-Adams houses built in the 1880s by the late Henry Hobson Richardson for author Henry Adams and former secretary of state John Hay.
Chicago's Stevens Hotel opens on Michigan Avenue. The 3,000-room Stevens is the largest hotel in the world (see Hilton, 1945).
Yosemite Park's Ahwanee Hotel opens July 14 with 103 rooms, but most visitors continue to stay at the Curry Village that opened in 1899.
Self-made Midwestern utilities magnate Clarence Geist pays $71,500 in November to acquire the Ritz-Carlton Cloister that opened early last year at Boca Raton, Fla. He will pour $8 million into the place, turning it into the exclusive Boca Raton Club whose members pay only $100 per year in dues but thousands in initiation fees. Plutocrats, entertainment stars, and politicians will arrive at Boca in private railway cars and yachts to enjoy the lavishly appointed club's world-class golf course, swimming pool, and other facilities, but crooked land deals have ended the Florida land boom and architect Addison Mizner is bankrupt.
Los Angeles's Mayflower Hotel opens December 26 across from the Biltmore Hotel on Grand Avenue.
Honolulu's Royal Hawaiian Hotel opens at Waikiki Beach. Alexander & Baldwin has financed the new hotel.