El Mirasol, Spanish Colonial Revival mansion in Palm Beach, Florida
El Mirasol was a 37-room Spanish Colonial Revival mansion at 348 North Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach, Florida. Designed by Addison Mizner, it had pale pink stucco walls, a red clay tile roof, and a round tower with a conical roof at the left of its symmetrical facade. The property stretched two blocks from the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean and included a 40-car garage, a tea house, an auditorium, and a private zoo.
El Mirasol was built for financier Edward T. Stotesbury, who hired Addison Mizner at the urging of his second wife, Lucretia (Eva) Stotesbury. Mizner completed the 37-room Spanish Colonial Revival mansion at 348 North Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach in 1920. Lucretia Stotesbury directed several additions over the years, and the house was demolished in 1959.
The picnic sequence in W. C. Fields' silent film It's the Old Army Game (1926), which survives, was shot on the mansion's lawn. The house was demolished in 1959, so the film preserves a record of the Stotesbury estate as it stood.
El Mirasol no longer stands: it was demolished in 1959, so there is nothing left to tour at 348 North Ocean Boulevard. Visitors can instead look for the stretch of shoreline and Intracoastal frontage the estate once covered, two blocks in all, and see the site where W. C. Fields filmed the picnic scene of It's the Old Army Game in 1926.
Lucretia Stotesbury, Edward's second wife, pushed her husband to hire Addison Mizner and then kept adding to the house herself. By the end the estate ran two blocks from the Intracoastal to the ocean and held a 40-car garage, a tea house, an auditorium and a private zoo. It was razed in 1959.
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