Four years after Hurricane Irma, Vizcaya’s “astonishing” boat basin is coming back
Just about 100 years ago, when industrialist James Deering was at home and receiving guests at his lavish Vizcaya palace at the jungle’s edge on Biscayne Bay, the properly grand way to arrive was by boat.
There were few roads in what was then the wild outskirts of Miami and Coconut Grove, so Deering and friends would alight at a limestone-covered yacht landing on one end of a curving harbor basin, and walk across a short, salmon-colored Venetian bridge to the villa’s vast east terrace.
In the near distance at the other end of the little harbor and its stone bulkhead, across a Venetian bridge that’s a twin to the first, they could see an alluring butter-colored tea house pavilion with a spring-green latticework cupola.
Just off the terraced shoreline lay the piece de resistance, one of Vizcaya’s most elaborate and whimsical treasures: a large protective breakwater shaped like a barge with twin prows, bedecked in all manner of classically inspired statuary, obelisks, urns, hand-carved balustrades and — at the time — lush plantings, fountains and a latticework “summer house.”
And so for the most part it all stood until 2017, when Hurricane Irma delivered a battering to the harbor that toppled statues, urns and balusters, tore off chunks of limestone and concrete and took the cupola off the tea house — damage that’s only now being extensively, and exactingly, repaired.
By the time the restoration work is complete sometime in mid-July, the distinctively unique bayfront at Vizcaya Museum & Gardens will likely look the best it has in decades. The $2.7 million restoration job’s conclusion will cap the publicly owned landmark’s long recovery from Irma, which also flooded the villa’s basement and ravaged its famed gardens.
“It’s a lot of detail work, a lot of care,” Kelly Ciociola(cq), Vizcaya’s conservator, said of the latest restoration effort.
The work, to be funded entirely by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through Miami-Dade County, has been by necessity slow and exceedingly meticulous. It’s driven by the goal of restoring the intricately detailed architectural elements pretty much to where they were a century ago, when Vizcaya was conjured up out of nothing by the Midwestern Deering, whose father founded what later became International Harvester.
Deering, a sportsman and conservationist keenly interested in the bay and the subtropical flora of Miami, bought land containing mangroves and a hardwood hammock from Mary Brickell, the mother of Miami. There he envisioned an Italian Renaissance palazzo poised on the edge where land and sea meet. Vizcaya was the product of Deering’s extravagant wealth and spending allied with his informed taste and supported by a team of talented designers and collaborators. Deering and his team bought original sculptures, fountains, artwork and furnishings from Europe for the house and the Italian-inspired gardens.
After years of design and construction work, Deering moved into Vizcaya in 1916, though the gardens weren’t yet finished, and began inviting prominent guests. Among them was artist John Singer Sargent, who during an extended visit in 1917 made a series of watercolors of Vizcaya, including one of the tea house and boat basin.
Vizcaya was to be the last of the grand Gilded Age villas and estates built by the fabulously wealthy bankers and industrialists of the day. In its particular way, it’s also one of the most romantic — designed and rusticated to look centuries old, while boasting modern comforts, all in the midst of a natural subtropical lansdscape.
In that spirit, the features of the boat basin were meant to look and feel antique, though none were. But today’s conservators and contractors must preserve that patina, so that nothing seems jarring or incongruous. That means using original materials where possible, or reproductions and materials made to rapidly weather to match what’s already there. Where structural supports are added, like bolts to secure urns, they must be invisible.
The job also presented unusual challenges. To reach the barge and portions of the yacht landing in the shallow water, contractors had to devise a floating bridge and tiny rafts to carry crews and materials, since scaffolds were impossible to install and the bay bottom is delicate and protected.
The tea house now has a gleaming, restored top — made of salvaged redwood and painted the original green — and bears a new coat of the original buttercream color. The Tradesmen Group, the contractors in charge of the restoration, also cleaned and brought back to life the marble flooring, and restored a series of cast stucco Classically inspired reliefs on the interior and exterior walls that really pop now.
The yacht landing has been reinforced with steel and practically rebuilt, mostly with original oolitic limestone that divers rescued from the bay bottom.
The entire top was lifted off, and contractors from South-Miami based Red Door construction, specialists in restoration work, found the landing’s concrete base had little in the way of structural support except for sand and a few steel rods. The sand was replaced by heavy gravel and more steel reinforcement was put in. Then the limestone pieces, supplemented with new reproductions where the old couldn’t be found or repaired, were fitted back together by trial and error to match the original surface pattern.
“Finding where the pieces fit was like putting together a puzzle.” said Annette Sosa, project manager for Red Door.
The contractor had extensive preparation. Its team has worked on the restoration of historic Coral Gables entrances, the Biltmore Hotel, and the historic 1933 federal courthouse and post office in downtown Miami, now owned and being restored by Miami Dade College.
The little Venetian bridge, taken apart by the storm, looks like its charming old self again.
Red Door and its subcontractor Castle Makers, experts in fabricating and restoring architectural features in stone, also undertook the biggest job on the site. They are giving the barge, made of concrete covered in oolitic limestone, what may be the most thorough restoration it’s received since the great Miami hurricane of 1926 swept away its summer house, fountains and trees forever.
Those won’t be coming back. But the expert team of restoration contractors has been working for months putting everything else into place. That’s meant hoisting dislodged stonework with cranes and carefully rejoining the pieces, filling cracks, repairing and restoring what can be fixed and painstakingly reproducing what can’t be, including stone balusters with a unique “drip” design that must be shaped by hand.
The detail work is critical because the barge is regarded as one of Vizcaya’s unique masterpieces — “an astonishing work of art and construction,” according to eminent landscape architect Laurie Olin, co-author of a book on the estate.
“It is truly a wonderful vision, or grand folly, and there is nothing quite like it anywhere in the world,” Olin wrote of the barge in “Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers.”
Over the decades, the barge was repeatedly hit hard by hurricanes, including 1992 by Andrew and Katrina and Wilma in 2005. But the impact from Irma was so great that Vizcaya conservation staffers think something other than wind and storm surge may have struck it. Chunks of the base were torn off and heavy stone balusters were knocked asunder.
“It’s had some patchwork over the years, but it’s been very resilient and enduring,” Ciociola said.
One of the four female figures that graced the barge, part of an ensemble of statuary and carvings by noted sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder, fell and has been removed indoors for repair and safekeeping. A copy will be made from a mold and installed on the barge. Eventually the three remaining original “herms,’’ as that type of statuary is known, will also be replaced with copies.
The boat basin was especially dear to Deering, who owned a small fleet of powerboats, houseboats and work vessels kept in a boathouse behind the yacht landing that was wiped out by the ‘26 hurricane. He often cruised the bay and fished in the Keys for days aboard his favorite yacht, Nepenthe, named after the fictional ancient Greek drug of forgetfulness, or cure for sorrow.
Deering did not long enjoy Vizcaya. He died in 1925 while at sea, on a ship returning from Europe to Biscayne Bay, where he’d hoped once more to set his eyes on his palace on the shore.
This story was originally published June 28, 2021 at 5:53 PM.