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WEEKEND, APRIL 16-17, 2022
THE 651st EDITION
HEWLETT EAST ROCKAWAY
JEWISH CENTER
JUDITH BERDY
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
For some years during my childhood my family lived in East Rockaway in Nassau County.
Our synagogue was designed by Morris Lapidus, better known for Miami Beach hotel designs of the 1950’s.
The building has grown and I have not returned to see it recently. I decided to check out the design of 60+ years ago from Wikimedia Commons.
How about the house of worship from your childhood ? Send us an image or two.
Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center. LOC gsc.5a25726.jpg
Title: Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center.
Abstract/medium: Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (Library of Congress)
Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center. LOC gsc.5a25728.jpg
Title: Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center.
Abstract/medium: Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (Library of Congress)
Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center, 295 Main St., East Rockaway, Long Island. LOC gsc.5a25532.jpg
Title: Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center, 295 Main St., East Rockaway, Long Island.
Abstract/medium: Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (Library of Congress)
Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center, 295 Main St., East Rockaway, Long Island. LOC gsc.5a25533.jpg
Title: Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center, 295 Main St., East Rockaway, Long Island.
Abstract/medium: Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (Library of Congress)
Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center, 295 Main St., East Rockaway, Long Island. LOC gsc.5a25534.jpg
Title: Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Community Center, 295 Main St., East Rockaway, Long Island.
Abstract/medium: Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (Library of Congress)
Most of the exterior has been preserved.
MORRIS LAPIDUS, ARCHITECT EXTRAODINAIRE
Morris Lapidus,an architect long derided and later praised for designing some of South Florida’s gaudiest, glitziest and most glamorous hotels in the 1950’s and 60’s, died yesterday at his home in Miami Beach. He was 98 and lived in a white high-rise he designed that stands near three of his most glittering creations, the Fontainebleau, Americana and Eden Roc hotels.
Lapidus’s style was mockingly called Miami Beach French, and critics scorned the ”obscene panache” with which he created what they called his palaces of kitsch, many of which have been razed or remodeled. But as Miami Beach underwent a renaissance, becoming an trendy place for the jet set, the critical winds blew in his direction. After being shunned by architecture critics and architects for much of his long career, he and his work are now referred to with respect by a new generation of writers and postmodernist architects — among them Rem Koolhaas and Philippe Starck. He had been, several critics decided, ”a postmodernist long before the term existed.”
Mr. Lapidus was steeped in classical architecture, but he created an eye-catching mixture of French Provincial and Italian Renaissance — with whiplash-curve facades and a splashy use of color — and he lavished ornament upon ornament. His most famous work was the Fontainebleau, built in 1954 and still a South Florida landmark. Its interiors combined 27 colors. It had what was called a staircase to nowhere that actually led to a modest cloakroom, so that dinner guests could leave their coats and parade down in their sparkling jewelry and decolletage to the delighted stares of the crowds in the hotel’s lobby.
Architectural understatement was not his style. He put live alligators in a terrarium in the lobby of the Americana, he said, so that guests would ”know they were in Florida.” One writer described his designs as ”emblems of tail-fin chic.” A critic called his dramatic decorative style, which flouted the popular, ubiquitous and understated ideas of Bauhaus Modernism, ”the epitome of the apogee.”
The Fontainebleau was once called ”the nation’s grossest national product.” The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 1970 that a purple-and-gold Lapidus-designed bellhop uniform at the Americana hit the eye ”like an exploding gilded eggplant.” Another critic suggested that his appeal was to the ”great mass of people who don’t know the difference between architecture and Coney Island.” When he designed the Summit Hotel (now the Loews New York) on Lexington Avenue in New York, the joke was that it was too far from the beach. Now getting the last laugh, the hotel is undergoing a $17 million renovation, to reopen as the Metropolitan next year.
Did you know you can share 10 gift articles a month, even with nonsubscribers? Share this article. Mr. Lapidus dismissed the jibes. He proudly referred to the Fontainebleau as ”the world’s most pretentious hotel.”
”I wanted people to walk in and drop dead,” he said of his celebrated hotel lobbies. His work, he said, ”set new standards, and a lot of old-line critics didn’t agree with me.” By the 1980’s, though, he said, that had changed, ”because everyone is doing the unusual now.”
And he was right. His works, critics have said recently, have deservedly become renegade popular landmarks. In an open letter in the Italian design magazine Domus in the 1980’s, the designer Alessandro Mendini gushed over Mr. Lapidus’s ”acrobatic virtuosity.”
He Created the First Known Movie. Then He Vanished. Whatever the critical reception, Mr. Lapidus made a lot of money. Over the decades he designed hundreds of buildings (200 of them hotels, he said) and he calculated that between 1943, when he went out on his own, and 1984, when he retired, he earned more than $50 million in fees.
Many of his innovations in the use of lighting, fabric and color have become staples of American design, and critics have noted that his work exerted enormous influence over the design of one of the biggest and most-visited American tourist attractions — modern-day Las Vegas.
Mr. Lapidus’s faux-French Fontainebleau ”and the sluggish crocodiles in the equally faux jungle under the Americana’s lobby stairs have evolved into the breath-stopping extravaganzas of Caesar’s Palace with its heroic Styrofoam statuary and the Luxor’s sphinx and mirror-glass pyramid,” Ms. Huxtable wrote.
Morris Lapidus (pronounced LAP-i-dus) was born on Nov. 25, 1902, in Odessa, Russia. His family left for the United States the next year and settled in Brooklyn. He attended Boys High School, New York University and Columbia University’s architecture school. He began work as an architect in 1927 and two years later married his Brooklyn sweetheart, Beatrice Perlman. She died in 1992. He is survived by his sons, Richard L., a lawyer in Florida, and Alan H., an architect in the New York area; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
In his autobiography, ”Too Much Is Never Enough” (Rizzoli, 1994), Mr. Lapidus traced his populist style to a childhood influence — his first vision as a Russian immigrant to Coney Island’s Luna Park. It was, he said, the first time he felt ”an emotional surge” about architecture.
”I was standing on the elevated platform just as dusk was falling,” he recalled, ”and the lights went on. To me it was the most beautiful sight I’d seen. Of course, I knew it was hanky-pank, a circus and showmanship. But to a child of 6 it was all the wonders of the world. I never outgrew it.”
At Columbia he planned on becoming a stage designer, but he began his career instead in retail design, pioneering the use of bright colors, lights and sweeping curvilinear forms to sell merchandise.
He developed an ability to make money while many other architects were searching for work. During these years, working for several firms and later for himself, he supervised the construction of more than 500 stores, storefronts and showrooms for Lerner, Bond’s, Howard Clothes and such shoe chains as Florsheim, Baker and A. S. Beck.
”I put merchandise in the open where customers could go over and touch it,” Mr. Lapidus told Daniel F. Cuff in The New York Times in 1981. ”Before that, the customer needed a salesman to get the items out for him. There were counters and heavy cabinets. ‘Let’s open it all up,’ I said.”
He worked for 20 years before designing a building. It was his connection with A. S. Beck that led to his big break. ”A company architect,” Mr. Lapidus told The Times, ”had a friend in the hotel business in Florida who didn’t like what the local architect was doing. My friend told him about me, about my innovative ideas, and I met with him. What experience did I have in hotels? he asked. ‘I have none,’
I told him. ”But I gave him my theories. Get rid of corners. Use sweeping lines. Use light to create unusual effects, Use plenty of color. Try to get drama. Keep changing the floor levels. Keep people moving and excited at all times.”
The Florida hotel man, Ben Novack, hired Mr. Lapidus as associate architect of the Sans Souci. That led to a half-dozen jobs in Miami Beach as an associate architect, including work for the Nautilus, the Algiers and the Biltmore Terrace.
”When Ben Novack announced that he was building the Fontainebleau, it appeared in the New York papers that I was to be the architect,” Mr. Lapidus told The Times. ”But when I called him he said I wasn’t chosen, that I never did a whole hotel and that he just needed a name at the time. It took me a year to convince him. I moved heaven and earth to get that job. ‘If there’s one thing I’m going to do,’ I told myself, ‘I’m going to do the Fontainebleau.’
”And I got it. My first building after 20 years. I did everything — the logos, bellhop uniforms. It was the chance of a lifetime. It brought me instant success. A few years later I wouldn’t touch a shop.”
The 560-room, 14-story Fontainebleau was completed in 1954. Critics used words like splashy, colossal, gaudy and opulent. The Italian-style Eden Roc and the Americana (now the Sheraton Bal Harbour), built with a 40-foot-high terrarium in its lobby, quickly followed.
At the Eden Roc in 1955, to satisfy the developer Harry Muffson, Mr. Lapidus had a copy made of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. When the statue was uncrated, however, Mr. Muffson was outraged. ”Where’s the head?” he demanded. ”For 10 grand, I want a head!”
Fred Trump, the New York builder and father of Donald, admired Mr. Lapidus’s work. ”He liked what I did at Sans Souci,” Mr. Lapidus recalled. ”He said, ‘I want you to do a lobby in an apartment house in Queens. Name any fee you like. You’re my architect, design everything.’ ”
The building, the Edgerton, was in Jamaica Estates, Queens. Mr. Lapidus did the entranceway and lobby and then did several other projects for the Trump organization and for many other clients, among them the Trump Village, Cadman Plaza and Presidential Towers apartments in New York; resort hotels in Jamaica, Switzerland and Aruba; stores; hospitals; office buildings; synagogues (Temple Share Zion in Brooklyn); and nonresort hotels, such as the 50-story Americana (now the Sheraton Center) in New York.
Through it all he developed a flamboyant visual lexicon, using woggles (amoebalike shapes), cheese holes (recessed circular lights in walls and ceilings), beanpoles (ornamental metal rods) and those flying stairways to nowhere.
He also designed 100 condominiums in Florida, and lived his later years in a Miami Beach apartment in a building he designed in the 1960’s. The apartment overlooked Biscayne Bay and was filled with Lucite, gold and mother-of-pearl. In his dining room was an oval Lucite-topped table for 10 that he designed. On the ceiling was one of his famous glittering chandeliers. The table, set with gold-plated flatware, was surrounded by curvaceous walls completely covered with translucent Capiz shells. The table was set off by a semicircle of decorative gold-leafed, fluted columns, which he called beanpoles.
Mr. Lapidus often said that he could not abide a straight line. ”A staircase isn’t a staircase unless it’s curved,” he said. And he expounded upon what he called his moth theory, that people are attracted to light.
But despite his theory, he often acknowledged that he was not really an innovator. ”I wasn’t the founder of a style,” he said. ”I’m just an architect who happened to be carried away by his emotions.”
”I wanted people to feel something,” he said. ”If two people were walking by one of my buildings and one said to the other, ‘Did you notice that building?’ and the other said, ‘What building?’ I’ve failed. But if he looks at it and says, ‘Oh my god,’ or ‘That monstrosity,’ I was glad. Because he noticed me.”
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 19, 2001, Section C, Page 11 of the National edition with the headline: Morris Lapidus, an Architect Who Built Flamboyance Into Hotels, Is Dead at 98
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Text by Judith Berdy
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