Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,361

This is the grave of Joseph Urban.

Born in 1872 in Vienna, Urban grew up wealthy and went into architecture. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, working under the tutelage of Karl von Hasenauer. He was already receiving commissions by the time he was only 19 years old. And this wasn’t any little commission either. It was to design a new wing for the Abdin Palace in Cairo, which was the seat of Egyptian government until 1952. He became a popular architect yes, but also a designer of stage sets and of illustrated books. In fact, he could pretty much do it all when it came to design. He and his brother in law Heinrich Lefler, later a quite prominent stage designer himself, founded the Hagenbund, an artistic movement that rejected some of the conservative architecture standards of the time. It continued to exist until Hitler banned it in 1938.

Early in his career, it was the set designs that got Urban the most work. He created the sets for around 50 major productions in Vienna, Paris, and London, among other leading cities of Europe. Then in 1911, he came to the United States to make the big money. Like so many artistic emigres of these years, Urban was attracted by the sheer potential to make money in a nation where all this high art stuff was new and the elites really wanted it. William Randolph Hearst became a major booster of his and that was certainly a tap of endless wealth. It was to become the artistic director of the Boston Opera Company, but he ended up doing a lot more than that over the years in the U.S. In fact, his first work in the United States was before he moved here. He won a big time architectural medal for his design of the Austrian Pavilion at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

In 1914, Urban took a new job–designing the sets for Florenz Ziegfeld’s productions, as well as for the Metropolitan Opera. He would work for both into the 1930s. But for all his set designs–which is an awfully ephemeral art form since they aren’t designed with any kind of permanence, it’s probably his building design that we know Urban more for today. He designed the Ziegfeld Theater in 1927, including its noted rotating stage and glass balconies, not to mention its huge female figurines and Bible scenes painted on the walls. Subtle! It was after that Hearst–who loved him a nightclub–hired him to design sets for his Hollywood productions, particularly the largely forgettable Marion Davies vehicles he created for his mistress.

Urban was also one of the people who introduced Art Deco design into the United States.He got his architectural license in the U.S. in 1926 and he worked pretty heavily in architecture after that. Unfortunately, not that many of his buildings remain. But some still exist, including the main building for The New School in New York, the base of Hearst Tower in New York, and several buildings in Palm Beach, including but not only The Bath and Tennis Club and The Paramount Theater. Others include the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn and the redesigned Central Park Casino, which was demolished in 1936. The reason he had a number of buildings in Florida is that he hated the cold. Florida had seriously opened for snowbirds beginning in the 1920s and there was a huge demand for high end buildings by the people who could afford to live here, as opposed to today’s snowbird, an angry racist Irish-American on a government pension who hates the government except for his pension and who lives in a modular home or some McMansion monstrosity in The Villages. But enough about my love for Florida. Anyway, Urban spent the last years of his life wintering in Florida and living in a large apartment at the St. Regis Hotel in New York with his wife Mary Porter Beegle, herself a well known dancer and theater person. Incidentally, we aren’t really discussing her much in this post because she is buried in New Jersey.

However, Urban has one very famous building still standing. You all know this building. Now, this is not Urban’s fault. We can’t really hold him accountable for who bought his building long after his death. But Joseph Urban is the designer of Mar-a-Lago. I couldn’t help laughing when I discovered that, which was just when I was writing the post. He designed this building for Marjorie Merriweather Post, the cereal heiress, in 1924. He went all in on the mixing of European styles for the grandeur and exotica that Americans ate up like their Bran Flakes. Now, there is an interesting story here that I didn’t know. After Post died, she left the building to the National Park Service in the hope that presidents would use it as a winter White House. But the NPS didn’t want to pay for the significant upkeep. So eventually they put it up for sale and it was purchased by Donald Trump. Now, the worst person in American history did not realize just how much the upkeep would cost on it so in 1944 he made it into the private club that it is today. I always thought the “winter White House” thing from the Trump administration was just typical bluster, but in fact I guess it wasn’t an inappropriate title after all.

In 1933, Urban had a heart attack in his New York apartment and died. He was 61 years old.

Let’s look at some of Urban’s work:

Joseph Urban is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other leaders of the Art Deco movement in the United States, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Walter Dorwin Teague is in Brooklyn and Edward McKnight Kauffer is in The Bronx. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.