You can tell a lot about a man by how he uses his property. Some get into mischief (Henry II, I’m looking at you); others find more fruitful adventures.  George Merrick got bored one day in the height of the American Jazz Age, and carved up his fruit grove into a city of astonishing beauty. He founded a university (now one of America’s best), and like all good creators, on the sixth day he did his most interesting work: in this case, the Biltmore Hotel, an imposing design in Moorish-Spanish vocabulary that leaps out of a sleepy suburb like a lighthouse that lost its way to the sea.

Merrick designed the Biltmore to be the centerpiece of his city, and for most of her history, she’s been just that.  She opened during the Gatsby years, when the world came to drink champagne by pool with Judy Garland and the Duke of Windsor, or to dance with Ginger Rogers on the endless marble terrazzo while Paul Whiteman conducted the band.

Then the war came, and the Biltmore became a hospital.  They plugged the windows with concrete and covered the precious floors with linoleum – I suppose in an effort to show the growing Soviet menace that we, too, could be as dead to beauty as the most hardened communist. We continue that noble tradition with Art in Public Places, a title that exercises the limits of irony.

All sorts of great ghost stories popped up around the hospital years – my favorite being the one of the handicapped woman who purportedly wheeled herself off (or did someone help??) the 13th floor one dark, stormy, &c. night. But, alas, the Biltmore’s spooky days are mostly gone – though a few charming, forgotten corners remain.  She reopened in the 80s as a luxury hotel.  In the 90s, the tenants (the city owns the property) remodeled her to return her to her original splendor. She is the center of life for much of the neighborhood: residents eat at her restaurants (one of which contends each year for the title of Miami’s Best); they drink at her bars and swim in her pool; they exercise at her gym and play tennis on her courts; they spend mornings on her golf course and nights in her ballrooms and live theater.