Where the Summer Spends the Winter: A Florida Song.
EDSON, Mary Louise; "Dick" Christie Henderson.
Where the Summer Spends the Winter: A Florida Song.
Rare Original Vintage Songbook for Where the Summer Spends the Winter: A Florida Song
West Palm Beach, FL: Edson and Henderson, 1924.
We're sorry, this item has sold.
Out of Stock
Item Number: 152153
Rare original 1924 vintage songbook published in West Palm Beach for a give away. The phrase “Where the summer spends the winter” is a famous, vintage tourism slogan that has been used to describe the Palm Beaches in Florida since the Gilded Age. In very good condition with creasing, a couple of small closed tears, and light damp staining. Words and music by Mary Louise Edson and “Dick” Christie Henderson. Compliments of the City of West Palm Beach, FL.
The Gilded Age of Palm Beach, Florida, represents one of the most concentrated and extravagant expressions of American wealth and leisure in the history of the nation, a period spanning roughly from the 1890s through the 1920s in which a narrow barrier island off the southeast coast of Florida was transformed from subtropical wilderness into the preeminent winter playground of the American plutocracy. The transformation was initiated almost entirely by Henry Morrison Flagler, the Standard Oil co-founder and railroad magnate whose Florida East Coast Railway extended the reach of American civilization southward along the Atlantic coast, and whose construction of the Royal Poinciana Hotel in 1894 and the Breakers Hotel in 1896 established Palm Beach as the terminus of the winter social season for the nation's most powerful industrial and financial families. The arrival of the architect Addison Mizner in 1918, following his recovery from illness at the home of Paris Singer, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, inaugurated the island's most architecturally distinctive era, as Mizner's synthesis of Spanish Colonial Revival, Moorish, and Mediterranean styles produced a series of private estates and public buildings of extraordinary beauty and ambition for clients including Eva Stotesbury, Anthony Drexel Biddle, Harold Vanderbilt, and the Phipps and Hutton families, giving Palm Beach the Mediterranean fantasy aesthetic that distinguished it from every other American resort community. The Florida land boom of the mid-1920s amplified this extravagance to near-feverish levels, attracting speculative capital from across the country and sustaining a building activity that found its documentary record in publications like This Week in the Palm Beaches, before the catastrophic hurricane of September 1926 and the subsequent financial collapse brought the most gilded chapter of the island's history to an abrupt and permanent close.
