RE Log - Fall 2022

FALL 2022 Ransom Everglades LOG 17 Kiehnel himself became more prolific and influential: he would go on to design the Coconut Grove Playhouse, Coral Gables Congregational Church, Miami Senior High School and many more. Arched monastery windows with carved wood balconies. Churchlike chimneys jutting out of barrel-tile roofs. Intricate concrete ”gingerbread” curled on top of imposing wooden doors that wouldn’t look out of place in an 18th-century Spanish prison. La Brisa had it all. And the burgeoning city of Miami took notice. The house once again became a nexus of social life in the Grove, this time among a new crop of wealthy transplants who were setting up shop along other bayfront tracts of land known as “Millionaire’s Row.” From their Kiehnel- designed patio with an ornate bench copied from Rome’s Ludovisi Throne, the Semples hosted frequent tea parties, garden parties and evening soirees with 200 guests. The house became a fixture of the society pages of the Miami Metropolis , celebrated for its singular beauty as well as its power as a fundraising venue for local institutions like St. Stephen’s. Its landscaping alone so inflamed the envy of the local glitterati that the Coconut Grove police reportedly led a late-night sting operation to catch a pair of bougainvillea thieves. Arrival of Fields and lions After the Semples died, their son sold the house in 1949 to Minna Field Burnaby, a wealthy relative of Chicago department store magnate (and future Field Museum of Natural History namesake) Marshall Field. Minna was a firebrand with a passion for animals, and soon after moving to the Grove she established a Sunday tradition for herself: each week she would visit the Crandon Park Zoo on Key Biscayne and watch a lion show headlined by the zoo’s director and chief animal trainer, Julia Rand Allen. At that point, Julia was not just the youngest zoo director in the United States (at age 22) but a kind of national animal celebrity. She had toured around the world with her lion act, catching the attention of magazines like Life and Vanity Fair . She was singular, bold, fearless — the kind of person who earns a correspondence degree in taxidermy at age 14 under a male pseudonym. She preferred to think of herself as a lion “trainer,” she would always say, because big cats can never truly be tamed. She and Minna hit it off. And she also hit it off with Henry Field, Minna’s son, who was by then a world- renowned anthropologist, archaeologist and explorer. In the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, Henry led or took part in some revelatory expeditions to the Middle East, including an excavation of Kish (a site in modern-day Iraq) that unearthed the oldest extant stone-wheeled chariot. A species of Middle Eastern viper, Pseudocerastes fieldi , was named after him. During World War II, he also served as “Anthropologist to the President,” preparing special reports on Middle Eastern cultures and societies — those most disrupted by G.I.s on the ground — for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Julia Rand Allen Field Early exterior views of La Brisa