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Addison Cairns Mizner was born on December 12, 1872 in Benicia, California. Failing to strike it rich in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush he moved to New York and took a job as an apprentice with a Manhattan architectural firm serving 10 years as a country house architect on Long Island. Moved to Palm Beach in 1918 for health reasons. In 1925, Addison was joined by his brother Wilson (who had established himself as a playwright, raconteur and entrepreneur) and the pair established the Mizner Development Corporation, with financial backing from such luminaries as Irving Berlin, W.K. Vanderbilt II, and T. Coleman DuPont. He became Florida's leading architect in the 1920s. Mizner, who also was an accomplished writer, published an autobiography covering his youth, and his days in Alaska and New York, The Many Mizners, in 1932, a year before his death in Palm Beach. He was later inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2001.