Bok Tower Gardens

Bok Tower is the singing mountain of Florida — the 205-foot Gothic Revival carillon in pink Georgia marble and fossil coquina that Edward Bok built on Iron Mountain, the highest point on the Florida peninsula at 298 feet. Bok — the Dutch immigrant who'd edited the Ladies' Home Journal to the top of American publishing — bought the hilltop in 1922, hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to design the sanctuary around it, and set Milton Medary's tower among the gardens. President Coolidge dedicated it on February 1, 1929 — Bok's gift to the country that had taken him in.

The carillon was the instrument America didn't know — sixty-one Taylor bells first played in December 1928, a full chromatic instrument where a chime was a toy. Bok courted the press deliberately ('I wanted the American people to know what was being prepared for them'), then watched the newspapers invent the memorials and the five-million-dollar price tag. The bells still play daily — now sixty of them — over the gardens Olmsted laid out as a bird sanctuary.

Bok died in January 1930, in his winter house within sight of the tower, and was buried at its base — the man lies under the instrument he built as a thank-you. The gardens remain what he named them: a sanctuary — the high ground of a flat state ringing twice a day with bells.

Bok Tower is the archive's singing file — the 1929 carillon on Florida's highest ground, built by the immigrant editor as a gift, where Bok lies buried at the base of the tower that still rings over Olmsted's sanctuary.