William Harneiski was first introduced to tile laying by an uncle in his native village some 60 miles from Warsaw, Poland in the mid-19th century. William had a natural talent for piecing things together, for looking at what may seem random to others and immediately recognizing a pattern by which all the pieces fit perfectly.
His uncle convinced his parents that William’s talent could earn real money for the family if he were to go to Warsaw to work and apprentice under masters. That had to be during his early teens because by the time he was 18 he was working for an architect as a mosaic layer traveling with another two dozen mosaic layers working on projects all over central Europe, a job he kept for only two years before he and a distant cousin left the continent and settled in London.
After less than a year William’s cousin returned to Poland, but he stayed finding plenty of work laying mosaics and tiles in private homes. He became quite popular among a group of Americans who were living in London, largely southerners, cotton and tobacco producers, and owners of railroads and shipping lines. Most had, along with their money, taken refuge in England during the Civil War, and wound up staying. As they built new town homes or county estates, it became quite the rage to have Harneiski lay the entrance hall or the center space in the parlor.
With a steady stream of wealthy clients, William’s business grew until he himself employed a small army of skilled and unskilled laborers and three designers. The projects moved more and more away from where his clients lived to where his clients worked, office buildings, bank lobbies, board room foyers. He had done one church alter space.
William’s day to day involvement in tile laying had long since ceased. He received reports on a weekly basis delivered to his estate in Somerset where he spent his time in a massive studio, sketching new designs. He only ventured from the estate for monthly visits to London for meetings with some new and all the long established clients. In was in one such meeting in the spring of 1886 that finally got William to cross the Atlantic.
On the recommendation and introduction from one of his longest and most faithful clients, he agreed to take a leave of absence from his company and work with a young New York architectural firm designing resort hotels in Florida. There would be lots of mosaics.
The late summer crossing was as smooth as could be expected and William’s introduction to New York was completely absent disappointments. The firm’s projects were visionary, the budgets liberal, and the opportunities for expression near limitless. In early October, the design team traveled to Florida to see the site. The two day train trip from New York to Jacksonville was as much a trip back into time as into a foreign land.
William had been in Jacksonville for nearly a week before the group was ready to travel the 30 miles farther south to St. Augustine and tour the construction site. At dusk the night before the trip, William walked the grounds of the St. James Hotel, its east façade silhouetted against the setting sun. He did not know the words but he felt the feeling of being a chosen person in a chosen time and place.