Flagler's Hotel Ponce de Leon

The grand towers rising over King Street were once the Hotel Ponce de Leon, the most lavish resort of Gilded Age America. It was the dream of Henry Flagler, a co-founder of Standard Oil, who fell in love with Saint Augustine and set out to turn it into the Newport of the South. The hotel opened in January of eighteen eighty-eight.

Its young architects, John Carrere and Thomas Hastings, were barely out of their twenties, and this was their first great commission. They built it of poured concrete mixed with crushed coquina shell, one of the first major concrete buildings in the country. Flagler's friend Thomas Edison helped wire it for electric light, powered by its own dynamos, when electricity was still a marvel.

Inside, Louis Comfort Tiffany designed the interiors. The dining room still holds its Tiffany stained-glass windows, still in daily use. For a few golden decades the wealthy came south on Flagler's railroad to winter here in splendor.

The hotel closed in nineteen sixty-seven, and the next year it became Flagler College. Students today eat beneath those Tiffany windows in the very room where America's Gilded Age elite once dined.