The Hotel Alcazar and the Lightner Museum
Near St. Augustine, Florida
Directly across King Street from Flagler College stands the old Hotel Alcazar, now the Lightner Museum. Henry Flagler opened it not long after its grander sister, the Ponce de Leon, and hired the same young architects, Carrere and Hastings. The Alcazar was built for pleasure.
Behind its Spanish Renaissance walls lay Turkish baths, a Russian bath, a gymnasium, a ballroom, a bowling alley, and above all an enormous indoor swimming pool, said to be the largest in the nation at the time and the first indoor pool in Florida. National championship swim meets were held here in the nineteen twenties. Then came the crash.
The Alcazar closed after the season of nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty-one, a casualty of the Great Depression, and sat empty for sixteen years. In nineteen forty-seven a Chicago publisher named Otto Lightner bought it for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to house his vast collections of Gilded Age treasures. The Lightner Museum opened the following year.
Today the building holds both the museum and Saint Augustine's city hall, and a restaurant sits in the drained basin of that once-famous indoor pool.
