FLAGLER’S ST.AUGUSTINE

May 10, 2012  Dateline St. Augustine, FL USA

Since Rich and Carol walked off to see St Augustine today I will let them tell you what they saw.

Early this morning, schools of lady fish trapped some small fish and were thrashing around hitting the smaller fish with their tails.  Several egrets came by to enjoy the feast.  One egret in particular seemed to the king of the hill.  He staked out a great spot where the smaller fish would jump on to some floating reeds and all he had to do was pick them up, no sticking his bill in the water.  Whenever another egret would come by he would pull up his feathers and chase the interloper away.

Our good friends on MARY FRANCES IV gave Rich a book he has been reading on Henry Flagler, so rather than write about all of the usual oldest city sites I, Rich, thought I would write about what Flagler left behind.

Henry Flagler built a luxury hotel in St Augustine called the Ponce de Leon.  The hotel today serves as the center piece of Flagler College.  It is not possible to get the whole front of the hotel in a single picture, but here is the best I could do.  The hotel, built in the late1880’s, had running water, electricity as well as elevators but most of all it had elegance.  Since the word Leon in Spanish means lion Flagler circled each of the main rooms with the heads of small lions.  But these lions were different; each had a light bulb in its mouth.  In the dining room they had and still have white bulbs, but in the court yard the bulbs were red.  In the courtyard there is a water fountain that also serves as a sun dial.  The building was built with some new material—poured concrete. Flagler wanted his hotel to stand the test of time.

Flagler believed that only God was perfect therefore when he had a mosaic floor laid in the rotunda of the hotel he, on purpose, had a mistake made in the very intricate design.  The error was made where the guests would walk into the hotel.  As they stepped in they would be so awe struck by the magnificence of the rotunda that they would look up and step over or on the error.  Notice that one of points is missing a white tile, that is the intended error.

On each end of the hotel there is a bell tower.  These bell towers contained 8,000 gallons of water so that the guests could have running water. 

Across the street from the Ponce de Leon, Flagler built the Alcazar Hotel.  This hotel, not quite the size of the Ponce de Leon, was for the more sporting guests.  It had a gym, indoor pool with a moveable roof, tennis courts and other things to make the guests happy.

St. Augustine exists today because of Henry M. Flagler