Ponce de León Hotel

Henry Flagler called it the hardest thing he ever did — not making the Standard Oil fortune, but building a hotel in the oldest city in America that could satisfy Gilded Age luxury and still belong to a town that had been Spanish for three hundred years. The Hotel Ponce de León, opened January 12, 1888, was his answer: Spanish Renaissance Revival by Carrère and Hastings in their first commission, the first major building in the country constructed entirely of poured concrete, wired by Edison himself, with stained glass and interiors by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Guests paid for the whole season — January to Easter — whether they stayed or not.

The dining room seated three hundred guests under a forty-eight-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling, each table with its own dedicated waiter. The courtyard fountain aerated the hotel's water supply. The towers that gave the skyline its silhouette held thousands of gallons of water for the guests' baths. Flagler built the Alcazar across the street and the Cordova beside it, ran his railroad down the Florida coast to feed them, and effectively invented Florida tourism in a single building campaign — the Ponce was the flagship, the hotel that convinced northern wealth that winter belonged in the ancient city.

The hotel closed in 1967 and reopened the next year as Flagler College — the Tiffany windows, the murals, the carved dining hall all still there, now full of students instead of Vanderbilts. It's one of the great adaptive reuses in the country: the grandest resort of the Gilded Age became a liberal arts campus without losing a single Tiffany panel.

The building Flagler called his hardest problem turned out to be his most durable — the poured-concrete palace that outlasted the hotel business, the railroad, and the man, still the heart of St. Augustine's skyline the way he designed it to be.