St. Augustine: The Hotel Alcazar - City Hall - The Lightner Museum
St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in North America. It was also the original home of Florida tourism. Henry Flagler was one of the founders, along with John D. Rockefeller and Samuel Andrews, of Standard Oil. However when his first wife became ill, Flagler traveled to Jacksonville FL. After she died, he remarried and moved to St. Augustine with his new bride. The Cyclopaedia of American biography, 1918 Flagler quickly saw that Florida could become a tourist destination for the rich of the northern United States. To facilitate this he built his first hotel in St. Augustine - The Ponce de León . Today this masterpiece is the heart of Flagler College. He also purchased the Florida East Coast Railway to provide passage south from Jacksonville. Advertisement from 1913 In 1887 Flagler built The Hotel Alcazar, as an overflow hotel for the Ponce de León. The two hotels sat across the street from each other. The building is base...