Henry Flagler arrived in St. Augustine in 1885 with railroad money and a clear idea of what a three-century-old Spanish colonial town could become: the first stop on a Gilded Age resort circuit built for wealthy Northerners riding his Florida East Coast Railway south. He commissioned two young, largely unproven architects — John Carrère and Thomas Hastings — to build the Hotel Ponce de León, a poured-concrete showpiece wired by Thomas Edison and decorated with Tiffany stained glass. Across the street went the Hotel Alcazar, complete with what the record calls the world's largest indoor swimming pool. When his daughter died in 1889, Flagler built a memorial church in Venetian Renaissance style, its copper dome cast in Italy, its baptismal font cut from a single block of Siena marble. The Depression closed the Alcazar in 1932. The Ponce de León became Flagler College in 1968. What Flagler built, the city kept.
