Ponce de León Hotel
Encyclopedia
The Ponce de León Hotel was an exclusive hotel in St. Augustine, Florida
, built by millionaire developer and Standard Oil
co-founder Henry M. Flagler and completed in 1888. The Hotel Ponce de Leon was designed in the Spanish Renaissance
style by the New York architects John Carrere and Thomas Hastings
, and was constructed entirely of poured concrete. The hotel also was wired for electricity at the onset, with the power being supplied by D.C. generators supplied by Flagler's friend Thomas Edison
. The building and grounds of the hotel are today a part of Flagler College
.
belonging to Dr. Andrew Anderson
, owner of the Markland house
. The hotel at 74 King st. in the Spanish Quarter section of St. Augustine was designed by architects John Carrere and Thomas Hastings of the firm Carrère and Hastings
in the Spanish Renaissance
Revival style. Construction began in 1885 by contractors and former New England shipbuilders James McGuire and Joseph McDonald; the building was completed in 1887.
The interior elements of the Hotel are credited to Louis Comfort Tiffany
, with Pottier and Stymus responsible for the furnishings. Bernard Maybeck
, whose later designs include the Palace of Fine Arts
in San Francisco, served as a draftsman on the project. Architect Emmanuel Louis Masqueray
who had recently arrrived from Paris, and who would go on to supervise the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, created the watercolor elevation of the hotel. Murals in the Rotunda and Dining Room were completed by the well-known artist George W. Maynard, who a decade later did murals in the Treasures Gallery at the Thomas Jefferson Building
of the Library of Congress
. Noted Italian artist Virgilio Tojetti prepared the ceiling murals in the Grand Parlor.
Originally, the twin towers of the hotel were water storage tanks which contained 8,000 gallons each, providing running water for hotel guests (during World War II, one of the towers served as a brig when the hotel was occupied by the U.S. Coast Guard as a training center). The Hotel Ponce de Leon was the nation’s first major poured-in-place concrete structure and, thanks to the Edison Electric Company, was one of the first buildings in the nation to have electricity.
, has been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Noted personalities including Mark Twain
, Theodore Roosevelt
, Somerset Maugham, Babe Ruth
and Babe Didrikson stayed there. The Artists' Studios portion of the building attracted many up-and-coming American artists, including Martin Johnson Heade
, who painted, among other works, "Giant Magnolias on a Blue Cloth" in Studio No. 7. The painting is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Heade has been honored on a U.S. postage stamp. Others of his works are in the White House and significant galleries. The Hotel Ponce de Leon was one of the few Flagler Hotels to survive the Great Depression
.
The federal government had implemented several of its direct aid programs to revitalizing the community's tourism economy. Authors such as Ernest Hemingway
, Zora Neale Hurston
, Robert Frost
, John Dos Passos
, and, most particularly, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
, visited or lived in St. Augustine during this time, and there was an active community of artists (widely known, since the publication of Robert Torchia's 2001 book of that title, as "The Lost Colony") whose works are now highly collectible.
One of the Coast Guardsmen was Jacob Lawrence
, already a famous artist. According to the official USCG history, "In October 1943 Lawrence was drafted into the Coast Guard, then part of the Navy. As the armed services were still segregated, he, along with all African-American recruits, were automatically limited to the steward’s mate rate. After his basic training at Curtis Bay, Maryland he was assigned to the Ponce de Leon Hotel (commandeered by the Coast Guard) in St. Augustine. Despite his rate, Lawrence was urged to continue his artistic endeavors by his commanding officer, Captain J.S. Rosenthal. He was later transferred to USCGC Sea Cloud
[1944], the first integrated ship in the naval services." He would go on to be the first black artist to have his works hung in both the Vatican and the White House. He never forgot the racism he encountered in St. Augustine.
In 1964 the city became a national stage for demonstrations that brought Martin Luther King to town. On March 31, 1964, more than a hundred students from all-black Richard J. Murray High School marched to downtown and sat-in at the elegant dining room of the Ponce de Leon Hotel. They were met by police with dogs and cattle prods and arrested. It was the first mass sit-in of the civil rights movement in St. Augustine, and it was reported the next day in the New York Times. Additional incidents took place at other segregated locations, including the Monson Motor Lodge and the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge, all of which contributed to passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964
. A number of books recount the events of the civil rights movement that took place at the Ponce de Leon Hotel, including David Colburn's Racial Change and Community Crisis (Columbia University Press, 1985)--which received the 1986 Rembert Patrick Award as the best book on Florida history—and Pulitzer Prize-winner Taylor Branch
's Pillar of Fire (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
In 1968 the hotel became the centerpiece of the newly-established Flagler College
. Beginning in 1976, with the nation's bicentennial anniversary, Flagler College embarked on an ambitious campaign to restore the Hotel and other Flagler-era campus buildings. In 1988 the College celebrated the centennial of the Hotel, and a decade later students created the Flagler's Legacy program which provides guided tours of the Hotel to thousands of visitors annually.
It was added to the U.S.
National Register of Historic Places
in 1975, and became a U.S. National Historic Landmark
on February 21, 2006.
St. Augustine, Florida
St. Augustine is a city in the northeast section of Florida and the county seat of St. Johns County, Florida, United States. Founded in 1565 by Spanish explorer and admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, it is the oldest continuously occupied European-established city and port in the continental United...
, built by millionaire developer and Standard Oil
Standard Oil
Standard Oil was a predominant American integrated oil producing, transporting, refining, and marketing company. Established in 1870 as a corporation in Ohio, it was the largest oil refiner in the world and operated as a major company trust and was one of the world's first and largest multinational...
co-founder Henry M. Flagler and completed in 1888. The Hotel Ponce de Leon was designed in the Spanish Renaissance
Spanish Renaissance
The Spanish Renaissance refers to a movement in Spain, emerging from the Italian Renaissance in Italy during the 14th century, that spread to Spain during the 15th and 16th centuries...
style by the New York architects John Carrere and Thomas Hastings
Thomas Hastings
Thomas Hastings may refer to:*Thomas Hastings , English Puritan settler in early Colonial America; deacon who left Ipswich in 1634; served in many Massachusetts public offices...
, and was constructed entirely of poured concrete. The hotel also was wired for electricity at the onset, with the power being supplied by D.C. generators supplied by Flagler's friend Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...
. The building and grounds of the hotel are today a part of Flagler College
Flagler College
Flagler College, is a private four-year liberal arts college in St. Augustine, Florida, USA and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008.The college has been named in recent years by US News & World Report as one of the southeast region's best comprehensive liberal arts colleges, and is included on...
.
Design
The Hotel Ponce de Leon was built on land that was part of a former orange grove and partially salt marshSalt marsh
A salt marsh is an environment in the upper coastal intertidal zone between land and salt water or brackish water, it is dominated by dense stands of halophytic plants such as herbs, grasses, or low shrubs. These plants are terrestrial in origin and are essential to the stability of the salt marsh...
belonging to Dr. Andrew Anderson
Andrew Anderson (St. Augustine, Florida)
Dr. Andrew Anderson II was a physician, philanthropist, mayor and benefactor of St. Augustine, Florida. Anderson commissioned multiple works of art to adorn a variety of public spaces in the City of St...
, owner of the Markland house
Markland (St. Augustine, Florida)
Markland is a historic mansion in St. Augustine, Florida. Construction on the original part of the coquina shellstone mansion was begun by New York doctor Andrew Anderson Sr. in 1839 just prior to his death in a yellow fever epidemic. Anderson had first arrived in St...
. The hotel at 74 King st. in the Spanish Quarter section of St. Augustine was designed by architects John Carrere and Thomas Hastings of the firm Carrère and Hastings
Carrère and Hastings
Carrère and Hastings, the firm of John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings , located in New York City, was one of the outstanding Beaux-Arts architecture firms in the United States. The partnership operated from 1885 until 1911, when Carrère was killed in an automobile accident...
in the Spanish Renaissance
Architecture of the Spanish Renaissance
Renaissance architecture was that style of architecture which evolved firstly in Florence and then Rome and other parts of Italy as the result of Humanism and a revived interest in Classical architecture...
Revival style. Construction began in 1885 by contractors and former New England shipbuilders James McGuire and Joseph McDonald; the building was completed in 1887.
The interior elements of the Hotel are credited to Louis Comfort Tiffany
Louis Comfort Tiffany
Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements...
, with Pottier and Stymus responsible for the furnishings. Bernard Maybeck
Bernard Maybeck
Bernard Ralph Maybeck was a architect in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century. He was a professor at University of California, Berkeley...
, whose later designs include the Palace of Fine Arts
Palace of Fine Arts
The Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina District of San Francisco, California, is a monumental structure originally constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in order to exhibit works of art presented there. One of only a few surviving structures from the Exposition, it is the only one still...
in San Francisco, served as a draftsman on the project. Architect Emmanuel Louis Masqueray
Emmanuel Louis Masqueray
Emmanuel Louis Masqueray was a Franco-American preeminent figure in the history of American architecture, both as a gifted designer of landmark buildings and as an influential teacher of the profession of architecture.-Biography:...
who had recently arrrived from Paris, and who would go on to supervise the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, created the watercolor elevation of the hotel. Murals in the Rotunda and Dining Room were completed by the well-known artist George W. Maynard, who a decade later did murals in the Treasures Gallery at the Thomas Jefferson Building
Thomas Jefferson Building
The oldest of the three United States Library of Congress buildings, the Thomas Jefferson Building was built between 1890 and 1897. It is known for its classicizing facade and elaborately decorated interior. John L. Smithmeyer and Paul J...
of the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
. Noted Italian artist Virgilio Tojetti prepared the ceiling murals in the Grand Parlor.
Originally, the twin towers of the hotel were water storage tanks which contained 8,000 gallons each, providing running water for hotel guests (during World War II, one of the towers served as a brig when the hotel was occupied by the U.S. Coast Guard as a training center). The Hotel Ponce de Leon was the nation’s first major poured-in-place concrete structure and, thanks to the Edison Electric Company, was one of the first buildings in the nation to have electricity.
Hotel operation
The headwaiter of the Hotel Ponce de Leon in the 1880s and 1890s was Frank Thompson, who was a pioneer civil rights advocate, and organizer of the professional black baseball team that became the Cuban Giants. One member of the team, Frank GrantFrank Grant
* , Personal profiles at Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. – identical to Riley -External links:* – unknown content, URL confirmed 2010-04-16...
, has been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Noted personalities including Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
, Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...
, Somerset Maugham, Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth
George Herman Ruth, Jr. , best known as "Babe" Ruth and nicknamed "the Bambino" and "the Sultan of Swat", was an American Major League baseball player from 1914–1935...
and Babe Didrikson stayed there. The Artists' Studios portion of the building attracted many up-and-coming American artists, including Martin Johnson Heade
Martin Johnson Heade
Martin Johnson Heade was a prolific American painter known for his salt marsh landscapes, seascapes, portraits of tropical birds, and still lifes...
, who painted, among other works, "Giant Magnolias on a Blue Cloth" in Studio No. 7. The painting is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Heade has been honored on a U.S. postage stamp. Others of his works are in the White House and significant galleries. The Hotel Ponce de Leon was one of the few Flagler Hotels to survive the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
.
The federal government had implemented several of its direct aid programs to revitalizing the community's tourism economy. Authors such as Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance...
, Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...
, John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
, and, most particularly, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie, also known as The...
, visited or lived in St. Augustine during this time, and there was an active community of artists (widely known, since the publication of Robert Torchia's 2001 book of that title, as "The Lost Colony") whose works are now highly collectible.
WW II training center
During World War II the Hotel was used as a Coast Guard Training Center. St. Augustine is considered by many to be the birthplace of the Coast Guard Reserve. One of the first classes to graduate from Reserve officer training did so at St. Augustine in May 1941 at the converted Hotel Ponce de Leon. From 1942-45, thousands of young recruits received their "boot" and advanced training at what was certainly one of the most unusual training stations of WWII. Members of the CGR returned to the former Hotel Ponce de Leon for their 50th Anniversary celebration.One of the Coast Guardsmen was Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.Lawrence is among the best-known twentieth...
, already a famous artist. According to the official USCG history, "In October 1943 Lawrence was drafted into the Coast Guard, then part of the Navy. As the armed services were still segregated, he, along with all African-American recruits, were automatically limited to the steward’s mate rate. After his basic training at Curtis Bay, Maryland he was assigned to the Ponce de Leon Hotel (commandeered by the Coast Guard) in St. Augustine. Despite his rate, Lawrence was urged to continue his artistic endeavors by his commanding officer, Captain J.S. Rosenthal. He was later transferred to USCGC Sea Cloud
USCGC Sea Cloud (WPG-284)
USCGC Sea Cloud was a weather ship for the United States Coast Guard and United States Navy during World War II. The ship served as the first racially integrated warship in the United States Armed Forces since the American Civil War. Originally a private yacht, she was transferred to the Coast...
[1944], the first integrated ship in the naval services." He would go on to be the first black artist to have his works hung in both the Vatican and the White House. He never forgot the racism he encountered in St. Augustine.
Post-War hotel and college
In 1963 the Hotel was one of several St. Augustine sites involved in the civil rights movement. Then Vice President Lyndon Johnson was invited to attend a banquet to launch the celebration of St. Augustine's upcoming 400th birthday as the nation's oldest permanent European settlement. Dr. Robert Hayling and other civil rights activists protested the exclusion of blacks from the event, and after negotiations, two tables were set aside for local black residents.In 1964 the city became a national stage for demonstrations that brought Martin Luther King to town. On March 31, 1964, more than a hundred students from all-black Richard J. Murray High School marched to downtown and sat-in at the elegant dining room of the Ponce de Leon Hotel. They were met by police with dogs and cattle prods and arrested. It was the first mass sit-in of the civil rights movement in St. Augustine, and it was reported the next day in the New York Times. Additional incidents took place at other segregated locations, including the Monson Motor Lodge and the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge, all of which contributed to passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation...
. A number of books recount the events of the civil rights movement that took place at the Ponce de Leon Hotel, including David Colburn's Racial Change and Community Crisis (Columbia University Press, 1985)--which received the 1986 Rembert Patrick Award as the best book on Florida history—and Pulitzer Prize-winner Taylor Branch
Taylor Branch
Taylor Branch is an American author and historian best known for his award-winning trilogy of books chronicling the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and some of the history of the American civil rights movement...
's Pillar of Fire (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
In 1968 the hotel became the centerpiece of the newly-established Flagler College
Flagler College
Flagler College, is a private four-year liberal arts college in St. Augustine, Florida, USA and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008.The college has been named in recent years by US News & World Report as one of the southeast region's best comprehensive liberal arts colleges, and is included on...
. Beginning in 1976, with the nation's bicentennial anniversary, Flagler College embarked on an ambitious campaign to restore the Hotel and other Flagler-era campus buildings. In 1988 the College celebrated the centennial of the Hotel, and a decade later students created the Flagler's Legacy program which provides guided tours of the Hotel to thousands of visitors annually.
It was added to the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
National Register of Historic Places
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...
in 1975, and became a U.S. National Historic Landmark
National Historic Landmark
A National Historic Landmark is a building, site, structure, object, or district, that is officially recognized by the United States government for its historical significance...
on February 21, 2006.
External links