HOTEL PONCE DE LEON
Ancient City Icon Now Part of Flagler College

By  Mike Miller December 11, 2025

The hotel is a magnificent place where several big stories in Florida history all collided at once:

• The Spanish “Ancient City” and its future
• Gilded Age resort boom in Florida
• Rise of the Florida East Coast Railway
• Hotel military service in World War II
• Declining visitors, financial problems, and closure
• Rescue by historic preservation and higher education.

When Henry Flagler visited St. Augustine in the early 1880s, he saw both the romance of the “Ancient City” and its shortcomings as a resort destination: limited accommodations, poor transportation, and an economy that faded with the short winter season.

Inspired in part by Franklin W. Smith’s poured-concrete Villa Zorayda a few blocks away (now a museum), Flagler decided to build a grand winter hotel that would honor St. Augustine’s Spanish heritage while offering the latest in comfort.

The land where the Hotel Ponce de Leon now stands was partly an orange grove and partly salt marsh with a small creek, owned by Dr. Andrew Anderson, whose Markland house still stands just to the north.

Flagler purchased and filled the marshy site with sand.  He then hired John Merven Carrère and Thomas Hastings, young Beaux-Arts-trained architects in New York. The hotel was their first major project.

Their Spanish Renaissance-influenced design, with its U-shaped courtyard, twin towers, and richly articulated façades, launched a partnership that would later produce the New York Public Library and other landmarks.

He also hired civil engineer Frederick W. Bruce to design a “floating” foundation suited to the deep sand that had been used to fill the site.

Finally he hired New England contractors (and former shipbuilders) James McGuire and Joseph McDonald and he was ready to go. 

Construction began in 1885. Flagler’s new hotel, named for the Spanish explorer associated with the mythologically “Fountain of Youth,” opened to enormous fanfare in January 1888.

Trains transported guests from the North directly to a St. Augustine railroad station located on King Street a short distance from the hotel.  Horse drawn carriages took the guests and their luggage from the station to the hotel.

Inside, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained glass, murals by George W. Maynard and Virgilio Tojetti, and New York furnishings by Pottier & Stymus wrapped visitors in Gilded Age luxury.  To put it mildly, this was not a Holiday Inn Express.

Many guests came down for the entire season (January through Easter) and paid $4000 for room and meals for the season. That is in 1888 dollars would be about $150,000 in today's dollars or about $1500/day (based on my assumptions and calculations).

In other words, staying at the Hotel Ponce de León was not simply a hotel stay: it was the Victorian equivalent of booking a room at one of today’s most exclusive luxury resorts, a place reserved for America’s wealthiest winter visitors seeking elegance, comfort, and social prestige in Old Florida.

The hotel quickly became the social and economic heart of Flagler’s growing St. Augustine resort empire, drawing high-society guests whose spending supported local shops, carriage services, and a growing class of seasonal workers.

Flagler also created an artist colony at the hotel with a separate Artist's Studio.  The colony attracted many future great artists to spend some time there.

Some of the famous people who stayed here include Presidents Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt, Warren G. Harding, and Lyndon B. Johnson.  Baseball great Babe Ruth stayed here as well as 13 year old future president John F. Kennedy.  Mark Twain stayed here more than once.

Beyond its role in tourism and Gilded Age glory, the Ponce de Leon is a milestone in American building technology:

• Poured concrete pioneer: The Ponce was the first large multi-story building constructed of poured concrete in the United States.  It used a mix of imported Portland cement, sand, and crushed coquina from nearby Anastasia Island. Workers poured the concrete in three-inch lifts into wooden forms, creating monolithic walls up to two feet thick.
  
  
• Engineered marshland: To build on a former salt marsh and creek, crews filled the site with sand and used a “floating” foundation rather than deep pilings. If the building were ever going to settle, it was designed to settle all at once so there would be no cracking or failure.
  
  
• Early electrification: From the start, the hotel was wired for electric lighting. Henry Flagler's friend Thomas Edison’s company supplied four steam powered direct-current dynamos and thousands of light bulbs, making the Ponce one of the nation’s earliest large electrified buildings.  This predated many public and government structures in the United States.
  
  
• Potable Water Improvements: A 12 inch diameter well was drilled to a depth of 1390 feet.  The well provided 10 million gallons of fresh water each day under natural artesian pressure strong enough to shoot the water 42 feet high.  This water served not only the hotel but the Alcazar Hotel as well. The hotel’s twin towers doubled as water tanks. This was an innovation that blended infrastructure and architecture.

• Rail and road connections: The hotel’s King Street façade fronted one of St. Augustine’s primary east-west routes, long before today’s automobile era. Flagler’s nearby rail depot funneled winter tourists into the city. A statue of Henry Flagler, originally at that station, now stands in front of the hotel’s main gate.

Henry Flagler decided to extend his railroad south along Florida's Atlantic coast and develop other resorts along the route.  He eventually brought the railroad all the way south to Key West.

This had the unintended consequence of hurting the Hotel Ponce de Leon as many tourists decided to cut their St. Augustine vacations short and go on south to Palm Beach, Miami, and Key West.

The number of visitors began to decline in the early 1900s and got even worse at the end of the 1920s due to the bust of the Florida real estate boom and the onset of the Great Depression.

The reduced number of tourists caused the Alcazar and Cordova Hotels to close, but the Ponce hung on.

In World War II, the Ponce’s massive, durable structure made it an ideal Coast Guard training center and headquarters for Coast Guard Reserve training on the Atlantic coast, further tying the building to national infrastructure and defense history.

The Coast Guard deactivated the hotel after the war ended, and the Ponce became a hotel again.  Business picked up for awhile, but it was not enough to make a huge difference.

The number of visitors continued to decline and the hotel was permanently closed in 1967.  I was one of many Floridians who felt incredibly sad when this happened.  I was afraid it would be demolished and replaced with modern condominiums.  

My old Navy buddy was right about the hotel becoming a girl's college.  Thank heaven for little girls and Flagler College (it became coed in 1971). I don't know if the sailors flocked to my friend's bar.

Flagler College’s occupation of the former hotel is what - in my opinio - saved the hotel.

From its opening in 1968, the college committed to using the Ponce as an active campus building with classrooms, dormitory rooms, dining hall, and more while also restoring its historic fabric.

Since the 1970s, restoration campaigns have repaired roofs and towers, conserved Tiffany glass and murals, and returned many spaces to their 19th-century appearance.

Preservation work documented by Leslee Keys and others notes that more than $50–60 million has been invested in restoration and rehabilitation up until the present time.

This has hopefully set a precedent for large-scale adaptive reuse of other historic resort hotels in Florida.

Ms. Keys is a historic preservationist and the author of "Hotel Ponce de Leon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Flagler's Gilded Age Palace." This is an interesting detailed book that has a place in my library.

Public access has grown through Flagler’s Legacy tours and, more recently, interactive exhibits in the rotunda and courtyard that interpret the building’s art, architecture, and social history, including its World War II Coast Guard chapter.

At the same time, the hotel’s story is regularly highlighted in regional cultural programming, from the Lightner Museum’s exhibitions on St. Augustine’s art colony to heritage-tourism campaigns that feature the Ponce as a signature stop in the city’s historic district.

The Hotel Ponce de Leon has always traded on atmosphere and mystique as much as amenities.  Here are a few stories:

• The Tiffany glow: The dining hall’s 79 Tiffany stained-glass windows and surrounding murals bathe the room in colored light.  It is described in tour materials as one of the largest surviving collections of Tiffany glass in a single location.
  
  
• The “shocking” hotel: Early guests, unused to electricity, were wary of the new technology. The hotel hired staff simply to operate the light switches because patrons were afraid to touch them.

Together, these layers of art, innovation, and myth have made the Ponce more than a building; it’s a stage on which St. Augustine’s identity as the “Ancient City” gets performed for each new generation.

For me, it's also a flashback to my New Year's Eve adventure more than 60 years ago.

---

---