Historic Tours of Flagler College

Henry Flagler, John D. Rockefeller’s partner at Standard Oil, honeymooned in St. Augustine in the 1880s and decided to make it the Newport of the South. His first move was the Hotel Ponce de Leon, opened in January 1888: a Spanish Renaissance Revival palace of poured concrete mixed with coquina shell, designed by the young New York architects John Carrère and Thomas Hastings (later of the New York Public Library), with interiors by Louis Comfort Tiffany and murals by George Maynard. It was among the first major buildings anywhere wired for electricity, and it set the template for the railroad-and-resort empire Flagler pushed south all the way to Key West. Since 1968 the building has been the heart of Flagler College, and students eat in the dining hall that once served the Gilded Age elite. The way in for visitors is the Historic Tours of Flagler College program, student-led walks of about 45 to 60 minutes through the ground floor. You see the courtyard with its fountain and new bronze of Flagler, the rotunda with its 68-foot dome resting on hand-carved oak caryatids, the Flagler Room — the former ladies’ grand parlor, all gilding and chandeliers — and the dining hall, lit by one of the largest collections of Tiffany stained-glass windows in the world. Even if you do not take the tour, the exterior and courtyard gates on King Street are the most photographed architecture in the city.

The tour logistics are straightforward. Tours run daily, with tickets sold online and at the college; times vary with the academic calendar and events, so check the schedule before you go, and book ahead on holiday weekends. The tour stays on the ground floor of the former hotel and does not enter the student residence halls, and because this is an active campus, routes can vary. Guides are students, and the best of them mix the architecture with the human details — the hotel’s winter season, the guests who arrived by Flagler’s own railroad, the building’s near-misses with fire and demolition. The college also sells a dedicated holiday-season experience in some years, when the rotunda is decorated; ask when you book.

The building is one of three Flagler-era landmarks clustered around King Street, and seeing all three explains the Gilded Age town in an hour. Across the street, his second hotel, the Alcazar, now houses the Lightner Museum, a collector’s trove of nineteenth-century art and curiosities set around the former hotel’s indoor pool. Next to it stands the Casa Monica, built by Franklin Smith in 1888, bought by Flagler, and restored as a hotel. A block north, Flagler’s Memorial Presbyterian Church, a Venetian Renaissance church he built in memory of his daughter, is where he is buried.

Plan it as a late-morning stop between the Castillo and lunch, or as the cool, shaded hour in the middle of a hot afternoon. Photographers should come back at dusk, when the towers and terra-cotta glow, and during Nights of Lights from the weekend before Thanksgiving, when the campus is outlined in white lights and the King Street facade becomes the city’s most elaborate holiday display. It is a short walk from the Plaza de la Constitución and St. George Street. Students and staff use the building every day, so keep voices low in the hallways, and remember that the tour is your only route into the interiors; wandering through the gates on your own will not get you inside.