Building Description Hotel Ponce de Leon, St Augustine Florida
The Hotel Ponce de Leon was designed by architects John Merven Carrere and Thomas Hastings and shows their commitment to the planning and design principles they learned at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The hotel exhibits a carefully thought-out pattern of circulation, with each major functional component reflected in the exterior massing. Its architectural style also received special attention. "The splendidly complex exterior of the Ponce de Leon reflected the influence of Spanish as well as Italian Renaissance and vernacular architecture . . . Flagler and Hastings credited the Spanish Renaissance appearance of the hotel's exterior to their admiration for the local Spanish colonial architecture, but the hotel's style owed much more to Hastings' Beaux-Arts interests and to his attraction to the architecture of the Renaissance."
The historic hotel is harmonious in its proportions and symmetrical in design, with a central axis from south to north that links the various components in the hotel complex, one behind the other. They include: a semicircular entrance plaza at the front gate adjacent to King Street; a large courtyard just inside the entrance gate; the main hotel building, U-shaped in plan with a five-story central block, four-story wings that enclose the sides of the courtyard, and a one-story raised loggia with central entrance pavilion that parallels King Street and links the wings; an oval-shaped Dining Room, three-and-a-half stories, immediately behind the main hotel with two-and-a-half story connector bridges on the north and south facades; a four-and-a-half story rectangular service building behind the Dining Room; and an adjacent service yard with boiler room and 125-foot brick chimney. A long, narrow, two-story building (the Artists' Studios) facing Valencia Street encloses the rear (north side) of the complex.
Carrere and Hastings sited the hotel complex on the eastern side of its block to provide a "pleasuring ground" for hotel guests on the western side, which includes a palm garden in the southwest corner. A low, concrete wall surrounds most of the block, which is bisected by an east-west carriage drive (from Cordova Street to Sevilla Street) to the porte cochere at the rear of the main hotel building. The drive runs under the porte cochere formed by the bridge between the main hotel building and the Dining Room. On the east side of the block, a large fountain with circular pool at the intersection of the driveway and Cordova Street greeted guests arriving by carriage.
The Hotel Ponce de Leon was the first large multistory building constructed of concrete in the United States. The concrete used in the building was a mixture of Portland cement, sand, and coquina (a limestone composed of broken shells, corals, and other organic debris). Blocks of coquina limestone were a traditional building material in St. Augustine. The Spanish built houses using a type of concrete know as tapia (which the English called tabby), and built the Castillo San Marcos of coquina blocks. The coquina for the Ponce de Leon came from quarries on Anastasia Island. It was crushed to use as the aggregate in the concrete mix, and the shell stone is plainly visible in the hotel walls. The Portland cement came from Baetjer and Meyerstein, a New York City company that imported it from Germany.
An 1887 brochure by Carrere and Hastings promoting the new "American Riviera" includes a description of their hotel's innovative construction: Before entering the court we must notice that the building is a monolith. A mile away, on Anastasia Island, there are quantities of tiny broken shells that you can run like sand through your fingers. Thousands of carloads of this shell deposit or coquina were brought over and then mixed with cement, six parts of shell to one of cement, the whole forming an indestructible composite. It is not exact to say that the hotel was built; it was cast. For there is not a joint in the building; the material was made on the spot, poured in [wooden forms] while still soft and rammed down three inches at a time. Thus the great building conforms in its very material to the natural conditions of the place. The coquina, found almost on the spot, was a suggestion of nature not to be overlooked, and the hotel seems far more at home than it would were it built of brown stone from Ohio.
Flagler hired James A. McGuire and Joseph A. McDonald to build the Hotel Ponce de Leon. They also built St. Augustine's Hotel San Marco, which opened in 1884 and helped inspire Flagler to build a luxury hotel in the "ancient city." The site Flagler selected for his new hotel included a salt marsh with a creek running through it. Workers filled the creek and surrounding land with sand to prepare the site for construction. During the summer of 1885, McGuire and McDonald experimented with bricks of concrete to determine their tensile strength and ability to withstand crushing under pressure. Flagler hired a local civil engineer, Frederick W. Bruce, to survey the hotel site. In his June 1885 report, Bruce recommended a "floating foundation" rather than pilings due to the depth of the sand on the site. Bruce was also in charge of planning and supervising the backfilling of the marshlands.
McGuire and McDonald refer to the base of the hotel walls as the "foundation," poured with an especially strong mix of concrete to a width of four feet. The formula used in the foundation was one part cement to two parts coquina and one part sand. In a January, 1886 letter to Franklin Smith, Flagler wrote: "I think it more likely I am spending an unnecessary amount of money in the foundation walls, but I comfort myself with the reflection that a hundred years hence it will be all the same to me, and the building better, because of my extravagance." The walls above used a weaker formula of one part cement to five parts coquina and two parts sand. The exterior walls taper to a width of two feet in the upper stories, and interior walls are 16 to 20 inches thick. The concrete was mixed on site in two large steam-powered mixers. They could hold seven barrels of concrete, which were poured into wheelbarrows and lifted up to the walls by a construction elevator erected in the center of the building. "The architects of the building, Carrere and Hastings, chose poured concrete as the material most likely to withstand hurricane winds. The footings, foundations, main exterior walls, and some interior partitions are monolithic concrete with a shell aggregate. The hotel has been able to resist enormous wind loads partly through sheer mass of material and partly because the monolithic walls form a rigid box."
The Hotel also utilized reinforced concrete in a limited way because concrete without metal reinforcement is not strong under tension. Iron beams were used to span some spaces with long widths, including the Grand Parlor. Iron also supports the Mezzanine floor and dome over the Rotunda, where it is hidden inside the carved wooden caryatids and columns.
The hotel was wired for electricity from the beginning as its primary lighting source (with gas lamps as a backup). The system was designed by Thomas Edison (a part-time resident of Fort Myers, Florida, as of 1886), and included four Edison direct-current dynamos. A key Edison employee, William Hammer, ran the hotel plant for the first year after the hotel opened. An 1888 brochure for the Edison United Manufacturing Company lists the Ponce de Leon with 4,100 lights. The hotel's two hydraulic-powered elevators (for passengers and luggage) were converted to electric power in the early 20th century.
At the hotel's front entrance on King Street, there is a semicircular paved plaza adjacent to the arcaded loggia at the southern end of the hotel's courtyard. The pyramidal-roof entry pavilion at the center of the loggia features an elaborate entablature with a terra cotta architrave, a frieze with putti, peacocks, and seahorses, and a scalloped cornice. The iron and wood portcullis in the tall round arch was raised historically during the hotel season (the winter months). Tall, square, burnt orange brick columns with terra-cotta lions' heads facing out to the street flank the gated entrance. A bronze, life-size statue of Henry Flagler stands at the center of the plaza. It was dedicated on January 2nd, 1916, Flagler's birthday, at its original location, the Florida East Coast (FEC) Railway station built by Flagler just west of the hotel site. The FEC gave the land and statue to the City of St. Augustine, which gave the statue to the college in 1971.
A concrete walkway from the entry plaza through the center pavilion leads directly into a large courtyard, 150 feet square. A circular fountain ringed by a circular walkway at the center of the courtyard has water-spouting terra-cotta frogs around the edge of the pool, and turtles in the pool at the base of a tall, mosaic column at its center, on axis with the entry pavilion to the south and the main hotel entrance to the north. Concrete walkways from this focal point lead up steps to the hotel's main entrance, and to side entrances in the east and west wings enclosing the sides of the courtyard. All entrances to the hotel from the courtyard are through tall round arches surrounded by a variety of decorative features, e.g., niches with fountains, shields, shells, and carved figures. The two side entrances, Ladies' Entrances in the hotel's early years, feature highly decorated two-story terra-cotta grilles. A circular walkway around the perimeter of the courtyard also links the entrances to the hotel. Planting beds between the central fountain and the perimeter walkway were heavily planted historically with flowers, tropical shrubs, and palm trees.
The main hotel building, originally designed with 450 guest rooms, is the primary and largest component of the Hotel Ponce de Leon complex. Its front-facing U-shaped plan includes a five-story center block with a southern exposure flanked by four-story east and west wings. The center block has several prominent features that reflect its Renaissance and Spanish-influenced architectural style: a prominent arched entrance with dramatically carved doors; a center dome surmounted by a bronze lantern; and square towers, 165 feet tall, that flank the central block adjacent to the side wings. The picturesque towers, with their arched and arcaded terra-cotta balconies and red-tiled conical roofs, are landmarks on the St. Augustine horizon.
The hotel's bold, monolithic walls of poured concrete speckled with coquina provide a sharp contrast to the lively, elaborate, and colorful construction materials and decorative features: first-floor arcaded loggias overlooking the courtyard; balconies with wooden ocher-painted posts at the third floor; wide eaves with heavy brackets; and red-tiled hipped roofs with a number of tall chimneys with decorated caps. The front corners of the hotel overlooking King Street have overhanging, wooden balconies at the third floor, and low towers with low-pitched hipped roofs. Window articulation varies by floor and by elevation, a wide assortment of windows that includes single round arches, round-headed pairs, flat heads with terra cotta pediments, casements with transoms, portals, and shed-roofed dormers. Red brick string courses and rusticated quoins add colorful horizontal and vertical elements.
Heavy paired oak doors open to the entrance vestibule with panels of pink marble. It leads immediately to the Rotunda, an extraordinary primary space that rises three-and-a-half stories to a heavily ornamented dome, painted and gilded. The Rotunda is the pivotal point in the hotel's floor plan, the crossing point of the primary north/south axis and the east/west cross axis, which also links the guest-room wings to the central block. This central location was the place where hotel guests arrived, departed, congregated, or circulated to other parts of the complex.
On the Rotunda's north side, stairs descend to the ground floor rear entrance with porte cochere, where guests arrived via carriage from the train station or exited for a stroll in the adjacent "pleasuring grounds" and gardens alongside the hotel. Stairs on the north side also rise to a landing in front of the Dining Room, a second major public space, and continue up to the Mezzanine's arcaded sitting area around the Rotunda. The Ponce de Leon's third major public space, the Grand Parlor, is at the end of the cross axis hall west of the Rotunda. Flanking the hall east of the Rotunda are rooms used as offices and recreation rooms in the hotel's early years. The cross halls also linked the guest room wings with the central block. According to Thomas Hastings himself, the floor plan took most of the time (75 percent) required to plan the Hotel Ponce de Leon.
At the Rotunda's first floor, eight caryatids of carved oak define the octagonal plan. Additional features that contribute to the exotic atmosphere and character of this dimly-lit, elegant space include mosaic tile floors, marble and dark oak baseboards, wainscoting, fireplaces, and cased openings with paneled reveals, and a variety of gilded ornamentation on the walls. Electric lights with lions' heads were added at the mezzanine level of the Rotunda in 1893. On the dome's eight pendentives at the second-floor level, noted muralist George W. Maynard painted female figures that represent the four elements (fire, earth, air, and water), and the four stages of Spanish "exploration" (Adventure, Discovery, Conquest, Civilization). The highly decorated plaster dome immediately above the Rotunda's third floor is a decorative, not structural, feature. The true dome on the hotel rooftop caps a large solarium that provided access to tropical rooftop gardens overlooking St. Augustine in the hotel's early days. Notable features in the solarium include an astrological chart with zodiac signs painted on the floor and the dome with exposed rafters. No rehabilitation work has occurred in this area, which is currently used for storage.
Back down on the first floor, a secondary staircase and adjacent elevator to the upper floors adjoin the Rotunda on its west side, north of the hall to the Grand Parlor, but the Grand Parlor occupies most of this western portion of the central block. Its formal, high style French (Louis XIV ) decoration with its emphasis on white and gold, make this primary public space a marked contrast to the rest of the historic hotel. The long, rectangular parlor, 53 feet by 104 feet, has columns and arched openings that compartmentalize the large space into three smaller sections. The center salon is the most elaborate, with wood flooring, an oversized mantelpiece of carved onyx on the north wall, heavy moldings, and a variety of decorative plasterwork on the ceiling, including interwoven medallions in a range of sizes. Salons at both ends of the Grand Parlor exhibit marble mantels, fluted Corinthian columns, full, deep entablatures, and ceiling paintings by Virgillo Tojetti. Henry Flagler was a patron of the arts and purchased a number of paintings to decorate his grand hotel. Some of his acquisitions remain at the hotel/college and are exhibited in the Grand Parlor.
In the early years, the hall east of the Rotunda was the location of hotel offices and the telegraph office, as well as a smoking room, library, reading room, barber shop, and ladies' billiard room. Each room features wainscoting, a fireplace with a decorative mantel, and plaster moldings. The barbershop displays the most elaborate decoration, with carved wood paneling, large mirrors, and a built-in cabinet with drawers for barbering equipment and supplies. The east hall now houses Flagler College administrative offices. This new use required construction of a wall to separate the offices from the Rotunda area and its many visitors. The new wall is in keeping with the character of the historic hotel.
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Hotel guest rooms occupied most of the central block above the first floor, and all of the east and west wings alongside the courtyard. The wide, double-loaded corridors on these floors were functional and plain, in contrast to the more public areas of the hotel. The side (Ladies') entrances from the courtyard were the exception. They feature wainscoting, fishscale shingles on the walls, and groin vaults where the side entrance halls cross the main corridor. The guest rooms also received minimal decoration. Fireplaces in each room have wooden mantels with winged cherub faces and inlaid tile surrounds. The original hotel plan provided communal bathrooms, but after the hotel's first season Flagler ordered remodeling work for semi-private bathrooms between pairs of adjoining guest rooms. The former hotel rooms serve as dormitory rooms for Flagler College, a compatible adaptive use that required minimal alterations. The old guest rooms were renovated floor by floor between 1975 and 1985. The fireplaces and much of the wood trim were retained, and new plumbing, electrical, heating ducts, and carpeting were installed. Dormitory rooms were air conditioned in 2001.
The Dining Room, three-and-a-half stories and oval-shaped, is located just behind (north) of the main hotel building. From the north side of the Rotunda, a grand marble stair rises to a wide landing at the second floor level. Tall arched openings with large panels of Tiffany glass overlook the sides of the landing, and two large paintings hang above the landing, "The Landing of Columbus" and "The Introduction of Christianity to the Huns by Charlemagne." On the landing's north side, a wide hall to the Dining Room also serves as a bridge that connects the main hotel block and the Dining Room. In addition, this hall/bridge provides a porte cochere at the ground-level driveway below for guests arriving via carriage, and a vestibule for the magnificent Dining Room at the end of the hall through the carved arched entrance of pink marble.
The Dining Room is the largest of the Hotel Ponce de Leon's public rooms and is generally considered the most notable. Its exceptional design, with lofty proportions, elegant and charming decorations, and beautiful, cheerful lighting, brought worldwide admiration. The two-story main hall, 90-feet square, receives natural light from Tiffany stained glass clerestory windows along the side walls of the 48-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling. Both end walls of the hall have monumental arched surrounds of carved oak and mahogany that encompass massive entrance doors and semicircular balconies with heavily carved niches that served as galleries for musicians. Along the sides of the main hall, paired and fluted Corinthian columns demark the cross axis. Its semicircular, one-story sections, the East and West Venido Rooms, are ringed with alcoves with triple sets of large double-hung windows that overlook the tropical grounds and fill these spaces with natural light.
Painter and moralist George W. Maynard was also responsible for the Dining Room's whimsical and delightful decorations, including colorful ornaments, inscriptions, crests, and allegorical figures painted on the ceiling. Against a backdrop of vividly hued Renaissance-inspired classical decoration, Maynard depicted more of his full-length female figures. His winged women, accompanied by mermaids and rainbow-dappled dolphins, floated gracefully over a decorative array of trompe 1'oeil pedestals and urns. Amidst the sea of lyrically decorative figures, there appeared the more formal Spanish crests and coats of arms for Spanish cities and provinces. The ceiling featured pithily worded proverbs incorporated into the decorative scheme and easily visible to diners. Not all the proverbs exhibited refined taste. For example, diners were treated to witticisms such as "the ass that brays the most eats least."
In addition to ceiling paintings, the dining room contained friezes of grape-toting putti and two large murals on the north and south walls that featured ships similar to the ones that carried Ponce de Leon, the French Huguenots, and Sir Francis Drake to the New World.
According to an 1893 fire insurance map, ground floor rooms below the Dining Room included the following: a gymnasium, children's playroom, bar, officers' hall, and workshop. The former gymnasium space, adjacent to the carriage driveway and porte cochere, has a large semicircular stained glass window.
A four-and-a-half-story rectangular service building, nine bays by three, sits on axis immediately behind the oval-shaped Dining Room. Its low-pitched hipped roof has red clay tiles, shed-roofed dormers, tall, slender chimneys at the corners, and wide bracketed eaves. In contrast to the main hotel block and the Dining Room, this component served a more utilitarian use historically, and its decorative elements are limited to terra cotta grilles at the second and third floors windows, and burnt orange brick window surrounds, string courses and quoins. A bridge over a driveway on the north side of the Dining Room connects the service building to components towards the front of the hotel complex. In the hotel's early years, the first floor of the service building was a wash room. A huge kitchen occupied the second floor, along with separate rooms for baking, pastry, meats, and freezing. There was also a large pantry, a dish pantry, a store room, "helps" dining room, and waiters dressing room. Upper floors provided dormitory-style quarters for hotel employees. After the Hotel Ponce de Leon's adaptive use as a college, this building became the main classroom building and faculty offices. In 1981-1982, it was largely gutted to provide more modern instructional facilities, and renamed Kenan Hall. A new "front" entrance on the side (west) facade has a one-story hipped roof porch. Two original windows in the center bays were enlarged to provide entrance doors.
The service yard behind Kenan Hall includes a brick boiler room with a 125-foot brick chimney on its west side. A tall wall with a wide opening for vehicular traffic encloses the east side. At the far end of the original hotel complex designed by Carrere and Hastings is the Ponce de Leon Studios, more commonly known as the Artists' Studios. This long, narrow two-story building with a low-pitched, tiled hipped roof served two purposes historically. Its south facade, adjacent to the boiler room and service area, had arched openings on the ground floor for coal and wood storage. The north facade facing Valencia Street has a double veranda, presenting a residential appearance to the neighborhood beyond. Stairs on both east and west end walls provided access to seven artists' studios with doors on to the second-floor gallery, carried on palm tree trunk posts. Each studio exhibits low wainscoting, a corner fireplace, canvas-covered walls, exposed rafters, and a skylight on the roofs north slope. This building currently houses the College's maintenance department on the ground floor. Art classes are held in the second-floor studios. Plans are underway to restore Studio 7, occupied by Martin Johnson Heade, leader of St. Augustine's 19th-century art colony.
A low concrete wall with alcoves at regular intervals surrounds the grounds on the south, east, and portions of the north and west sides. Tall concrete bollards topped with concrete ball finials are linked by draped iron chains with spike-studded spheres. The wall was restored in 2001. On the hotel's east side, there is a large circular fountain with a circular pool adjacent to the driveway that leads to the porte cochere. The original driveway from Valencia Street at the rear of the property was extended to provide parking for cars circa 1930. The parking area was expanded in the 1980s, but the row of sable palms from the hotel's early years remains.
On the west side of the hotel complex, the "pleasuring ground" occupied approximately one-third of the block. When the hotel first opened, there was an orange grove at the northwest corner, and shell-covered paths crossed the grounds, but apparently there were no formal landscaping features. There is a palm garden at the southwest corner (King Street and Sevilla Street), and the area also has a number of large, tropical plants. Several resources have been constructed in this area since its adaptive use as a college: a swimming pool (1953), an octagonal brick pavilion in memory of Lawrence Lewis, Jr., founder of Flagler College; and a large Flagler College sign of brick and concrete at the northwest corner, 20 feet long by six feet tall. (There is a similar sign at the southeast corner). The new additions do not really detract from the historic character of the grounds, which maintain a high degree of integrity.
Flagler College opened in the former Hotel Ponce de Leon in 1968 without significant alterations to the building, launching an ambitious, long-term rehabilitation and restoration program in 1975. Rehabilitation work began with the dormitory rooms (the original guest rooms), followed by restoration of the towers (1978-1979), the Grand Parlor (1982-1987), the Dining Room (1986-1992, by Biltmore Campbell Smith of Asheville, North Carolina), and the Rotunda (1991-1995). In 1981-1982, major rehabilitation of the former service building, now known as Kenan Hall, provided the college with modern classrooms and office space for faculty members. Handicapped accessibility and fire safety modifications, including fire escapes at the southeast and southwest corners of the main hotel building and a handicapped ramp along the west wall of the courtyard, were in keeping with the building's historic character and the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation. Balconies, roofs, the lantern on the dome, windows, and floors have also been stabilized, rehabilitated, or restored. The perimeter wall was restored in 2001.
