sulfuric water from artesian wells, and its towers stored , gallons of
water in case of fire. (No West Point would St. Augustine be.) A local asso-
ciate of Flagler’s built another, much smaller hotel across King Street, al-
most simultaneously, called the Casa Monica. He shortly sold it to Flagler,
who renamed it the Cordova. Then Flagler built next to the Cordova what
he called a casino, the Alcazar. Beginning with the tourist season, the
Alcazar offered shops and entertainment for Ponce de Leon guests but also
rooms for rent at much lower rates than the colossus across the street.
Flagler also built a number of private cabins for tourists less interested in
society and promenades.
Flagler was ever the negotiator with rail companies, and his huge in-
vestment in St. Augustine made him a railway owner and, ultimately, the
builder of the East Coast Line (later the Florida East Coast Railway) that
reached all the way to Key West. Initially, however, he bought into an exist-
ing line from Jacksonville that concluded northeasterners’ journey to St.
Augustine. Flagler had been dismayed that St. Augustine had no decent
depot, merely an open platform on the western bank of the San Sebas-
tian River, which parallels the Matanzas and at the time marked the inland
boundary of the city. Deciding he must build the depot himself for the bene-
fit of his hotels’ clients, Flagler calculated that he must have an interest
in the railroad, too. So, inadvertently, began his late-life career of claiming
vast acreages of public lands in return for rail mileage built southward, ever
southward.
The other inadvertency leading to Flagler’s railroading career was a
series of natural calamities that prevented St. Augustine from becoming
Newport. In January , even as Flagler and his architects finished plan-
ning and began to build the Ponce de Leon, amid much fanfare a New York
City newspaper printed not only the low local temperature for the day—°
Fahrenheit—but that for St. Augustine: °, only six degrees higher than
frigid Gotham’s. There was a yellow fever outbreak in , the year the first
two hotels opened for business. Then came more freezes during the sea-
son of –. By the time Henry James’sThe American Sceneappeared
in , with James’s complimentary bow to the Ponce de Leon, St. Augus-
tine had become passé, and Palm Beach—another Flagler concoction—
had emerged asthescene to make in winter. On his way to Palm Beach,
Flagler had bought another big hotel, the Ormond, just north of Daytona.
He doubled the Ormond’s capacity, then redoubled it and changed the look
of its sprawling grounds to suit his notion of La Florida: the indigenous
pines came down, and palms were planted in their places.