By Peter Guinta
The "newly risen spirit" of Henry Morrison Flagler sat comfortably alive on a stuffed chair Tuesday night before a packed house at Flagler Auditorium and talked to St. Augustine Mayor Joe Boles about the strategy that shaped the city.
The gray-haired Flagler, portrayed precisely by actor and director Tom Rahner, was handed a bottle of water and popped out his own question: "What's plastic?"
The evening was titled, "Palaces in Paradise: Flagler's Age of Opulence," and became an interesting, amusing and educational tour through the life of a self-made man who never quit -- even through tragedies that would have stopped many other men -- and who changed the face not only of St. Augustine but also of Florida.
Thomas Graham, professor emeritus of history at Flagler College, said that, when Henry Flagler first came to St. Augustine with his wife, Mary Harkness, in 1881, the town seemed "dirty, depressed and run down, full of sick people."
A yellow fever epidemic was happening at the time.
Flagler told Boles, "I thought the place was a pest hole."
They stayed at the San Marco Hotel, where the parking garage stands today. When he returned in 1883 with new wife, Ida, he teamed up with prominent Dr. Andrew Anderson and bought up orange groves where the Model Land Company neighborhood is now.
He built Hotel Ponce de Leon, now Flagler College, using concrete construction and giving the building Tiffany windows, employing Edison's DC electricity from dynamos and four deep wells for water. A great parlor was created as a place where women guests would congregate. A hotel orchestra was hired.
Seven studios were created for artists in the back.
When the hotel opened in 1888, President Grover Cleveland stayed there.
Behind the building he constructed Grace Methodist Church to replace the church land he needed for the hotel.
The Casa Monica was also being built at that time and opened Sept. 15, 1887.
Graham said most people came during "the season," from January through March.
"Nobody came other times, because you were likely to get yellow fever and die," he said.
Flagler also began building the three-story Hotel Alcazar, now City Hall, but the building was never completed.
It offered an indoor swimming pool fed by an artesian spring, tennis courts and bicycles. A fourth floor was added later.
By the 1890s, Ida began showing signs of the insanity that would eventually put her into a sanitarium for the rest of her life. Also about that time, Flagler's son, Henry Harkness Flagler, called Harry, left to pursue music in New York City, creating a rift between father and son.
Graham said, "In a way, St. Augustine was a mistake (for Flagler). People were deciding that there was reliably warm weather in South Florida."
John Blades, director of Whitehall, a home built in 1902 by Henry Flagler in West Palm Beach that is now a museum, said, "Flagler was the brains behind the largest and most profitable corporation in the world (Standard Oil). He built the Hotel Royal Poinciana in the Jupiter area, the Palm Beach Inn and The Breakers, which opened in the 1920s, years after Flagler's death in 1913.
Blades added that Whitehall is 125,000 square feet and costs $13,500 a day to maintain.
The Breakers is one of the only Flagler era hotels that's been restored.
He built hotels in Miami, then called "Fort Dallas," he said.
The shade of his third wife, Mary Lily Keenan, of North Carolina, also came to life to talk about Flagler.
Mary Lily played with sparkle and silken Southern naughtiness by St. Augustine artist and actress Dianne Jacoby, She described her wedding present as Whitehall and a five-foot strand of pearls with a large diamond clasp.
"I love to entertain -- several hundred of my closest friends," she told the audience, as if inviting them inside to a party. "I've always loved Palm Beach. It's where Mr. Flagler and I became ... reacquainted."
Mary Lily said that, during that period, she did what she could to take Flagler's mind off Ida's insanity.
"I think I succeeded," she said, giving a knowing laugh.
Blades said one of Flagler's last projects was completing the east coast rail line to Key West, which he saw as a deep-water port nearest the newly opened Panama Canal.
"We're all beneficiaries of his vision," Blades said. "We say at the Flagler museum that Henry Flagler invented modern Florida."
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