In a Tourist Trap

Another distinctly American layer to St. Augustine is the tourist scene. Being the oldest European town they have the first or the oldest of a lot of stuff. They have the oldest house, the oldest wooden schoolhouse, the oldest store, the first stone fort in North America, it’s where Ponce de Leon “took possession” of the New World in 1513, and where the first North American “man-made aid to navigation” was built. And all of it is open to the public! Buy your tickets now!

The transformation into a tourist destination began in the 1880s when one of the partners in Standard Oil named Henry Flagler decided to develop Florida as “America’s Riviera.” He built several hotels in St. Augustine, several in Palm Beach and built a railroad line all the way to Miami to bring in the vacationers from the north. At that time, it was intended for the rich upper crust vacationers who would live in Florida during the cold north-east winters. Of course once other people got a look at Florida they started to come on vacation too.

One of these hotels of Flagler’s was the Alcazar. It now houses St. Augustine City Hall and the Victorian-era art collection of another guy named Otto Lightner. As you stroll through the Lightner Museum, there are all kinds of photographs from the days when the building was the Alcazar Hotel. They had a ballroom (now an art gallery), a spa (now housing an extensive cut glass exhibit) and an indoor pool (now filled in and turned into an antique mall).

In the same tradition is the Villa Zorayda. It was built by a Franklin Smith in 1883 as his winter home in Florida. It is built to look (a little bit) like the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. The name comes from one of the princesses mentioned in Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Smith imported a bunch of Moorish and pseudo-Moorish furniture and finishings to complete the look of the place. There is a harem room, a mini Court of Lions and an Egyptian room. The house later became the Zorayda Club which was a posh spot for cards, gambling and drinking until the 1930s. The decorations were further refined by a Lebanese antique dealer named Abraham Mussallem who filled it with even more Oriental, Middle Eastern and Victorian treasures and really turned it into a center of St. Augustine night life. It is still in the Mussallem family and they’ve had it open as a museum since 1934. It’s a neat place to see. But beware! There is a cursed cat-hair rug and the guides are likely to tell you that the place is a copy of the “al-HAM-bra.”

Not quite so tourist-oriented but still interesting to see is the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum. For a mere $8 you can climb up 216 steps to the top. We did. It’s a great view. The Museum is in the old keeper’s house and has a lot of info about the Lighthouse in WWII when it was used as a Coast Guard station and apparently chased away German U-Boats that were close enough to shore to see the people on the beach. There is also info about the extensive restoration done on the keeper’s house and the other out buildings in the 1970s as it was all being turned into a museum.

One night we took a walking ghost tour. St. Augustine is supposedly the third most haunted city in the U.S. The costumed ghost tour leaders are nigh-ubiquitous in the old parts of town. There are at least three different companies that run them. There is also a “Trolly of the Doomed” and a haunted “train” that let you ride to haunted buildings. On our tour we heard stories about the vengeful spirit of a Seminole war chief who was kept in the Castillo, the Huguenot massacre that resulted in the bay being call Matanzas, a ghostly nun and conquistador that visited an old lady one night and an orphaned boy buried in the cemetery. We had hoped for an intimate tour but there were almost 50 people trooping around the city with us. We saw no strange happenings and didn’t hear anything. But Matt took a few pictures of the cemetery and there are definitely unusual light phenomenae going on. Check out that apparent fire rising out from in front of that grave!

And yet none of these things compare to the most tourist-ensnaring thing we experienced. Don’t go to the Fountain of Youth Archeological Park; it’s a trap! All of the exhibits (save the newest – the shipwreck exhibit) are distinctly second or even third-tier attractions. Their dioramas are the worst we’ve seen since elementary school. The so called “Discovery Globe” is possibly the most… painful… informational presentation we have ever endured. There is a planetarium with a “how to navigate by the stars” program – which is a cool idea, but it’s hampered by a garage-sale quality projector and an unclear relationship between the visuals and the audio. You also get a taste of some real “fountain of youth” well-water but they don’t make mention of the fact that the whole story of the fountain of youth seems to have been attached to Ponce de León’s voyage after the fact by historians writing after his death. The signage and all the presentations point to the park being the location of de León’s 1513 landing, however, that is also something that is unsure from a scholarly point a view. The most redeeming quality of the place is that it does seem to be the location where Menéndez built the fort that was the start of St. Augustine (see last post). There is a plaque (far from the main buildings) that commemorates this fact. It might be worth going (warning cash-only at the admission gate), just to say you have been, but don’t say you haven’t been warned!

And so the front loops around to the back. The early-modern Spanish Ponce de León who first sloshed up onto beach of the New World is now part of modern America’s capitalist system. There is nothing of interest which some American will not put a fence around and charge admission to see. Likewise, there is nothing of interest that all Americans will refuse to pay admission to see. And so it goes.