Old hobbies, new visiting pleasures in St. Augustine

By Christine Tibbetts

TIFTON February 28, 2008 11:34 am

— Nineteenth-century wealth, elegance and surely some eccentricity spill out around the corner and up the street in Florida’s oldest city, St. Augustine. Four handsome neighboring buildings filled with remarkable objects and furnishings tell tales of quite a lifestyle.
One of them re-opened Feb. 15 for the first time since 2000, and in far greater splendor than visitors have seen for years. Careful loving historic preservation led by a granddaughter of the owner and her husband can do that.
Stroll another block to find two churches tied to the builders of these opulent 19th-century homes and hotels if you can tear away.
I couldn’t. Missed the churches because the wonders are immense and the days not long enough to enjoy everything in Villa Zorayda, the Lightner Museum, Flagler College and Casa Monica Hotel, all within sight of one another.
Those are today’s names. Expect to be confused because the Lightner is often referred to as the Alcazar Hotel, which it was until Otto C. Lightner turned it into a museum of hobbies. He had plenty of those.
Flagler College started life in 1887 as the Hotel Ponce de Leon and the Casa Monica Hotel opened its doors to three guests Jan. 1, 1888.
Don’t relax yet, however, because Henry Flagler changed its name to the Cordova when he bought it all three months later: “fixtures, furnishings, silver, hardware, linen, bedding, parlor, hall, dining room and kitchen furnishings and all other chattels” for $325,000.
Casa Monica didn’t return as the name until 1999 when a massive renovation by the Kessler Collection re-created the hotel’s Spanish Moorish design, Victorian velvet and tapestry and medieval European castle design. Now it’s a AAA Four Diamond property.
Stay at the Casa Monica with these other grand buildings in sight through your windows, leave the car parked and cross the street to unlimited treasures. Restaurants, little shops and galleries are handy too, in the hotel and on the street.
Spain is evident all over St. Augustine thanks to the 1565 discoverers, but it’s not limited to forts, cemeteries and stories of Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.
Luxurious is the style here and it’s easy to wrap up in the splendor, transporting yourself to another era. Mustn’t touch exquisite museum pieces, but you can relax in splendid lobbies and dining rooms, gaze across massive ballrooms, stroll the grassy grounds, sit under Louis Comfort Tiffany brass and gold chandeliers and across from dozens of Tiffany windows. Reason enough to visit.
Flagler College tour guides say the world’s largest collection of Tiffany stained glass is right here, installed in the early years of his career.
Windows matter across the street too at Villa Zorayda. Forty of them to be exact. Give full reign to your imagination when you look at the front of this building, one-tenth of the scale of a portion of Spain’s Alhambra. Many of those 40 windows jut out of the coquina cement structure at all sorts of angles.
Original owner and builder Franklin W. Smith, who founded the YMCA, and his wife Laura Bevan loved the Alhambra and recreated this version in 1883 for wintering in a warm climate.
If you’ve read, and remembered, Washington Irving’s “The Alhambra,” you’ll already know that Zorayda is one of the three princesses.
Seems like royalty must have lived here considering the tapestries, furnishings, sculpture, inlaid wood, ancient rugs and artwork, but not so. It’s easy to meet the granddaughter of second owner Abraham S. Mussallem in Villa Zorayda, and she shares plenty of memories.
“I always loved this place when I was little,” says Marcia Mussallem Byles. What a place to transport yourself to another world, and that means adults probably more than kids.
The front door just opened Feb. 15 with daily tours beginning at 10 a.m. and Marcia and her husband James M. Byles are likely to be there, sharing the family memories and restoration stories.
“Ninety nine point nine percent of everything here is original to the house,” Byles says. “Franklin Smith’s collection was old and amazing and we sought restoration experts all over the nation, including here in St. Augustine, to properly preserve each item.”
That’s no little claim. Check out the rug (no photos allowed) made with the hair of sacred cats roaming the Nile centuries ago. How did it get here? As a gift to Mussallem, a noted lecturer on Egypt, with a caveat that it could never be sold or given as long as he has a living heir. This rug’s on the wall because it also carries a curse if you step on it. Villa Zorayda is not your everyday museum.
Admission is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors, military and students, and $6 for children. Hold their hands. Touching these treasures is an overwhelming urge.
I hung over the balcony a long time; it circles the entire main room on the first level and looking down into Moorish lamps and tables was as interesting as seeing them from eye level. Looking through all 40 windows of many shapes let me know I wasn’t in an average house.
Repeat that balcony leaning next door at the bright and airy three-story Lightner Museum, where Chicago hobbyist and magazine publisher Otto C. Lightner kept his collections. He believed everyone should have a hobby, and I think a good new one for me is looking at his.
Flanking the balcony in this former Alcazar, a recreation area for Henry Flagler’s posh guests at the across-the-street Hotel Ponce de Leon, are a Louis XV-style mahogany bureau, a desk with 200 small drawers, inlaid with ivory and ebony, owned by the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte and French, German and Italian sculpture including works of gilded bronze and of marble.
This was the ballroom gallery and today you’ll see enormous decorative urns, a morning glory chandelier made in France for Maximilian and Carlotta, and French and Belgian paintings.
The balcony overlooks space that was the Alcazar’s 120-foot long, 50-foot wide indoor pool, where the Flagler guests – required to book three months and to prove their place on the New York Social Register - took the waters.
The pool was only one way, and women had a private area if they preferred. Roman, Russian and Turkish baths were the other and visitors can sit in them today, sans the steam and water.
Lightner didn’t collect a silver spoon now and then or a quilt or piece of cut glass. He collected collections of them. Complete rooms. Whole houses. Even his button collection is interesting, and the diaries that go along with it, with original owner Blanche Elder claiming, “Buttons are my weakness.”
Spend the whole day at the Lightner Museum, or at least be sure you’re there at 11 a.m. or 2 p.m. when the music box collection is played. These are big boxes, not the little jewelry version more commonly seen. Check out the 1874 German Orchestrion with its 45-note piano, glockenspiel, three ranks of pipes, drums and cymbal.
The ceilings are high, the windows broad, the sunshine inside is Florida-bright and the whole experience is charming. Ask to chat with curator Barry Myers, a three-generation and 18-year veteran of these collections.
“My grandmother told me stories of swimming here as a child,” Myers says. “I was still a boy the day she learned I hadn’t been inside the museum; she set her groceries on the front step and marched me directly to the Lightner.”
Now he’s a professional curator in love with cut glass and porcelain collections, fossils and cameos, Tiffany glass and Victorian art glass and with his job of caring for them.
Criss-crossing King Street to revisit these four places is fun enough for any good vacation. If you must stray, it’s just block to Avenida Menendez on the Matanzas River and the Bridge of Lions, and equally close to St. George Street for pedestrian-only, no vehicle shopping. Hold on to the mood of Spain in this neighborhood with sangria and paella among the best dishes for lunch or dinner at Columbia restaurant.
This stretch of St. Augustine offers lots of tastes and styles.

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