Ancient City (February/March 2001 | Volume: 52, Issue: 1)

Ancient City

AH article image

Authors: Carla Davidson

Historic Era: Era 1: Three Worlds Meet (Beginnings to 1620)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

February/March 2001 | Volume 52, Issue 1

 

In mid-December of 1999, a grand hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, opened its doors for the first time since 1932. It was originally called the Casa Monica; then, with an early change of ownership, it became the Cordova. Now once again the Casa Monica, it has been renovated to the tune of millions of dollars by Richard Kessler, an entrepreneur who specializes in hotels with a history. Last winter, almost as soon as I came across a brochure promoting the sprawling Moorish fantasy of towers and battlements, I was on my way.

By coincidence, I arrived the night of the official ribbon cutting (the December opening, known in hotel parlance as a “soft opening,” had been in the way of a tryout). As my cab pulled up, I could see the entire downtown area aglow with the “million lights,” a winter tradition that began here during the Depression and started up again seven years ago. That night Casa Monica, lit as if for a Hollywood premiere, was the undisputed star, prompting the cabdriver to ask if he could please take my (wheeled) bag into the lobby just so he could get a look at the place. “The oldest hotel in the oldest city” was back in business.

The notion of St. Augustine as the nation’s oldest city has long been a selling point; the Ancient City Cab Company is but one present-day use of the theme. Local historians regularly feel the need to fend off other claimants like Jamestown (1607) or Plymouth Plantation (1620). Ponce de León’s failed attempt at colonization in the area led to his death in 1521, but the legend that he had discovered a fountain of youth there persisted through the decades. On September 8, 1565, the Spanish explorer and colonizer Don Pedro Menéndez de AvilÖs came ashore here to found a garrison that grew to become today’s city. “If there be settlers or corsairs of other nations not subject to us,” King Philip II told his emissary, “drive them out.” The Spanish held off English and French attackers for two centuries, and when the British gained St. Augustine in 1763, it was by treaty. They kept it for two decades and then ceded it back to Spain in a trade for Gibraltar and other territories. In 1821 Florida became a U.S. territory and in 1845 a state.

Of the first Spanish era, as it is called here, the only survivor is the Castillo de San Marcos, part of the National Park system and considered the best example of a Spanish colonial fortification in the continental United States. Constructed between 1672 and 1695 of coquina (a favored local building material made of hardened shell), the fort served as Spain’s northernmost outpost of empire. The Castillo has undergone much alteration, but wandering its ramparts you can still find, as did Ralph Waldo Emerson, who visited in 1827, “speaking to the eye a thousand things, of Spain, a thousand heavy histories.”

A few miles