Preserving the Ancient City Through the Ages
By William R. Adams
Until recent years, historic preservation in St. Augustine was associated with what locally was known as the "Restoration," an effort to reconstruct the colonial city. Only in little more than the past quarter century have historic preservation activities that meet a conventional definition appeared. That apparent confusion of objectives resulted from St. Augustine's special place in American history and the unique qualities of its historic resources.
St. Augustine is not just another city with a history. All cities boast a past. Nor is St. Augustine merely the nation's oldest city. What it rightfully claims, in the pages of United States history, is a unique distinction as the capital of Spain's colonial empire in North America. In the American experience, St. Augustine's historic resources incomparably testify to that heritage. When, in 1821, the United States acquired Florida, the colonial presidio contained some 300 buildings, the most abundant physical legacy of Spain's presence on the North American continent. Little more than a century later, only thirty-six remained, survivors of the fires, insects, rainfall, humidity, and human destruction that consumed the others. The Restoration, a program initiated in the midst of the Great Depression to preserve those remaining resources and even to reconstruct parts that had been lost, consumed the next generation of preservation activity.
Congressional approval of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the subsequent organization of federal and state programs to assist and encourage local activities caused a preservation ethic to blossom throughout America. State-fostered programs and municipal measures adopted in St. Augustine during the 1970s paralleled the national experience. In some respects, St. Augustine emerged as a leader, one the first two cities in Florida to adopt historic architectural guidelines and historic districts and the first to approve a historic preservation plan. The existence of a state preservation program in the city nevertheless discouraged the development of neighborhood organizations that characterized the preservation movement in most Florida cities. By the century's end, the state organization was gone. Responsibility for actively pursuing or assisting historic preservation activity remained uncertain.
St. Augustine contains much to preserve. It possesses the largest concentration of historic resources in the United States that testify to the contributions of Spain and the Spanish-speaking people to the nation's colonial settlement and development. The Castillo de San Marcos is the only stone military bastion of Spanish origin in North America. St. Augustine served as one of the colonial capitals of Revolutionary War America, a fact generally ignored in American historiography because St. Augustine and the British colony of East Florida remained loyal to the British Crown throughout the struggle for independence. Still, no other place in Florida possesses comparable historic resources that have survived from that epochal period of American history. The city's ante-bellum and mid-nineteenth century architectural legacy comprises, in number of buildings and arguably their stylistic quality, Florida's most extensive and finest collection. Its late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, the legacy of the "Flagler Era," would, in any other location, earn that place unequaled distinction.
Geographically, the municipality of St. Augustine and, particularly, the colonial walled city have historically occupied a relatively small piece of land, confined to a peninsula between two rivers and a barrier island. The archaeological evidence therein which testifies to centuries of pre-historic habitation by native Americans, 256 years of colonial European settlement, and nearly two centuries of historical experience under the dominion of the United States remains relatively undisturbed in many locations. The colonial "Town Plan," an irregular checkerboard pattern of streets drafted in accordance with the administrative provisions of royal ordinance in the late sixteenth century, has suffered surprisingly little change, despite 400 years of urban growth and activity.
Historic preservation in the modern sense is essentially a process of controlling change. Only in a museum setting can an expectation exist to preserve historic buildings in a pristine state. In a "living city," transformations of buildings and their environment inevitably occur. Every age exerts its cultural prejudices upon the past. That has certainly marked the experience of St. Augustine throughout its history. The process may be said to have begun with the arrival of the British in 1764. They found the buildings left them by the previous inhabitants unappealing. The Spanish "consulted convenience more than taste," wrote one British observer in 1769. Bernard Romans complained in 1775 about the narrow streets, described the church as "a wretched building," and regarded the town as "a fit receptacle for the wretches of inhabitants." The British accordingly exhibited no esthetic compunction about altering the buildings to suit their habits of domestic comfort, introducing glass windows, interior fireplaces and of course, chimneys, which they pushed through rooflines. What they did not change they often destroyed. John Bartram reported two years after the arrival of the British that half the town had been torn down for firewood.
For the first but surely not the last time St. Augustine suffered the cultural bias that characterizes Anglo-Saxon opinion of the Spanish. Historians call that bias the "leyenda negra" or "black legend," the idea propagated for centuries in English cultural tradition that the Spanish were a corrupt, evil and oppressive people. The black legend provided a useful argument for arousing popular sentiment against the Spanish, with whom the British contended over three centuries and more for supremacy throughout Europe and the Western Hemisphere. The black legend persists. It can be found in the popular and academic tendency to diminish Spain's role in the settlement and development of the United States. St. Augustine has paid a price for the black legend. State and federal governments, foundations, and other sources of funds for historic purposes have chronically neglected the city and its resources, favoring places that reflect Anglo-Saxon traditions.
When the Spanish returned to St. Augustine in 1784, they found the city in shambles, with "nothing presenting itself to the eye anywhere except roofless buildings on the point of falling, or, already fallen, to the ground." They remained until 1821, when the United States formally took possession of the colony and its capital city, St. Augustine. During those forty-six years, despite political and social turbulence in Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and in the colony of East Florida itself, the Spanish occupants built a number of new dwellings and other buildings, including a new and impressive church on the Plaza. Some 100 new buildings were added to the 200 or so that were counted in 1796. Most reflected the rawness of a frontier town, but some were substantial, erected by owners profiting from trade and commerce with the burgeoning states north of the Florida colony.
The town did not appeal to the first American surveyor to enter it in 1821. Charles Vignoles found it "ruinous, dirty, and unprepossessing" and condemned the Spanish for allowing it to "decay." Abandoned buildings were often cannibalized for materials used in erecting other buildings. A local minister wrote that St. Augustine "wears a foreign aspect to the eye of the American. Ruinous buildings, of antique and foreign model ... and a rough, tasteless exterior ... awaken a sense of discomfort and desolation in the mind of a stranger." He held out hope for a change in the town more to his liking. "This ancient city is being transformed into American features, both in its external appearances and customs of the people."
A visiting Baptist minister in 1844 wrote that St. Augustine "seems destitute of all ideas of civilized architecture" and that the old Spanish homes, which he called "rat castles," were "only fit for owl nests." Another observer concluded that there were no more than a dozen residences in the town that "would be considered comfortable" in the north. According to some antebellum observers, only the poverty of the community saved many colonial houses from demolition.
Opinion changed after the Civil War, when the country's industrial economy spawned a distinct leisure class, loaded with money and an appetite for travel. One Northern magazine, for example, touted St. Augustine as a "foreign city…with a foreign language and customs." Something else was at work in America as well. As the nation came upon its centennial year, people looked for a history that set it apart from Europe. About St. Augustine, a travel writer proclaimed, "We keep it to show our sneering European visitors, who say we have no past….It has its ancient story, which it has preserved in an unadulterated state." By the late part of the century, the St. Augustine style, with its walled and narrow streets, had become a familiar theme in travel magazines and brochures. Buildings once called dilapidated had become "quaint." Harriet Beecher Stowe thought that the town had a romantic quality to it, without "pretensions to architectural richness and beauty; and yet…impressive from its unlikeness to any thing else in America." It was, she wrote, "as if some little, old, dead-and-alive Spanish town ... had broken loose, floated over here, and got stranded on a sand-bank."
It was such qualities that entrepreneur Henry Flagler sought to capitalize upon in the 1880s, when he brought his railroad into town and began construction of the monolithic hotels that indelibly transformed the city. A quaint, foreign-appearing town it no longer was, but one whose architectural marvels rivaled Newport's and all the other watering holes of the nation's rich. Many of the wealthy people who spent winters in Flagler's hotels built homes for themselves in the city, introducing examples of the picturesque styles that characterized late Victorian Era architecture. Flagler's projects actually had little effect on the colonial city itself. Instead, he created an architectural legacy of his own, on the fringes of the Ancient City.
The enemy most ruinous at the time to St. Augustine's colonial heritage was fire. Widespread destruction resulted from conflagrations in 1887 and 1914. By the early twentieth century, only about fifty of the 300 colonial era buildings remained standing. An appreciation for their historic value was not absent within the city. A complaint was voiced in 1886 about the damage that tourists inflicted upon the Castillo de San Marcos when they chipped away souvenirs from the coquina façade. In 1907, a group of women defeated an attempt by the mayor to dismantle the City Gate portals at the north end of St. George Street. Four years later, the organization that is now the St. Augustine Historical Society appealed to the Secretary of War to take urgent action to preserve Fort Matanzas, a seventeenth century fortress along the Matanzas River, eleven miles south of St. Augustine.
The Society began in 1918 to take an active role in preserving the city's historic resources when it purchased the Gonzales-Alvarez House on Marine Street for exhibition as the "Oldest House." The building once had rivals for that claim, but its pedigree has withstood challenge. More than one local entrepreneur at the time advertised often outrageous historic claims about a building to entice tourists. Over the next twenty years and more, the Society went on to purchase other threatened historic buildings whose preservation at times it assured through resale with restricted covenants.
The automobile and an interstate road system created a new era of tourism for St. Augustine in the post-World War I period, raising local awareness of the potential economic value that historic buildings and sites held. A planning study commissioned by the City in 1917 emphasized the need to promote St. Augustine's historic character and for the first apparent time enumerated the physical resources such as buildings and sites that might be defined as "historic." The Charter of the City of St. Augustine, approved by the State Legislature in 1925, declared the "preservation, restoration, and maintenance…of ancient landmarks, sites, buildings, and remains and other property of historical and antiquarian interest" a municipal purpose. To preserve them, the charter authorized the City Commission to exercise eminent domain and to hold historic property in trust. Seven years later, the City agreed to accept in trust from the estate of Anna Burt the Peña-Peck House, whose origins dated to about 1740, a rare "First Spanish Period" building. The City used the same authority much later to acquire title to the Llambias House (c. 1750) from the Carneigie Institution, which had purchased the building as a consequence of that organization's role in the Restoration program.
As the air began to seep out of the 1920s Florida real estate bubble, presaging the advent of the Great Depression, the Atlantic Bank Building rose to completion beside the Cathedral. The six-story edifice overwhelmed the historic church. A horrified City Commission belatedly concluded that the historic character of the Ancient City had been compromised. It adopted an ordinance restricting the height of future construction throughout the city to thirty-five feet, the first recognition in municipal code that the architectural principle of scale indelibly figured in what modern preservation parlance refers to as the city's "sense of historic place." The economic misfortunes that the collapse of the Great Boom brought on may have restrained the City Commission from engaging in a more proactive preservation role. In 1929, it refused an appeal from the Historical Society for an appropriation to maintain old cemeteries and "properly certified landmarks."
By the advent of the Great Depression, there existed evident concern about the ultimate fate of the city's remaining colonial resources. There was also much economic misery in St. Augustine, like elsewhere in America. Looking for a solution to the two problems, St. Augustine discovered a role model in Williamsburg, Virginia, where the highly publicized restoration of that colonial capital was proceeding under the financial auspices of John D. Rockefeller. In 1935, St. Augustine Mayor Walter B. Fraser mobilized support for organization of a national committee to formulate plans for a similar effort in the Ancient City. He approached the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., a rich and powerful national foundation, to underwrite the effort. A preliminary meeting of a national committee, held in Washington on October 26, 1936, advocated a historic survey of the city's historic resources as an initial measure of activity. Although not, probably, what local leaders wanted, the committee's proposal offered the logical first step in any preservation program, namely identification and evaluation of the city's historic resources.
In the same year, transfer of the Castillo de San Marcos from the War Department to the National Park Service (NPS) placed the city's most prominent historic structure under the auspices of an agency dedicated to that site's preservation and interpretation. The former chief historian and acting director of the Branch of Historic Sites and Buildings for the NPS, Verne Chatelain, was selected to direct the St. Augustine survey as a research associate on the staff of the Carnegie Institution. Chatelain, who hoped to make St. Augustine a laboratory of history, said that ultimately the program was designed to reveal the "life history" of the city and translate the results of his survey into a plan of physical development.
The Committee began its work with a survey and collection of documentary materials in the National Archives in Washington and called for collection of the East Florida Papers, Spanish documents relating to the area's colonial history. Pictures and photographs were gathered and photographs made of existing historic buildings in the city. A tentative assessment of archaeological documents was compiled, for, as Chatelain pointed out, no reconstruction work could proceed without preliminary investigation of the below-ground historic resources. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) a depression-era New Deal agency, gave the project assistance by funding two historic surveys, a nation-wide records search and a state archives search. W. J. Winter, a former NPS archaeologist, was placed in charge of the local search for archaeological records. He promised that his work would constitute only the beginning of a systematic study of archaeology throughout St. Johns County.
World War II interrupted the ambitious program before it got much beyond the planning stage. Very little physical work was accomplished, although the City adopted an ordinance to protect historic landmarks. The ambitious research effort produced little. Chatelain presented many of his findings in a book on the military defenses of the colonial city. No report resulted from the archaeological program. Its data were scattered and lost. Significantly, however, the State of Florida endorsed the program. In 1937, the State Legislature approved a special act granting St. Johns County and its cities and subdivisions the power of eminent domain to protect historic landmarks and sites. A bill providing for creation of a "St. Augustine Historical Preservation and Restoration Commission" was introduced and an appropriation of $50,000 to fund the acquisition and preservation of historic sites approved. Although the Commission authorization failed, the appropriation did stand and was later transferred to the City to purchase the Llambias House.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, residents grappled among themselves and with federal officials over widening of the Bayfront, closely skirting the Castillo de San Marcos. The eventually constructed four-lane boulevard proved but one of a number of new developments in an era of fast growth that threatened the remnants of the city's past. The Historical Society purchased three colonial buildings in the early 1950s to prevent their destruction. With the 400th anniversary of the city's founding approaching, local officials this time turned to the state legislature for assistance. On June 19, 1959, Governor LeRoy Collins signed into law a bill creating a St. Augustine Historical Restoration and Preservation Commission. The seven-member commission was authorized "to acquire, restore, preserve, maintain, reconstruct, reproduce, and operate for the use, benefit, education, recreation, enjoyment, and general welfare" St. Augustine's "historical and antiquarian sites."
Employing concepts formulated in the 1930s by the Carnegie-sponsored study, the Commission proposed to conduct a program of restoration or reconstruction of colonial structures throughout the "Walled City," or colonial presidio. In late 1960, it undertook its first physical venture, restoration of the Arrivas House, and looked to the State Legislature for financial assistance to expand its efforts. It received an appropriation of $150,000, but was required to dip into that small pool of money to fund its staff activities. Little or nothing remained for the acquisition of additional properties or for the actual task of restoration. The recurrent pleas of trustees for capital support to pursue the restoration program job fell on deaf ears in Tallahassee. The legislative practice of merely funding staff salaries while ignoring capital expense needs remained in place for the succeeding thirty-six years.
By the end of 1961, after two years of work, the Commission had but one partially completed project to show for its efforts. Looking elsewhere for funds, the Commission created a private foundation to solicit private and other public or foundation assistance. For at least the first two decades of the program, the City of St. Augustine and St. Johns County made annual contributions to the Commission for the acquisition and restoration of specific historic properties.
The Commission selected north St. George Street as the focal point for the program popularly referred to as the "Restoration." That part of the city contained a distressed commercial sector, which community leaders wanted revitalized. One block, moreover, harbored a cluster of five surviving colonial buildings, the closest such concentration in the city. They stood directly west of the Castillo de San Marcos, offering the possibility of creating an interpretive program linked to the city's most visible and popular attraction. Between 1961 and 1984, the Commission (renamed the Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board in 1968) restored, reconstructed or preserved some forty buildings within the colonial city, most of them in the blocks bounded by Fort Alley and Hypolita streets on the north and south, and between St. George and Charlotte streets. The City of St. Augustine contributed to the program's interpretive effort by limiting St. George Street to pedestrian traffic from the City Gate to Hypolita Street.
Other legislative developments cast early doubt on the state's commitment to St. Augustine's program. Preservation boards modeled after the St. Augustine example were created in Pensacola, Key West, Tallahassee, and four other locations, providing competition for legislative monies, which, in any case, were always limited. In its thirty-six years of operation, 1960 to 1996, the state-sponsored commission (or board) received less than $200,000 in capital outlay expenditures for the purposes of acquiring, restoring, or reconstructing historic buildings. Especially after the creation of the rival Pensacola Commission in 1968, it was easily apparent that, barring some legislative miracle, St. Augustine would never receive a state appropriation sufficient to complete even a modest part of its original plan for the colonial city's restoration.
The existence of a professional historic preservation staff at the Board nevertheless permitted St. Augustine to march in the vanguard of state preservation efforts in the 1970s, during a time when historic preservation in the United States experienced dramatic changes. The national movement, launched by Congressional passage of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, fed upon a growing national awareness of the negative impact that modem development exerted on America's historic towns and cities and the energies generated by the national Bicentennial celebration. The Board's staff prepared applications for listing of many local historic buildings and sites in the expanded National Register of Historic Places, including, in 1971, the colonial city historic district. Three years later, in 1974, the City Commission adopted an ordinance demarcating for architectural control five local historic districts, essentially within and around the colonial city. To supervise change within those districts, the Commission authorized creation of an architectural review board.
Although the Restoration initiative faltered for lack of funding in the 1970s, historical and archaeological research and investigations flowered. Professional historians and archaeologists, funded by the Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board, the Castillo de San Marcos, and the St. Augustine Restoration Foundation, which briefly considered the reconstruction of the 1580 colonial settlement, produced a rich and abundant body of scholarship. In little more than a decade's time, archaeologists Hale Smith, Charles Fairbanks, John Griffin, Kathleen Deagen, and Robert Steinbach, and historians Albert Manucy, Luis Arana, Eugene Lyon, Paul Hoffman, Michael Gannon, Michael Scardaville, and Amy Bushnell established a base of knowledge that will support a generation and more of research and preservation effort.
The preservation initiative also expanded in the 1970s to embrace resources outside the colonial city. The Preservation Board completed in 1981 a three-year long archaeological and building survey, compiling information about historic resources that permits agencies, property owners and, especially, the Historic Architectural Review Board (HARB) to make informed preservation judgements. Employing the information gathered from the survey, the Board's staff wrote nominations embracing two historic neighborhoods, the Abbott Tract and Model Land Company historic districts, listed in 1983, and assisted in the listing of many other individual sites and structures. A fourth National Register historic district within the city, Lincolnville, prepared at the request of the City in 1988, recognized the community's historic black neighborhood. A later attempt, sponsored by the City Planning Department in 1992, to add the Lighthouse neighborhood to the National Register of Historic Places failed because of the objections of residents.
The City in 1987 adopted a Historic Preservation Element as a part of its Comprehensive Plan. This document provided an outline of goals and objectives for preserving cultural resources and suggested policies for achieving them. In response to one of the plan's declared objectives, the City Commission in 1988 approved an ordinance requiring property owners undertaking development at a defined below-ground level to make an assessment of the property's archaeological resources. The City employed a professional archaeologist to perform the investigations. In 2002, St. Augustine remains the only city in Florida with such an ordinance in place.
The Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board withdrew from sponsorship of community historic preservation research and advocacy in the late 1980s. Preserving buildings and other historic resources was left to property owners and market forces. A relatively small number of property owners took advantage of federal tax laws that accorded an investment tax credit for the rehabilitation of historic buildings. Many eligible public agencies and non-profit entities received state and federal grant assistance for historic preservation improvements to historic buildings. Only within the historic districts controlled by municipal ordinance were changes to the historic architecture or landscape officially monitored.
In the mid-1990s, as the St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners and its staff prepared to move into a new courthouse on the outskirts of the city, St. Augustine faced the renewed threat of a vast, empty building in the heart of the city. In the early 1960s, the same building, originally constructed as the Casa Monica Hotel in the late nineteenth century, had remained vacant for over thirty years before its conversion to the county courthouse. In the same period, its two companion buildings, the Ponce de Leon Hotel and the Alcazar Hotel, likewise empty or about to be vacated, found useful new life, the first as a centerpiece for a four-year college and the second as a museum and municipal office building. The Casa Monica was rescued a second time through adaptive re-use, returned to its original purpose as a hotel. The facility breathed new economic vitality into the city, like the two other Flagler-era hotels. Both St. Johns County and the City of St. Augustine adopted a state-authorized ad valorem tax relief provision to encourage rehabilitation of the Casa Monica Hotel and other eligible historic buildings.
The Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board experienced some fitful years after 1988, resulting in a one-year legislative abolishment of the agency in 1990-91. When it was reconstituted, the Board was placed under close control from Tallahassee. The apathy of state officials toward maintaining the historic program became increasingly apparent. Faced with growing evidence that the Board's years were numbered, St. Augustine's Mayor and City Manager began quietly in 1993 to inquire about the costs and problems associated with the City's assumption of the program's management. When the State Legislature ended the program in 1997, the Florida Department of State gave the City a five-year lease upon the buildings and properties that had been assembled during the state's thirty-six years of operation and responsibility for managing the museums associated with those properties. The City Commmission established a new department to administer the former state program and also subsequently approved the acquisition of additional properties in the area associated with the Restoration, indicating a municipal purpose to continue the work.
The City's Planning Department sponsored an updated survey of historic buildings in 1998. As the municipal department responsible for the Historic Architectural Review Board and the archeological program, as well as review of ad valorem tax relief applications, it has, by a process of default, become the only identifiable entity in the city that exercises an active historic preservation role. Architectural preservation outside of the historic districts controlled by municipal ordinance essentially relies on incentives provided under state and federal tax laws. Archaeological research continues, under the auspices of the City and the University of Florida, which conducts annual field studies that for over a decade have centered on early settlement patterns. Historical research within the city that might contribute to interpretation of archaeological findings and to architectural preservation suffer from an absence of any sponsored professional historian dedicated to that work. It is encouraging, however, that at the dawn of a new century that will encompass the quincentennial of the city's founding, tentative efforts have begun to give renewed purpose to preserving the colonial city and to the Restoration itself.
This article is provided with permission of the author. For additional accounts of life in St. Augustine, please see Firestorm and Ashes: The Siege of 1702. El Escribano, 39, 2002. St. Augustine, FL: Jean Parker Waterbury.