Henry Flagler, the Standard Oil co-founder who was reshaping St. Augustine into a winter resort for America's elite, commissioned the Hotel Alcazar as a companion to his grander Ponce de Leon Hotel across the street. The New York architecture firm of Carrere and Hastings designed both buildings in the Spanish Renaissance Revival style -- among the earliest poured concrete structures in the world. The same firm would later design the New York Public Library and the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. The Alcazar was not just a hotel; it was an experience. Guests had access to a steam room, massage parlor, sulfur baths, gymnasium, a three-story ballroom, and what was then the world's largest indoor swimming pool. For decades, the wealthy descended on St. Augustine each winter by Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway, checking into this opulent playground where the architecture itself was the first entertainment.

The Depression killed the Alcazar. By 1932, the elegant winter resort closed its doors, and the massive building sat empty for fifteen years, its grand pool drained, its ballroom silent. Then, on August 20, 1947, Otto C. Lightner arrived. Lightner was a Chicago publishing magnate who had built his fortune on Hobbies Magazine, and he was a collector of almost pathological ambition. He purchased the abandoned hotel and filled it with his Victorian-era collections -- art glass, mechanical musical instruments, curiosities from around the world. He gave the building and its contents to the city of St. Augustine, and the museum opened to the public in 1948. Lightner understood something about the Alcazar: a building designed to dazzle railroad tycoons was the perfect vessel for a collection meant to dazzle everyone else.

The museum occupies three floors of the former hotel's health facilities, including the old spa, the Victorian Turkish bath, and the soaring ballroom. The first floor houses a Victorian Science and Industry Room where shells, rocks, minerals, and Native American artifacts fill ornate Gilded Age display cases. A music room holds mechanized instruments dating from the 1870s through the 1920s -- player pianos, reproducing pianos, and orchestrions that once filled parlors with automated symphonies. The second floor displays cut glass, Victorian art glass, and stained-glass work from Louis Comfort Tiffany's studio. The third floor, set in the ballroom's upper balcony, exhibits oil paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Paul Trouillebert, sculptures by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, and a grande escritoire crafted for Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother and King of Holland from 1806 to 1810.

From that third-floor balcony, you can look down at the most unusual restaurant in St. Augustine. The Cafe Alcazar sits at the bottom of the drained swimming pool -- the same pool that was once the largest indoor pool in the world, where Gilded Age guests swam under vaulted ceilings. Today, diners sit where swimmers once floated, surrounded by the original tile work and arched windows. The courtyard beyond the cafe centers on an open space with palm trees and a stone arch bridge arching over a koi pond, the kind of architectural flourish that reminds you this building was designed to make ordinary life feel extraordinary. The Lightner Museum partnered with the Benjamin and Jean Troemel Arts Foundation in 2021 to launch Lightner Local, providing exhibition space for Northeast and Central Florida artists -- proof that the building's instinct for collecting has not dimmed.