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Went for a tour of Flagler College. |
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Learned quite a few different aspects of the architecture. |
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The who's who towards the end of the eighteen hundreds |
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The college started out as the Hotel Ponce de Leon, built by Henry Flagler. |
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Louis Comfort Tiffany contributed the leaded glass windows. |
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The hotel opened January 12, 1888. |
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Guests paid $4,000 for an entire season's stay. |
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Thomas Edison wired the hotel for electricity. He also created this clock, that is right twice a day, because it is embedded in the largest slab of white marble in the northern hemisphere and no one can remove the clock for repair without damaging the marble! |
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Four hundred rooms with 80% of them having fireplaces. |
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Designed by the same men that designed the New York Public Library. |
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There were magnificent paintings behind the black velvet rope! |
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Eleven rock crystal chandeliers. |
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Painted canvases by George Maynard and Virgilio Tojetti. |
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Built with poured concrete and coquina and wired for electricity three years before the white house!! |
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He married three wives, one died of Tuberculosis, her care giver, the second wife, sent to an insane asylum and the last wife won the lotto when Flagler died. It was her great-nephew that saved the hotel from demolition with the money she had inherited. |
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Edison used these dragon heads to illuminate the courtyard. The dragons had red glass balls in their mouths. |
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Every detail had a reason. The fountain was a sundial with the twelve frogs around the base. |
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Two towers holding eight thousand gallons of fresh, running, water for the guests. |
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The rotunda is three stories tall. There are two thousand doors and one thousand windows. |
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It took Henry Flagler and his buddy, John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, two years to construct with three hundred to four hundred men working all of the time twenty four hours a day. |
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The first, poured in place, concrete building in the United States. I feel as if I am writing a book report for school! The college student, who showed us around, would be surprised at what I could remember from his tour presentation. |
