Saint George Street, the pedestrian heart of colonial St. Augustine — the reconstructed Spanish town, the Colonial Quarter, the oldest wooden schoolhouse, and the layers of four centuries.
Now come back to the City Gate and turn down Saint George Street with me — and mind, you're walking one of the oldest streets in America, on the same narrow path Spanish soldiers and shopkeepers walked four hundred years ago. Cars can't come down here; it's yours on foot. Let your eye wander up as you go, past the shop signs, to the overhanging wooden balconies and the coquina-block walls and the little walled gardens tucked behind them.
Some of what you see is genuinely, achingly old, and some of it is careful reconstruction — because St. Augustine was burned and rebuilt more than a time or two, and in the twentieth century the town lovingly restored its colonial quarter to show how the Spanish city looked and lived. Watch for the Colonial Quarter, where you can step into a working version of the eighteenth-century town, and for the Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse, a tiny weathered building of cedar and cypress that has stood here, they say, since the early seventeen hundreds, held together with wooden pegs and handmade nails.
Keep strolling south down Saint George Street, deeper into the colonial town.
Photo: Barbara Ann Spengler · CC BY 2.0
