The Lightner Museum, housed in Flagler's former Hotel Alcazar (1887) — once home to the world's largest indoor swimming pool, now a museum of the Gilded Age.
Turn and look just across King Street from the old Ponce de León, and you'll see its companion — another grand Flagler creation, the former Hotel Alcazar, built in eighteen eighty-seven. Today it houses the Lightner Museum, and it's every bit as splendid, wrapped around a lovely courtyard with palms and a fountain.
When Flagler built it, the Alcazar was a wonderland of leisure for the Gilded-Age crowd. Down in its great interior hall it held what was, at the time, the largest indoor swimming pool in the entire world — a vast casino and bath under a soaring roof, where the wealthy came to swim and be seen. That pool is still in there; these days you can stand on its floor, drained now and filled with museum shops and a cafe, and look up at the balconies where the fashionable used to watch the swimmers below.
When you come out, keep heading east on King Street, back toward the plaza.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
