Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine

5. Architects Carrère and Hastings, 1885

56 5 ∑ Architects Carrère and Hastings, 1885 We’ve got a million dollar hotel to build. —Tom Hastings to John Carrère, 1885 Having decided to build a hotel in St. Augustine, Flagler returned from New York in May 1885 to meet with Dr. Anderson and Franklin W.Smith, attend to the details of his property acquisitions, and sign the attendant legal documents. He brought with him an expert real estate man from New York to evaluate the properties he had purchased and those he intended to buy. He also brought twenty-five-year-old Thomas Hastings. Flagler meant for this young man to supply the creative spark for the design of his hotel. The trio of northerners stayed at Markland as the guests of Dr. Anderson while they did their investigations and discussed their plans for the future.1 Thomas Hastings was the son of Flagler’s close friend and former pastor Thomas S.Hastings. Flagler and his family worshiped at the church where Has­ tings had been pastor, West Presbyterian Church on 42nd Street, a dozen blocks south of the Flagler home. Each Sabbath more than a thousand worshipers filled its large auditorium. West Presbyterian was known as the “brokers’ church” or the “millionaires’ church.” Its membership included Jay Gould, Russell Sage, and Elias Cornelius Benedict. The church stood just off Fifth Avenue overlooking Bryant Park, named after the poet William Cullen Bryant. The impressive West Presbyterian building had been constructed in the popular red-brick Gothic Revival style with square towers and a slender steeple. At the east end of the park, facing Fifth Avenue, loomed the massive fortress-like walls of the Croton Reservoir, the source of water for lower Manhattan. The supervising engineer for construction of the reservoir had been young James Renwick, who in his subsequent career as architect followed Architects Carrère and Hastings, 1885 · 57 the Gothic revival style in designing the Smithsonian Institution’s “Castle” headquarters on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and in his great St. Patrick’s Cathedral on New York City's Fifth Avenue. Thomas Hastings’s father, Thomas S.Hastings, was a descendent of one of the Puritan founding families of Massachusetts. For the first quarter century of West Presbyterian Church’s existence, the elder Hastings had ministered as its pastor, and then in 1881 Hastings became a professor of homiletics at Union Theological Seminary. He soon rose to become the seminary’s president. The Reverend Doctor Hastings’s career placed him in successive positions of eminent respectability and prestige that partly counted for money in the calculus of social standing. Beyond that, he had married into a family from the old Manhattan Dutch aristocracy , which also opened doors to the higher echelons of New York society.2 Years later Harry Harkness Flagler would describe Dr. Thomas S.Hastings as “a very old friend of my father’s.”3 Between 1895 and 1902 Flagler would hold a position on the board of Union Theological Seminary (and was presumably a financial supporter), although he was an inactive member.4 Flagler’s friendship with Hastings would have tremendous impact on Flagler’s future and on that of Hastings’s son. Young Thomas Hastings was born in 1860, the fourth of five children. A delicate child, he grew up in a family of intellectuals and musically talented relatives. (Hastings’s grandfather, another Thomas Hastings, an albino, had been a prodigious composer of hymns, including the American version of Rock of Ages.) As a child Thomas evinced a gift for drawing. “He drew insistently from an early age, constituting himself something of a nuisance as he decorated pages of books and other surfaces not intended to be used as drawing paper.”5 His parents showed sensitivity to his talents, and after he had spent a while at a college prep school, at age seventeen Thomas was apprenticed to Herter Brothers, the interior decorating firm that had furnished the Hastings residence. Christian Herter’s talents as an interior decorator had won him commissions from many of the city’s well-todo families. The architect attached to Herter’s firm, Charles Atwood, introduced Hastings to the discipline of the drafting table. One of Hastings’s co-workers recalled him as “all electricity, on the nervous qui vive, enjoying every minute and constantly laughing.”6 Hastings joined a “sketch club” of architects who met biweekly to amuse themselves by hashing over design problems. Then Herter Brothers gave Has­ tings his first...