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Photo Diary: Lightner Museum, St Augustine FL [1]

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Date: 2023-02-25  

The Lightner Museum is housed, along with the St Augustine City Hall, in the old Alcazar Hotel building.

For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently wintering in Florida.

The Alcazar Hotel in St Augustine was another luxury resort that was created by railroad magnate Henry Flagler to entice northern tourists to winter in Florida. (He had already opened the Hotel Ponce de Leon a few blocks away.) The Alcazar served as a tropical playground for the glitterati until the Great Depression, when it fell on hard times and closed in 1931.

In 1947, the now-empty building was purchased by Otto Lightner, who owned Hobbies Magazine. Founded in 1931, Hobbies marketed itself as “the magazine for collectors”. The Lightner Museum of Hobbies, now housed in the former Alcazar building, featured a vast number of pieces grouped by various collections, including pottery, light fixtures and chandeliers, stained glass, and brass-ware.

The Museum opened in 1948. Lightner himself died just two years later, and is buried here in the courtyard. But the museum and its collections remains open.

Some photos from a visit.

The museum

The Museum is housed inside the Alcazar Hotel building

The hotel courtyard

Inside the Museum

The preserved Russian Bath room from the Alcazar Hotel

Looking down into the Alcazar’s Ballroom

Violano-Viruoso machine from 1927. A coin-operated machine-played violin.

Roman and Middle Eastern oil lamps

A Blickensderfer typewriter from 1897

Wooden statue of French King Francis I, from 1890

Persian carpet, from the late 1800s

Wedgwood pottery, 1840s

19th century Chinese porcelain

Arabian two-seat teakwood couch, 1880

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/25/2150582/-Photo-Diary-Lightner-Museum-St-Augustine-FL

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