was headed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and his company, Tiffany & Co, which provided the stained glass windows in the hotel's dining room. The hotel's furnishings were provided by Pottier & Stymus, a prominent New York City furniture and design firm at the time. Bernard Maybeck, whose later designs include the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, served as a draftsman on the project and designed its 540 guest rooms. Architect Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, who had recently arrived from Paris and would go on to supervise the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, created the watercolor elevation of the hotel. Murals in the rotunda and dining room were completed by the well-known artist George W. Maynard, who a decade later painted murals in the Treasures Gallery at the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. The murals at the Ponce were well known at the time. Writing of a visit to St Augustine, Ring Lardner has one of his characters say: Electricity was supplied by the Edison Electric Company, as Thomas Edison was a personal friend of Henry Flagler and architect Thomas Hastings' brother Frank was the company's secretary-treasurer. Edison oversaw the installation of DC dynamos in the hotel. The building was one of the first in the world to be wired for electricity and constructed with it in mind. When the hotel first opened, Flagler hired staff to turn power on and off for his residents, because the people staying at the hotel were too afraid to turn the switches on and off themselves. Originally, the twin towers of the hotel were water storage tanks which contained 8,000 gallons each, providing running water for hotel guests. During World War II, one of the towers served as a brig when the hotel was occupied by the U.S. Coast Guard as a training center. Operation The Ponce de Leon Hotel opened on January 10, 1888. It was an instant success, and within two years, Flagler opened another hotel in St. Augustine, the Alcazar. Just across the street, it absorbed guests that the Ponce could not accommodate and eased the massive demand. A year later, in 1888, he purchased Franklin Smith's troubled Casa Monica Hotel, renovating it and reopening it as the Cordova. The success convinced Flagler that Florida was viable and ripe for development, and it encouraged him to continue development south along the state's east coast, as he