The city badly needed better hotels and travel facilities. Visitors then had to come up the St. Johns River by steamer to Picolata, and from there a horse-drawn stage jolted them for eighteen miles over a miserable road to the San Sebastian River, where a flatboat ferried the carriage across the river to the city’s outskirts. By 1871 travelers could go up the St. Johns River by steamer to Tocoi Landing, and there take a mule-drawn car over a crude railroad that ran fifteen miles east through the wilderness to St. Augustine. It was called the St. Johns Railway and a few years later installed two wood-burning locomotives. [Illustration: _The San Marco, St. Augustine’s first great resort hotel, was opened in 1886, and burned to the ground in 1897._] _Its Isolation Broken_ The bonds of isolation and inaccessibility, which had retarded St. Augustine’s growth yet preserved its Old World character, were gradually being removed. Some signs of this awakening were apparent. “Hammers are ringing on the walls of a new hotel,” a visitor noted, “in which northern tourists are to be lodged, a splendid coquina wall, which might have stood for another century, having been torn down to make room for this ephemeral box.” The same observer lamented that because of these changes the city was losing some of it former charm: “The romance of the place is gradually departing now. The merry processions of the Carnival, with mask, violin and guitar, are no longer kept up with the old taste; the rotund Padri, the delicate form of the Spanish lady, clad in _mantilla_ and _basquina_ are gone.” In 1883 the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Halifax River Railway was completed, linking the city with South Jacksonville. A mammoth four-story wooden hotel, the San Marco, arose on a site just west of the Castillo. The tide of tourists swelled. Souvenir shops, museums, and showplaces sprang up. _The Flagler Influence_ Among St. Augustine’s many visitors during the winter of 1883-84 was Henry M. Flagler, one of the co-founders of the Standard Oil Company. Immensely wealthy, he came to rest but was impressed with St. Augustine’s charm and possibilities. Many well-to-do families were then wintering on the southern shores of France and Italy, a section known as the Riviera. Flagler believed they could be induced to come to Florida if proper facilities were provided for them. He decided to invest in the construction of luxurious hotels at St. Augustine that would make the Florida coast an “American Riviera.” His first hotel, the Ponce de Leon was begun in 1885. Two others, the Alcazar and Casa Monica (later renamed Cordova), were soon underway nearby. These and other Flagler-financed structures were massively built of solid concrete in a style of architecture adapted from palaces in Spain.