Tourist with Coquina Rock Display, St. Augustine Area, Florida, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Tourist with Coquina Rock Display, St. Augustine Area, Florida, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Tourist with Coquina Rock Display, St. Augustine Area, Florida, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-BEF31D

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The sign reads "COQUINA" and explains, with the patient enthusiasm of a roadside attraction, that this porous shell-limestone was quarried locally and used to build the old Spanish fortifications — the kind of fact that, in 1950s Florida, had been turned into a minor industry of educational placards placed next to rocks. The man leaning against the specimen with one hand on his hip and a cigarette in his fingers has the posture of someone who agreed to stop for a photograph and decided he might as well look proprietorial about it.

Florida tourism in the 1950s ran on the proposition that history was more enjoyable when you could touch it, ideally while wearing pressed slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States, had more colonial-era stonework than it knew what to do with, so it distributed samples to sidewalks and gave them placards.

He looks directly at the camera with the mild expression of a man who has learned something about coquina today and considers the transaction complete.

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