St. Augustine history goes back 446 years.

   Property rights go back at least as far, and the two are at loggerheads as city government wrestles with height limits at the north end of St. George Street.

   Both the Historic Architectural Review Board and Planning and Zoning Board will recommend to the City Commission that building heights in this historic preservation district not be reduced from 35 to 27 feet as advocated by resident Robert Hall.

   The reason: property rights. "Property owners now have the right to build higher," PZB Chairman Grant Misterly said. "To reduce height affects that right and could bring lawsuits."

   City Attorney Ron Brown said "At $35 to $50 a square foot rental along St. George, owners look to vertical expansion." PZB Member Deltra Long said, "We don't want to put the city into a litigious situation."

   Hall, whose long-advocated height adjustment was highlighted by recent approval of a second story on a building bordering the City Gate, suggested existing properties could be grandfathered for the currently allowed height, and the planning board added to its recommendation a willingness to further review the idea if the City Commission directs.

Song inspired on front lines

   For Eli Grimes, a guitar player and song writer for the last 25 years, inspiration came in a jam session on a Friday night at the United Services Organization building at Contingency Operating Base Basra, Iraq, with a guitar borrowed from a soldier who had bought it from another soldier who did not make it home.

   "You hear that this is a war zone, but when you're home reading about it, you kind of say, 'Well, they wouldn't invite us over there if it was dangerous,'" said Eli, a master electrician, who left his riverfront home on the St. Johns in March under contract with the US Army to maintain their generator units.

   Grimes' Back to the good ole' USA came from those jam session conversions, and the bunkers. "Now, there is nothing in the world that makes it real like running to a bunker and hearing mortars or rockets explode around you."

   Read the full story by an Army public affairs writer here, and hear the song here.

   After returning home, Eli wrote to that jam session soldier: "Thank you Eric, for being a friend and for loaning me that guitar and for giving me something else to focus on other than the Incoming Mortars, Rockets, the Heat, the Sand, Sand Storms and Missing my Family and Loved Ones so Very Much. I wish you a lot of luck! Eli" 

   From a 1993 account by James Cusick, curator of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida Library

   There has been considerable debate about the location of St. Augustine's earliest forts. When the Spanish expedition of Pedro Menendez de Avilés arrived in Florida in 1565 to expel a French colony, the Spaniards established the settlement of St. Augustine and fortified themselves against a French attack.

   Menendez selected for his landing site a Timucuan Indian village and received from the cacique, Seloy, an Indian great house to house his stores.

   Accounts suggest that between September 6 and 7, 1565, Spanish work crews converted this great house into a defensible stronghold surrounded by a moat and fascine. The following day, settlers, stores and armaments were off-loaded to the vicinity of the new fort.

   Documentary and archaeological evidence has convinced virtually all scholars of sixteenth-century St. Augustine that the landing point and original Spanish settlement were located in the area now occupied by the Fountain of Youth Park and the Mission of Nombre de Dios.

   Historians have documented nine St. Augustine forts built prior to the still-standing Castillo de San Marcos. The first fort - incorporating Seloy's great house - was built in 1565 and was destroyed by fire on April 19, 1566, when the local Saturiwa people attacked the Spanish.

   The second fort was built during the summer and early fall of 1566. The third, constructed in the spring of 1567, had a triangular shape and contained the church and storeroom.

   The location of the second and third forts is a subject of debate. (Some historians) placed them on Anastasia Island. Eugene Lyon, after a review of documentary sources, concluded that the second and third forts were probably built on the mainland close to the original fort.

   There is less debate over the location of later forts. It is generally agreed that the fourth and fifth forts (1571 and 1579) were built on the mainland not far from the location of the first fort. The sixth fort, San Juan de Pinillos, is depicted on the 1586 Baptiste Boazio map of Drake's raid.

   This was a hexagonal pine log stockade surrounding storage rooms and quarters, with raised cavaliers or gun platforms. A moat and earthworks surrounded all but the south and east areas.

   The 1586 and later forts appear to have been located further to the south. The town of St. Augustine itself also was moved south at the end of the sixteenth century and occupied the southern half of the present downtown area.

   The archaeology of St. Augustine's first forts is important not only as a means of pin-pointing the original Spanish community, but because it will provide basic information about what the forts looked like.

   Image: St. Augustine's sixth fort, depicted on Baptiste Boazio's 1586 map of Drake's raid.