1886

I'll have a dry martini please ... or maybe it has not been invented yet? The sun is well over the yard-arm where I am.

It's a long way from the ferry to Holyhead! :-)

Looks like it must be 1860-1865 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Eastern The Sept 1861 voyage looks like a contender - "On the second day out [from Liverpool] the wind increased to gale force, causing the ship to roll heavily"

Although, the captain of the ship from 1866-78, during its cable-laying years, was a Wicklow man en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Halpin It seems odd that the saloon and dining saloon would be so luxuriously appointed for that kind of work though.

ccferrie The absolute earliest this could be is 1865, as Lawrence didn't set up in business until then. But logistically speaking, it was probably at least a few years after that. (Robert French, photographer on three-quarters of our Lawrence Collection didn't even start working for William Lawrence until 1880-ish....)

How much house do you really need?

reminds me of dee dee outside the broke down palace!

The Seminole Hotel at Lake Osceola in Winter Park, Florida opened in 1886. The hotel was a five-story, 200+ room structure and cost $150,000 to build and furnish. When completed it was the largest hotel in Florida and had more than 2,300 registered guests the first season. As wagons and carriages were the only modes of local transportation at the time guests were brought to the hotel from the South Florida Railroad train depot via a horse car that traveled on rails. It's shown in the above photo in front of the entrance. The hotel featured a 42x100 ft. formal dining room, many parlors, suites with open fireplaces, a barbershop, laundry services, and a 567 ft. long colonnaded porch.  Guests could take the elevator to view the surrounding area from the promenade on the top of the hotel. The original Seminole Hotel, above, was destroyed by fire in 1902, and the underinsured property was sold for residential lots.  A new Seminole Hotel was built on the western shore of Lake Osceola in 1913 on the eastern end of Webster Avenue that is now Kiwi Circle. The hotel sold for $250,000 in 1970 and was torn down to make way for residential development. –Excerpted  [1] [2]