Jacksonville FL: Urban Grit and Renewal in FL's Oldest Neighborhood

[simms3_redux]

Just another Jacksonville neighborhoods tour. This time the shots are taken street level. They were all taken July 5th of this year, hence the Red White & Blue decor and the lack of street activity (I think people were recovering, heh). I also apologize in advance for my crappy camera.

Now on to FL’s oldest neighborhood, including plenty of grit! If you have the time, read the history and the captions (when provided).

Springfield began to be developed as a neighborhood, plotted out in the 1860s. The original waterworks (still standing) was completed in 1879. Then some prominent local businessmen bought 600 acres (close to 1 square mile), extended the Main Street trolley line, brought about the first large surge of development in the 1880s. Springfield was incorporated into Jacksonville’s city limits along with some other neighborhoods in 1887. In 1888, the Board of Trade constructed and brought the Sub-Tropical Exposition to Springfield to display exotic animals and tropical plants to tourists. The main building was a grandiose structure 325 ft. long and 100 ft. tall with towers and elements pulling from Romanesque and Middle Eastern influences.

During the 1890s, Cuba’s liberation from Spain drew support from Jacksonville. Duval County Sheriff Napoleon Bonaparte Broward ran guns and men to Cuba throughout the war. Jacksonville became a staging area for American troops entering the war. Unfortunately, with 18,000 troops stationed in Springfield, a Typhoid epidemic broke out and killed 362 American soldiers, almost as many as the 385 that died in combat. Then the 1901 Fire broke out and burned down all of downtown. Springfield was protected by a creek that now forms the basis for 2 parks. As a result residents fled to Springfield, and the 2nd housing boom occurred from 1901 to 1915. Springfield is roughly 1 square mile, but at its peak population had close to 12,000 residents.

By the 1960s, Springfield was in decline. By the 1980s, Springfield was one of the roughest hoods in the country. A current resident who is one of the new urban pioneers of the neighborhood bought a home that 7 people were murdered in just the few years prior. Just some trivia, his home was built of steel and in a fashion to be hurricane proof, fire proof, and termite proof by famed shipbuilder Arthur Stevens, the founder of Merrill Stevens now located in Miami. There was a boiler in the basement (yes basements in thi neighborhood even in FL), and original Thomas Edison light bulbs, as well as letters to Arthur from Woodrow Wilson and Edison.

Now Springfield is one of the “fastest growing” neighborhoods in Jacksonville, but only because people are moving back, not necessarily building a new neighborhood. The street cars are gone, but there is talk of rebuilding them some day. Most of the houses have been restored at least somewhat, and Main Street is the only obstacle yet to be brought back to life. The neighborhood is very ethnically diverse with every ethnicity/color, old people that grew up in the neighborhood, young New York transplants looking for an urban environment, gays and artists, and navy personnel.

The neighborhood has 4 quadrants divided by Main St and 8th St and I missed the NW quadrant.



Section 8!! Welcome to the hood! No it’s not quite like that.



Klutho Park: Named for famed NY architect who relocated to Jacksonville after the Fire and became one of the most prominent architects in the rebuilding of the city. Citizens of Jacksonville are hoping this par is restored and becomes sort of the “Central Park” of Jacksonville along with Confederate Park adjoining this one.



1909 Tudor Revival home needs some love.





Klutho Park



Love the Bismarck Palm growing in the front. This palm is tropical and is popular in S FL, but it can grow in Jax and people have started planting these all over the place. They are white.





Klutho Park













1892 home, reminds me of the Garden District of NOLA





1901 home





1870s or 1880s home







The old First Church of Christ Scientist, built in 1921, is now a Karpeles Manuscript Museum, one of just a few in the country (the others are in Buffalo, Charleston, Newburgh, Fort Wayne, and Santa Barbara). In this particular museum you find the original proposal draft of the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Olive Branch Petition, Handel’s Messiah, Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Wagner’s Wedding March, and works by Descartes, Kepler, Newton, Galileo, Luther and others.



Klutho park



Bethel Baptist Church, a historical black congregation started in 1838, the present building was completed in 1904.



The Pearl…a relatively popular nightclub with a fake tree as the centerpiece inside. It’s more for the indie crowd and often has a long line out the door, even though it’s isolated and not near other similar establishments.



These are what the bus stops look like in Springfield, in traditional Klutho style.



Springfield Preservation



3rd and Main, a new development with ground floor retail and condos. Designed in traditional Klutho style. Jacksonville has a unique twist on Prairie School architecture made popular by Henry Klutho, a New York architect who relocated to Jacksonville and studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. Jacksonville still has the largest collection of Prairie School Buildings outside of the Midwest.



Someone’s garage.





These are actually new homes built by SRG.







1908 house





1890s home











Shands Jacksonville, our largest public hospital with close to 600 beds. Shands has a program with University of Florida, and UF med students take up residency here. If you work at Shands, you have seen it ALL. It is the closest hospital to Jacksonville’s dangerous NW side, and Jacksonville has been known as the murder capital of FL for 2 decades, though we have come down from our close to 200 annual murders in the 1990s.



1890 residence







1922 Presbyterian Church.







Half of the houses in the neighborhood have a tin roof…so FL!







1900 home



This is actually a relatively new building occupied by either a law firm or an accounting firm that redid the building in traditional Klutho style.







1880s home



Looking towards the neighborhoods central focal point: the intersection of Main and 8th





Apartments designed by Henry Klutho in 1911, known as the Florence Court Apartments









1890 home









1929 restaurant…it has always been a restaurant



1915 “New” Waterworks building



The 1879 “Old Waterworks” building





Klutho parks again







1901 W.B. Barnett Residence, built for the founder of FL’s Barnett Bank, once one of the country’s largest banks based here in Jacksonville, it had several cities’ tallest skyscrapers, including ours, which is now Bank of America Building (Nationsbank bought Barnett, which was then bought by BofA less than a year later).



1924 Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, still in use today. Egyptian Revival. The other temple is downtown and is even larger and is also Egyptian Revival, built for the Shriners.



Confederate Park, circa 1907.





Duval Armory, 1915.



I like this view for some reason.



A dog park.



Ugly “community center”, or maybe it’s a library, the latter would be better.



Section 8!!



This couple just moved down to Jax and is working to make this former commercial space a house.





New home









This is now a coffee shop I think.



A wine bar



















Section 8!!!



I am not sure what this building is, but it’s pretty.









Looks like it once was either a cannery or a brewery



Needs some love fast!









1902 home





I originally thought this church made a statue of a black Jesus being crucified, but he was real and we actually chatted for a little bit. Kind of odd.







Lauderdale Apartments, circa 1912.



1890 home in the Queen Anne style



1886 home in the Queen Anne style



1870s? home





Kirby Smith Middle School.





Klutho Apartments, circa 1913



A restaurant on Main







Andrew Jackson High School





















Love this house



The future of Springfield:

Within 5 Years: Almost every house restored, more businesses on Main and in commercial areas, Klutho Parks restored to former glory
Within 10 Years: Streetcars running again, a loft/warehouse district served by rail with nightclubs and bars and restaurants open in the NE Quadrant
Within 15 Years: Current Section 8s are “affordable mixed housing”
Within 20 Years: Springfield is one of the most highly desired neighborhoods in the country

Other photo tours

Riverfront mansions, clubs, and skyline views in Ortega:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=183922
FL’s largest historic district via the riverfront:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=183919

[LAsam]

No comments?! Thanks for posting these photos. I really love seeing these old Florida neighborhoods. Orlando looks like it has some good ones as well.

[Chef]

Interesting tour. Take out the palm trees and a lot of those houses could be in the Midwest.

[LouisianaRush]

Great neighborhood. It reminds me a lot of New Orleans. I it is odd how Jax looks nothing like Miami or Ft. Lauderdale. I think the housing stock in Jax is much nicer than the bland stuff we have down here in Miami.

[Thundertubs]

Cool tour. I drove through once and also thought it had kind of a Midwestern vibe. I will be sure to check it out more in-depth next time.

[whatsthepoint13]

I love it! So much character, thanks.

[bobdreamz]

Great tour and pics of the Springfield neighborhood. It's amazing how the architecture is so vastly different in Jax compared to the Miami area and a healthy amount of brick buildings also!

[Cory]

What a surprise.

[ColDayMan]

Neat shots!

[JBoston]

Wow with all of the old architecture it looks like a Rust Belt city with a lot of palm trees. Surreal.

[Coldrsx]

Very impressive character indeed.

Love the Victorian touches

[simms3_redux]

It looks Midwestern for two primary reasons: A) the original settlers were largely from Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and even Wisconsin (other areas of town were dominated by more NE origins), and B) one of the city's greatest architects moved down after the 1901 fire and after studying under Frank Lloyd Wright. He popularized the Prairie Style seen throughout the whole city and other architects followed suit. Outside of the largest midwestern cities, Jacksonville has the largest collection of Prairie School architecture.

For being in the south, and in FL, Jacksonville looks almost more like a northern city than a FL/southern city. Where it looks more like FL and more tropical is at the Beaches. I will post some photos of the beaches areas soon. (Atlantic Beach/Neptune Beach look like Cape Cod with palms, Jax Beach is our "Sobe" but looks more like Daytona or Gulf Coast, PVB is the closest thing we have to Palm Beach, and nothing really compares to St. Augustine, which I will put in its own thread).

[sopas ej]

Very interesting tour. Thanks!

I was gonna say, I would think that St. Augustine would have Florida's oldest neighborhoods, but I'll admit I'm not familiar with Florida; I've never even been to Florida.

[simms3_redux]

sopas ej: St. Augustine is the oldest overall settlement in FL, and really going back is the oldest in the country. Ironically, St. Augustine was first settled in 1565, but Jacksonville was first explored and settled by the French in 1562 (Jean Ribault). Fort Caroline (replica is standing) in Jax predates Castillo de San Marco in St. Augustine by about 100 years. Menendez, who really got St. Augustine going, fought with Ribault for many years.

St. Augustine is its own city, though, and I will showcase a separate thread for that. While there are some 1600s/1700s buildings (really none from 1500s, and barely any from 1600s), much of St. Augustine in the way of the Spanish architecture was developed between 1870 and 1890 by the likes of Henry Flagler.

Pensacola also has old houses and old neighborhoods, but Jacksonville was literally the nation's winter resort and Florida metropolis until almost the Great Depression. South Florida took over from there. Then Tampa started happening more, and then Orlando didn't really pick up until the 1960s and 70s. All 3 of those cities overtook Jax fairly quickly in population and Jax has never caught back up. However, for scale of oldness and amount of oldness, nothing else in FL compares to Jax, especially relative to the size of the city.

Springfield is only 1 square mile where most structures were built before 1910. Riverside and Avondale combined is a much larger area (much larger than St. Augustine) and almost every structure was built before 1928. That combo is the largest historic district by a long shot in the state, even much larger than St. Augustine.

[LSyd]

nice tour, good to see restoration work in progress

-

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by simms3_redux

sopas ej: St. Augustine is the oldest overall settlement in FL, and really going back is the oldest in the country. Ironically, St. Augustine was first settled in 1565, but Jacksonville was first explored and settled by the French in 1562 (Jean Ribault). Fort Caroline (replica is standing) in Jax predates Castillo de San Marco in St. Augustine by about 100 years. Menendez, who really got St. Augustine going, fought with Ribault for many years.

St. Augustine is its own city, though, and I will showcase a separate thread for that. While there are some 1600s/1700s buildings (really none from 1500s, and barely any from 1600s), much of St. Augustine in the way of the Spanish architecture was developed between 1870 and 1890 by the likes of Henry Flagler.

Pensacola also has old houses and old neighborhoods, but Jacksonville was literally the nation's winter resort and Florida metropolis until almost the Great Depression. South Florida took over from there. Then Tampa started happening more, and then Orlando didn't really pick up until the 1960s and 70s. All 3 of those cities overtook Jax fairly quickly in population and Jax has never caught back up. However, for scale of oldness and amount of oldness, nothing else in FL compares to Jax, especially relative to the size of the city.

Springfield is only 1 square mile where most structures were built before 1910. Riverside and Avondale combined is a much larger area (much larger than St. Augustine) and almost every structure was built before 1928. That combo is the largest historic district by a long shot in the state, even much larger than St. Augustine.

Thanks for that interesting bit of history. A question for you; I know that Jacksonville is Florida's largest city in terms of both population and land area, by virtue of having consolidated with the county that it was in back in the late 1960s, I believe; does Jacksonville feel like a large, spread-out city with no one dominant core, or does its downtown dominate?

[simms3_redux]

^^^ Sopas, Jacksonville feels more like a collection of smaller municipalities that happen to center around a downtown.

I will post pictures of downtown from high vantage points soon and street level, but you will see that downtown Jax still has some issues to work out before it can dominate the region like it once did. Jacksonville's neighborhoods are all so unique and have completely different feels to them and are inhabited by completely different people. That may sound like every city, but trust me it stands out in Jacksonville.

I will also post some pictures of the Southside (taken during a rough winter, meh), and you will see that while there are some awesome urban neighborhoods in Jax, it sure sprawls like any other sunbelt city. We just widened a suburban highway going from 95 to the beach to as much as 10 lanes, put in some big new intersections, and therefore have continued to promote the Butler corridor for suburban growth.

The interesting thing is, though, that while Jacksonville is spread out, where the land is built on is relatively dense. More than half of Duval County is still pine forests or swamp land or the river. The area that is built on is home to almost 900,000 people probably over ~380 square miles. Suburban apartment buildings are often 4-7 floors, houses sit on no more than a quarter acre in most places, and for a city its size there are a good bit of apartments and condos (many are towards the beach, but it all counts). It's similar to the SE FL counties. They are large in land area (~2,000 sq. mi.), but most of the land is taken up by the Everglades.

Florida just passed a revision to a prior SB360 (growth management legislation) that will have large impacts for the top 6 metros (Miami down to Fort Myers) in the state curbing sprawl and forcing transportation budgets to include a variety of transportation types (outside of roads/highways). Hopefully with this bill Jacksonville will have to grow only within current bounds and will be forced to implement better public transportation in the form of rail. Some say we don't have the density, but they are looking at the county as a whole. The urban core of Jacksonville is denser than almost any other area in the south and is already fairly walkable, let alone if there was rail to connect the areas. It's actually a very progressive piece of legislation considering the state.

[Prahaboheme]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

Very interesting tour. Thanks!

I was gonna say, I would think that St. Augustine would have Florida's oldest neighborhoods, but I'll admit I'm not familiar with Florida; I've never even been to Florida.

Old Town Key West is also an older neighborhood, as is the Seville Quarter in Pensacola.

[Lakelander]

Great shots, Simms3. Btw, SB 360 and the 2030 Mobility Plan will greatly impact Jacksonville. While the transporation element of the plan is still being debated by the council's task force, the land use element has already moved forward to the state. I'm actually suprised it got through so easily. I guess the developers and their attorneys are too focused on the mobility fee they'll have to pay for building future unsustainable sprawl.

[xzmattzx]

Nice pictures.

That restaurant is pretty cool. Roadside architecture like that can be very interesting and noteworthy sometimes.

There's a decent warehouse district that could be something nice eventually.