J Magazine Winter 2017

LaVilla was a bustling hub for black-owned businesses as seen in this early 20th century photo of the intersection of West Bay Street and today’s Broad Street.
The challenge for Jacksonville, which has
long ignored its history, is to celebrate it and
make it part of the city’s image and brand.
Utilizing its antebellum beauty and
charm to its advantage, Savannah attracted
13.9 million visitors in 2016, spending $2.8
billion in its economy. In Charleston, the
numbers were more staggering with $27
billion in annual total gross sales and 41,000
jobs supported annually due to the preservation
of its architectural heritage as the
Southeast’s largest city during the colonial
era.
In the years after the Great Fire of 1901,
Zora Neale Hurston lived in Jacksonville at
1477 Evergreen Ave. with her brother John
and his family. A novelist, short story writer,
folklorist and anthropologist known for her
contributions to African-American literature,
Hurston eventually became a leading
figure in the New Negro Movement and
Harlem Renaissance.
Next door, the family operated a flower
shop in a period when the city was characterized
as a dense walkable network of
neighborhoods tied together with a 61-mile
streetcar system carrying 13.8 million passengers
in 1912.
In 2013, the century-old Hurston family
business was quietly demolished with little
discussion, which continues to be a common
occurrence in working-class neighborhoods
adjacent to Downtown. The Hurston
flower shop’s relation to a nationally recognized
historical figure and its untimely
demise is the result of a city that has a rich,
fascinating history not viewed as critical
infrastructure because most of its citizens
don’t know about it.
The Hurston site also represents a historical
period of significance that remains unmatched
in Florida and much of the South’s
Lowcountry. As the region’s first urban center
to surpass 100,000 residents, Jacksonville
is the home of the largest collection of urban
structures built between the Great Fire of
1901 and the 1960s. Jacksonville attracted
well respected citizens and villains like
Charles Ponzi and bootleggers like William
“Bill” McCoy. However, this significant history
has been lost with time.
In Downtown Tampa, the Henry B.
Plant Museum is a U.S. National Historic
Landmark housed in a lavish hotel completed
by the railroad tycoon in 1891. Recalling
the country’s Gilded Age and the extraordinary
life of the railroad tycoon largely responsible
for the Bay Area’s growth, the museum
was established by the City of Tampa
in 1941.
Unknown to most, it was Plant who also
laid the foundation for Jacksonville’s modern
development with the opening of the
city’s streetcar system in 1879. It was also
Plant who extended his railroad to the city
in 1881, making direct travel from the North
possible and Jacksonville a Gilded Era tourist
destination. His lasting local legacies include
CSX Transportation, Riverside’s Five
Points and several other mixed-use districts
throughout the urban core that were built
around Plant’s streetcar lines.
In South Florida, Whitehall is another
National Historic Landmark dedicated
to a 19th century railroad magnate, Henry
Flagler. However, it was Flagler’s investments
that made Jacksonville Florida’s Gateway
City. Seeing a need for a grand railroad
station, the Standard Oil partner of John D.
Rockefeller established the Jacksonville Terminal
Company in 1893. The railroad terminal
eventually grew to become the largest
passenger railroad station south of Washington,
DC, serving as many as 40,000 trains
and 10 million passengers annually.
Plant and Flagler’s late 19th century
railroads laid the foundation for modern
Jacksonville, rapidly pushing the city past
Savannah and Charleston and into national
prominence.
Today, many wonder if removing Confederate
monuments will erase the city’s
history without realizing that Jacksonville’s
significant history as a progressive turnof-the-century
African-American cultural
center is still being overlooked, ignored and
erased.
By 1900, Jacksonville emerged as Florida’s
largest city with 57 percent of its population
African-Americans working in the
city’s booming hotel, lumber, port, con-
State Archives of Florida
82 J MAGAZINE | WINTER 2017-18