J Magazine Winter 2018

“This is not a new partnership,” Barton
said. “After spending almost $30 million on
those extensive renovations in the highrises,
building something from the ground
up sounded pretty good to us.”
The three high-rises form a triangle,
and Ashley Square will be built in
the middle on a vacant lot, at Ashley
and Beaver streets. It will blend in
architecturally with the adjacent
senior housing project, Stevens Duval
Apartments, an historic red brick building
that was the city’s first school, Barton said.
The five-story apartment building will
have 110 one- and two-bedroom units for
working adults and seniors, a fitness center
and on-site parking. The seniors will have
access to the nutrition site, wellness center
and service coordinators at the Cathedral
Residences.
The Downtown Development Review
Board and the Downtown Investment
Authority have signed off on the concept,
and Aging True has applied to the state for
financing.
“It’s a highly competitive process,”
Barton said. “The vision is there and the
commitment is there, but it may involve
more than one funding cycle. We’re not
the first in line for those dollars. But it’s a
good use of public dollars and resources,
and it conforms to what they want
Downtown, so we’re optimistic.
“Our goal is to continue to develop
a really robust and quality environment
for seniors to live Downtown,” Barton
said. “We don’t think of the buildings as
buildings but as a community.”
Community-building also is the goal
of Cathedral District-Jax, a nonprofit
established by St. John’s Cathedral to be a
catalyst for development in the district.
It is awaiting state funding for the
property at 325 E. Duval St., now known as
Billy Goat Hill Inc., named for the highest
point Downtown. The $20 million Lofts
at the Cathedral project will transform
the old YWCA into about 115 apartments,
said Ginny Myrick, CEO and president of
Cathedral District-Jax.
Most of the complex will be workforce
housing with 15 percent of the units
reserved for low-income residents
to satisfy deed restrictions. The state
requirement that the property serve the
homeless was just one of the challenges
the project faced.
Back when Community Connections
owned the property, it got state funding
that required that it be used to serve
the homeless. That was a barrier to
redevelopment, so Cathedral District-Jax
“We want to
see people of
all walks of
life, living in a
neighborhood
they cherish
and are proud
to boast
about.”
GINNY MYRICK
CEO and president of
Cathedral district-jax
negotiated with the state to revise the
requirement so that it now has to serve
low-income people, not homeless.
The property, 1.52 acres east of the
Cathedral, also was encumbered by
numerous city, state and private liens,
environmental issues and a designation
as a historic site. It took 18 months to
untangle it.
The property had been vacant for most
of the decade when Cathedral District-
Jax bought it, helped by a loan from the
Episcopal Church Building Fund. The
closing was on Good Friday.
The project is considered a catalyst for
redevelopment in the Cathedral District.
Another is a charter school.
A K-8 charter school needs about 900
students to be financially feasible, Myrick
said. In 2015, the University of North
Florida surveyed the major Downtown
employers and found 5,000 people
interested in having a Downtown school.
Myrick said they have been talking
with several charter school operators,
and she hopes one of them will file an
application for a Downtown campus with
the School Board by the Feb. 1 deadline.
It bears pointing out that the
organizations making this happen —
Aging True and Cathedral District-Jax
— are nonprofits. And they aren’t the
only ones that are making a mark on
Downtown.
St. John’s Cathedral has been a player
in Downtown redevelopment since
1962 when it established the Cathedral
Foundation and built the three high-rises.
It was part of the Cathedral’s mission of
serving an underserved population —
the elderly. The Foundation also built a
120-bed skilled nursing facility, Cathedral
Gerontology Center, 333 E. Ashley St.,
now known as Cathedral Care. In 2011,
it rebranded as Aging True, a name
that better reflects its broad outreach to
seniors that includes nutrition programs,
care coordination and caregiver support.
Elsewhere in Downtown, the Jessie
Ball duPont Fund took on the rescue and
renovation of the Haydon Burns library
into the nonprofit hub, the Jessie Ball
duPont Center.
And the newest player is Clara White
Mission, which plans to build a village
of tiny houses for homeless veterans in
LaVilla.
In its master plan, the Cathedral
District-Jax envisioned creating a sense of
place in the neighborhood with a diverse
population living along a residential spine
spanning Duval and Church streets and
shopping in a retail district on North
Market Street.
“We want to see people of all walks of
life, living in a neighborhood they cherish
and are proud to boast about,” Myrick
said.
That will take critical mass, she pointed
out. And momentum is building.
“When you see someone walking their
dog in the Cathedral District, you will
know we are moving in the success lane,”
she said.
Lilla Ross was as a reporter and editor at The Florida
Times-Union for 35 years. She lives in San Marco.
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J MAGAZINE | WINTER 2018-19