Downtown Frankenstein! Rewind to Blight
After all, there must have been some sort of reasoning.....People don't just dynamite everything in sight with no projected outcome in mind.
The last installment discussed the problems posed to Jacksonville by the arrival of the car:
The condensed version:
1. The streets weren't originally designed with cars in mind.... so while they were wide enough to accommodate trolleys and pedestrians, they weren't wide enough to accommodate all three---given the choice, we junked the Trolleys and street cars and replaced them with two lanes of traffic and room for parallel parking.
2. No one ever anticipated the problems of parking in the pre-car world when they were building the city. All the blocks of the city grid were built out with buildings on them, leaving no place to store all the unused cars without tearing down an existing business.
Instead of having more space, we decided to limit the amount of time any one car could be stored and installed parking meters and heavy fines for 'overtime' parking. Eventually this became such a net negative that shops and stores began having greater success in the neighborhoods outside of the control zone.
Enter the Haydon Burns administration and the advent of the idea of 'Blight'.
We hear often about 'blighted' neighborhoods.
Urban Blight is a catchy byword which in the present day means 'run down', 'badly repaired', and 'abandoned'.
But let us consider for a moment that the meaning and context of this word has changed over the past 40 years.
For example, the idea that the inner city was 'blighted' goes back a long way. A really surprisingly long way back.
Most people remember that the Haydon Burns administration was a period of modernization and growth. Much of our civic architecture dates to this period of time and the dynamic vision of the seemingly permanent mayor of Old Jacksonville.
What people do not remember, however, is that the build out was seen as a redevelopment of a 'blighted' downtown.
What was the 'blight' you might reasonably ponder?
The Wharves of course.
And apparently, Negroes.
Let us begin with the less controversial of the two perceived blights.
The Wharves.
Ever heard of them? Most people haven't. Their scarlet memory has all but been erased from our collective identity.
Wharves. Hmm..... wharves.....seems reasonable to expect that there might have been something like that.....big river, shipping town, Navy base, Atlantic Ocean, and what have you.
Ah but the Jacksonville wharves were something to behold.
They existed in unimaginable romance and squalor on the river in the place presently taken up by the Jacksonville Landing and the Hyatt Hotel.
In a recent conversation with Wayne Wood, the author of "Jacksonville's Architectural Heritage" and "The Great Fire" and this city's most beloved historian, I asked Dr. Wood to tell me what it was that people were fixing when they formed the Downtown Redevelopment Authority back in 1971. While there will be more on this in a bit, he recalled that his friend, Bob Broward, a legendary architect, and the designer of the iconic Modis Tower had spoken a bit about the wharves.
"Bob Broward said when you walked down Bay Street there were 20 different languages being spoken" Dr. Wood related, and went on to recount that the street was packed with sailors and merchant marines from all over the world, on leave for a few days. Bob, coming from the remarkable Broward political dynasty, is a long time Jacksonville native.
It was a riotous, place of great color, bombast, and very real danger. Transient men, many of whom comprised the wretched refuse of a hundred seagoing nations dropped in for a few days at most for the Jacksonville stop of their trade routes, looking for liquor, hookers, and a good time-----which they apparently found in abundance.
It was also a huge criminal district of illicit trade and, shall we say, 'loose' activities.
There were of course, also rats.
Huge shaggy, beastly wharf rats with yellow fangs and red eyes. Long scaly tales, and a flavor for palmetto bugs.
And lest we forget, the buggery and vice.
Mayor Haydon Burns straddled the mid century history of Jacksonville, from the late forties to the late sixties. From WW2 until the Civil Rights movement, and Mayor Burns was determined to do something to clean up the Wharves.
And he did.
He dynamited them, and initiated a program of Civic construction that took over the old criminal district and redeveloped it into the center of the municipal Government.
He was a bold guy, not only in his vision of Jacksonville as a modern city, but in most ways, including his penchant for modern architecture and Civil Construction. Certainly in his use of dynamite.
Out with the old, in with the new.
Probably, if he had contented himself with simply building bold new buildings on the bones of the recently dynamited criminal Wharf district, he would be remembered with less fury by todays Historical Society Doyennes, but he didn't. He also demolished a few old landmarks to make way for his big shiny modern city.
The most egregious of which, at least to the history buffs was the dynamiting of Henry Klutho's gold domed City Hall, to make way for the green crustacean which became the Haydon Burns Main Branch Library.
But we digress. We were talking about the dynamiting of the wharves and the construction of the City Administration buildings on the river.
And it is here that Haydon Burns really got a name as a progressive fellow.
You see, Jacksonville wasn't the only city that was struggling with the problem of where to put unused cars in cities that simply were never designed to store them.
Burns proved himself to be the very model of proaction when he cemented over the wharves watery grave, and actually created real estate on the river. And to what use did the wily Burns put the newly minted riverfront property?
Parking.
In doing this, he set a pattern. People looked at the example of a city owned 'parking lot', and simply marvelled. How clever, they thought.....and he built it over a waterfront slum you say........incredible!
Of course, today we look back and wonder who the hell in their right mind would waste riverfront property (for Pete's Sake) on Parking.(!) But at the time, Burns seemed the very cure.
The cost was all the cultural diversity and international presence in the heart of the city.
We also dynamited a few blocks of property and a gilded city hall.
We got modern buildings, a virtually crime free riverfront, and a funky Library building.
However it was under the later administration of Burns that the most ambitious elements of his Civic restructuring took place.
All of them led by the guiding principals of a man named Robert Moses.
(to be continued...)