Kings Avenue: The Importance of Rehabilitating Buildings

When you travel to a city, you don't want to go to that place out on the expressway interchange. You want to go to the center of town to see how it emerged. There, you'll find your most interesting buildings. If the city had any long-range vision for itself, it embraced these old places and continued to adaptively reuse these buildings to keep it as an interesting focal point of their community. -Tony Troppe, The Everett Group, during a 2004 interview with Smart Business

The small buildings along Kings Avenue (lower left corner) once housed many businesses and industries adjacent to South Jacksonville's shipyards.  Today, many of these buildings have been preserved and restored into new uses.

Buildings tell stories, and when you remove the buildings, you remove a chapter from the history and character of the community.  Kings Avenue proves when buildings are preserved they can combine to create a distinct district with its own unique sense of place that can't be duplicated in the suburbs. 

Article by Ennis Davis