Jacksonville's Ten Major Missed Opportunities
Parts of Jacksonville would look completely different if the opposite decisions were made on these ten missed opportunities.
1. Sorry Walt Disney, We Don't Deal With Carnival Folk
Image courtesy of https://piccartoon.com/mickey-mouse-cartoon.html/mickey-mouse-cute
Believe it or not, if one Jaxson would have dealt with "carnival folk," Walt Disney World possibly would have been located in North Florida. Seeking land for an east-coast theme park in Florida, Walt Disney initially reached out to Jacksonville's Ed Ball. After being told by Ball that "I don't deal with carnival folk," Disney eventually found 27,000 acres in Central Florida, opening Walt Disney World in 1971.
Today, Walt Disney World is the largest employer in Central Florida, with about 70,000 employees. The city that has benefited the most is Orlando. Once a podunk citrus town, its metropolitan area has almost doubled in population since 1990 to 2.3 million while also attracting more annual visitors than New York City and Paris.
2. Hollywood, You Can Have This Rowdy Crowd
Excerpt of original. A one-reel comedy made in 1916 in Jacksonville featuring Oliver Hardy. Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida. To see full-length versions of this and other videos from the State Archives of Florida, visit https://www.floridamemory.com/video/.
Entertainment is big business in the United States. The sector as a whole generated 522 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2013. Dubbed the "World's Winter Film Capital" a century ago, early 20th century Jacksonville once had more than 30 studios.
Jacksonville served as the birthplace of Metro Pictures, which later became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM. It was also the location of the first feature-length color film produced in the U.S., and the place where Oliver Hardy launched his career. Jacksonville's life as a major American epicenter for the film industry wouldn't last long due to clashes with locals, war, and increased competition from a new upstart rival in Southern California.
Today, that Southern California community's name has come to be a metonym for the motion picture industry, while it's Florida counterpart ends up on Metro Jacksonville's list of missed opportunities.
Source: https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/2008-09-05-118465882_x.htm
In the end however, Jacksonville simply did not spend the money or effort to compete with Hollywood, California---an even more anti movie morality town. While United Artists was spending the money that DW Griffiths had amassed with his incredibly racist "Birth of a Nation" on actually producing films in Hollywood, Southern Industries (which would morph into Paramount) was spending money on controlling distribution and the vertical construction of the Industry. Spending on Production instead of Distribution led to a glut of talent and technical skills in Hollywood. Jacksonville was left with a few people generating huge profits with Paramount (check out the Lynch Building and the Florida Theatre history) but that wealth could pick and go anywhere it liked.
It did.
The Cities that benefited were Hollywood and Los Angeles, California. The film industry employs more than 240 thousand people and contributes 47 billion dollars to the economy of the region every year, according to a recent study covered by the Los Angelese Times.
https://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/20/entertainment/la-et-ct-onlocation-20121120
3. Who Needs $50 million For A Convention Center? We Don't!
Prime Osborn image courtesy of APA Florida.
In 2010 alone, Jacksonville lost 11 conventions, representing an estimated loss of $12.5 million in total economic impact for our city. According to the reasons cited by groups who booked elsewhere, our convention center was too small, too expensive, had no proximity to hotels and entertainment, and our community in general didn't have any brand awareness as a destination. This isn't anything new; locally, we've known for years that our convention center needs help to compete in a highly competitive market and if it could, downtown would economically benefit. The problem is no one has any money to address its needs.
However, it wasn't always that way. In 2000, Mayor John Delaney offered the Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) $50 million of Better Jacksonville Plan money to expand the Prime Osborn. However, the CVB declined the offer in factor of a more ambitious and expensive dream to relocate to a new unfunded facility along the St. Johns River. Some times dreams don't come true. 14 years later, there's still no plan, answers, or finances set aside to deal with Jacksonville's convention center dilemma. Perhaps the CVB should have taken the money and developed a plan B.
4. Successfully Turning $100 Million For A Rapid Transit System Into A County Courthouse
Approved by voters in 2000, the $2.2 billion Better Jacksonville Plan set aside $100 million for the Jacksonville Transportation Authority to start the development of a rapid transit system.
Instead of putting the money into getting something off the ground, years were spent attempting to launch a billion dollar bus rapid transit system, complete with elevated busways in the median of I-95, only to terminate in places that stopped growing decades ago, such as Gateway Mall.
As the years passed and the Duval County Courthouse costs ballooned to more than $100 million over the original estimates guess who's money went up in smoke and disappeared faster than a bad magic trick?
14 years after taxpayers voted to give $100 million for a local rapid transit system, we still haven't gotten anything off the drawing board. They say use it or lose it. In this situation, that principle is about as applicable as it gets.
5. The Metropolitan Park System That Never Happened
Potential metropolitan park system as shown in George Simons Jr's 1929 City Plan for Jacksonville. Image courtesy of George W. Simons, Jr Planning Collection at UNF Digital Commons at https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/simonsflorida/9/
Ever wonder why urban Jacksonville does not have the grand public parks that help define the urban core character of some of the largest cities in the country? It's because we said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression.
The WPA was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unskilled workers to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It also operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects during the Great Depression.
In 1934, looking to put Jaxsons back to work, the WPA offered to develop a 14-mile, 3,500-acre metropolitan park system for the City. The urban green space would have begun at the mouth of the Ribault River, moving west until reaching Cedar Creek. From that point, the park would have followed Cedar Creek and the Ortega River, ending where the Ortega meets the St. Johns, forming a greenbelt around urban Jacksonville. A major part of this plan would have been to connect the Ribault and Ortega Rivers at their headwaters, thus virtually converting urban Jacksonville into an island. In addition to this, miles of driveways, walks, bridle paths and picnic shelters were to be constructed.
The WPA saw this urban park system as something that would stimulate economic development throughout Jacksonville. It was its belief that the newly created waterway would drain vast areas of the westside while also stimulating development along the park borders, which would repay the park’s capital cost investment. This line of thinking was supported by Jacksonville financier Ed Ball, who claimed it would generate $30 million to the city annually in economic impact. Ninah Holden Cummer promoted the development of this space as well, telling the city council that a city without a vision would perish. To entice the city to move forward with the park plan, the WPA offered to provide $735,000 to purchase the property needed to construct the urban greenway.
However, what could have been Jacksonville’s version of San Diego’s Balboa Park or New Orleans’ City Park, would not happen. City leaders did not see the value of spending their money on 14 miles of parkland when residents could already visit the woods anytime on their own.
6. Losing LaVilla Before The Urban Revitalization Movement
West Forsyth Street near Jefferson Street in LaVilla's Railroad Row in 1928.
LaVilla was an ethnically mixed neighboring city that evolved into Jacksonville's first Jewish enclave and later became the commercial and social center of Jacksonville's African-American community. This neighborhood helped pioneer two of the greatest forms of American music, Blues and Soul. Ray Charles, Ma Rainey, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston all spent considerable time here in many of the buildings still standing. Its train station was the largest in the country south of Washington, DC and one of the city's top employers for six decades.
On the notorious side, with over 60 bordellos confined within a four block stretch, LaVilla's Ward Street red light district, also known as "The Line," may have been one of the largest in the South. As far as Southern urbanism goes, it's hard to find many places that once had the mixed use vibrancy of LaVilla's Railroad Row. A compact place where the railroad, maritime, manufacturing, tourism, and prostitution industries all came together.
Ever wonder where Jacksonville's version of NYC's Harlem, Memphis' Beale Street, or Atlanta's Sweet Auburn is? It's sitting in a landfill. After decades of decline as residents deserted downtown and adjacent neighborhoods for newer areas of town, the City of Jacksonville took a wrecking ball to the entire neighborhood in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, a few years before neighborhoods like LaVilla became desired in the early 2000s as a part of a national trend of people returning to cities.
7. Who Needs Streetcars? GM Says Buses Are Better!
Courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, https://floridamemory.com/items/show/31292
More than a half-century after streetcars were abandoned and burned, several U.S. cities are working to revive them. Why? Because of their uncanny ability to rapidly transform once-decrepit neighborhoods into economic powerhouses by attracting billions of dollars of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) within walking distance of their routes.
Jacksonville's affiliation with streetcars date back as far as the 1870s. 13,828,904 passengers rode the system in 1912. By 1936, with nearly 60 miles of streetcar track, it had become the largest streetcar system in the state.
Unfortunately 1936 was also the year that Jacksonville's system became the first of Florida's major streetcar companies to cease all operations and be replaced with buses.
In later years it was discovered that the streetcars were shut down and replaced by buses as apart of a General Motors streetcar conspiracy. Also known as the Great American streetcar scandal, the deliberate destruction of streetcars was a part of a larger strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency.
Since that time, the 30 square miles of walkable neighborhoods once served by Jacksonville's streetcar system have declined 50% in population, giving our city's heart the characteristic of being an aging rust belt setting in the sea of rapidly growing automobile dependent surburbia.
Now that we know better, a drive down the streets of the city's oldest neighborhoods today reveals that most of the walkable districts like San Marco Square, Five Points, Downtown, and Park & King, are a direct economic result of the defunct streetcar system. This helps validate the nationwide push to invest in streetcar networks to serve as a catalyst for infill economic development and confirms our loss in dismantling our reliable public transit system.
8. Sorry Uncle Sam. Keep Your Jets In Virginia!
Recently, GE Oil & Gas announced plans to open a new advanced manufacturing facility at AllianceFlorida at Cecil Commerce Center. Employing 500, Mayor Alvin Brown called it the city's largest job creation project in more than six years.
However, it's peanuts compared to what could have been landed in 2005 when the Base Realignment and Closure Commission considered closing Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach and relocating nearly 250 jets to Cecil Field.
Under the gun to return Cecil Field back to the Defense Department by December 31, 2006, the economic benefits where enough to make a priest pay for community lap dances at Wacko's. 12,000 new jobs with an annual payroll of $800 million, an immediate influx of 30,000 people to the region, and an estimated first year economic impact of $1.2 billion.
After much community debate, Jacksonville passed on the opportunity due to fear of jet noise and a desire to gamble on the potential economic benefits of landing major manufacturing and distribution centers at Cecil and keeping the westside sprawl growth machine going.
A year later, the real estate market and economy crashed and the rest is history.
9. Hey UNF! You Don't Really Need To Be Downtown
The construction of UNF. Image courtesy of https://www.unf.edu/library/archives/.
Today, the University of North Florida (UNF) is home to more than 16,000 students, offers approximately 200 different degrees, almost 200 clubs, 25 Greek chapters, and covers nearly 1,400 acres in total.
One can only imagine the impact the school would have on Downtown Jacksonville and the surrounding areas if it were located near the heart of the city, similar to what Florida State University and University of Florida have done for Tallahassee and Gainesville.
When UNF was originally established, it appeared that the school's main campus would be located near what is now the UF Health medical complex in Springfield or near McCoys Creek. After being given a generous land donation miles from the city in what would become Jacksonville's Southside, the current campus site was selected in September 1969. Today, sites originally considered for UNF's campus decades ago look like war zones while the Butler Boulevard corridor flourishes with UNF as a major destination.
10. Neither Do You, Florida Coastal School of Law
Florida Coastal School of Law relocated to Deerwood Center near Baymeadows in 2006.
Attracting colleges to invest and anchor in urban environments has become a common practice in many cities across the country. 10 years ago, Jacksonville had an opportunity to land a downtown school of its own. Established in 1996, Florida Coastal School of Law (FCSL) had already overgrown its Beach Blvd. campus by 2002. In 2004, FCSL publicly announced that they were hoping that a suitable downtown location could be found for its new campus. Despite, Florida Coastal's desire for a downtown location, the school would ultimately end up purchasing a 220,000-square-foot Baymeadows office building and 1,400-space parking garage in 2006. According to school officials, a downtown location was nixed because of a lack of available parking. Considering we have more parking spaces downtown than people, it seems like parking challenges could have been overcome if everyone was on the same page.
If given the same opportunity and conditions, one can't help but wonder if local officials in cities like Charlotte and Orlando would have settled for the same result? So we've struck out with landing UNF and FCSL in downtown. Who knows? Maybe third time's a charm.
Article by Ennis Davis, AICP. Contact Ennis at edavis@moderncities.com
Contributions by Stephen Dare. Contact Stephen at stephendare@gmail.com
Image courtesy of https://piccartoon.com/mickey-mouse-cartoon.html/mickey-mouse-cute
Believe it or not, if one Jaxson would have dealt with "carnival folk," Walt Disney World possibly would have been located in North Florida. Seeking land for an east-coast theme park in Florida, Walt Disney initially reached out to Jacksonville's Ed Ball. After being told by Ball that "I don't deal with carnival folk," Disney eventually found 27,000 acres in Central Florida, opening Walt Disney World in 1971.
Today, Walt Disney World is the largest employer in Central Florida, with about 70,000 employees. The city that has benefited the most is Orlando. Once a podunk citrus town, its metropolitan area has almost doubled in population since 1990 to 2.3 million while also attracting more annual visitors than New York City and Paris.
2. Hollywood, You Can Have This Rowdy Crowd
Excerpt of original. A one-reel comedy made in 1916 in Jacksonville featuring Oliver Hardy. Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida. To see full-length versions of this and other videos from the State Archives of Florida, visit https://www.floridamemory.com/video/.
Entertainment is big business in the United States. The sector as a whole generated 522 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2013. Dubbed the "World's Winter Film Capital" a century ago, early 20th century Jacksonville once had more than 30 studios.
Jacksonville served as the birthplace of Metro Pictures, which later became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM. It was also the location of the first feature-length color film produced in the U.S., and the place where Oliver Hardy launched his career. Jacksonville's life as a major American epicenter for the film industry wouldn't last long due to clashes with locals, war, and increased competition from a new upstart rival in Southern California.
Today, that Southern California community's name has come to be a metonym for the motion picture industry, while it's Florida counterpart ends up on Metro Jacksonville's list of missed opportunities.
Quote
"In the early days, Jacksonville prospered because it offered a variety of backgrounds from sandy beaches and tropical jungles to urban scenes. And the railroad stopped here, making it an easy destination for northern filmmakers."
Among the notable Jacksonville films were the 35 one-reelers in the 'Plump and Runt' series made by Hardy and his sidekick Billy Ruge. Many of the films contained Southern, Florida and Civil War stories, including "The Old Soldier's Story" and "The Escape from Andersonville."
When World War I broke out, many actors and technicians joined the armed forces or took jobs at Jacksonville's growing shipyards. The 1918 worldwide flu pandemic struck the city particularly hard.
Filmmakers didn't help their cause, pulling alarms so they could shoot real-life fire trucks rushing to fight blazes that didn't exist. Car chase scenes in town were criticized as reckless. Churchgoers didn't like studios staging bank robberies on Sundays, when the streets were empty.
'Some people felt the filmmakers were taking over the town,' Bean said.
An anti-film mayor was elected in 1917 and by 1930 the city had lost all its major producers."
Source: https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/2008-09-05-118465882_x.htm
In the end however, Jacksonville simply did not spend the money or effort to compete with Hollywood, California---an even more anti movie morality town. While United Artists was spending the money that DW Griffiths had amassed with his incredibly racist "Birth of a Nation" on actually producing films in Hollywood, Southern Industries (which would morph into Paramount) was spending money on controlling distribution and the vertical construction of the Industry. Spending on Production instead of Distribution led to a glut of talent and technical skills in Hollywood. Jacksonville was left with a few people generating huge profits with Paramount (check out the Lynch Building and the Florida Theatre history) but that wealth could pick and go anywhere it liked.
It did.
The Cities that benefited were Hollywood and Los Angeles, California. The film industry employs more than 240 thousand people and contributes 47 billion dollars to the economy of the region every year, according to a recent study covered by the Los Angelese Times.
https://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/20/entertainment/la-et-ct-onlocation-20121120
3. Who Needs $50 million For A Convention Center? We Don't!
Prime Osborn image courtesy of APA Florida.
In 2010 alone, Jacksonville lost 11 conventions, representing an estimated loss of $12.5 million in total economic impact for our city. According to the reasons cited by groups who booked elsewhere, our convention center was too small, too expensive, had no proximity to hotels and entertainment, and our community in general didn't have any brand awareness as a destination. This isn't anything new; locally, we've known for years that our convention center needs help to compete in a highly competitive market and if it could, downtown would economically benefit. The problem is no one has any money to address its needs.
However, it wasn't always that way. In 2000, Mayor John Delaney offered the Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) $50 million of Better Jacksonville Plan money to expand the Prime Osborn. However, the CVB declined the offer in factor of a more ambitious and expensive dream to relocate to a new unfunded facility along the St. Johns River. Some times dreams don't come true. 14 years later, there's still no plan, answers, or finances set aside to deal with Jacksonville's convention center dilemma. Perhaps the CVB should have taken the money and developed a plan B.
4. Successfully Turning $100 Million For A Rapid Transit System Into A County Courthouse
Approved by voters in 2000, the $2.2 billion Better Jacksonville Plan set aside $100 million for the Jacksonville Transportation Authority to start the development of a rapid transit system.
Instead of putting the money into getting something off the ground, years were spent attempting to launch a billion dollar bus rapid transit system, complete with elevated busways in the median of I-95, only to terminate in places that stopped growing decades ago, such as Gateway Mall.
As the years passed and the Duval County Courthouse costs ballooned to more than $100 million over the original estimates guess who's money went up in smoke and disappeared faster than a bad magic trick?
14 years after taxpayers voted to give $100 million for a local rapid transit system, we still haven't gotten anything off the drawing board. They say use it or lose it. In this situation, that principle is about as applicable as it gets.
5. The Metropolitan Park System That Never Happened
Potential metropolitan park system as shown in George Simons Jr's 1929 City Plan for Jacksonville. Image courtesy of George W. Simons, Jr Planning Collection at UNF Digital Commons at https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/simonsflorida/9/
Ever wonder why urban Jacksonville does not have the grand public parks that help define the urban core character of some of the largest cities in the country? It's because we said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression.
The WPA was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unskilled workers to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It also operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects during the Great Depression.
In 1934, looking to put Jaxsons back to work, the WPA offered to develop a 14-mile, 3,500-acre metropolitan park system for the City. The urban green space would have begun at the mouth of the Ribault River, moving west until reaching Cedar Creek. From that point, the park would have followed Cedar Creek and the Ortega River, ending where the Ortega meets the St. Johns, forming a greenbelt around urban Jacksonville. A major part of this plan would have been to connect the Ribault and Ortega Rivers at their headwaters, thus virtually converting urban Jacksonville into an island. In addition to this, miles of driveways, walks, bridle paths and picnic shelters were to be constructed.
The WPA saw this urban park system as something that would stimulate economic development throughout Jacksonville. It was its belief that the newly created waterway would drain vast areas of the westside while also stimulating development along the park borders, which would repay the park’s capital cost investment. This line of thinking was supported by Jacksonville financier Ed Ball, who claimed it would generate $30 million to the city annually in economic impact. Ninah Holden Cummer promoted the development of this space as well, telling the city council that a city without a vision would perish. To entice the city to move forward with the park plan, the WPA offered to provide $735,000 to purchase the property needed to construct the urban greenway.
However, what could have been Jacksonville’s version of San Diego’s Balboa Park or New Orleans’ City Park, would not happen. City leaders did not see the value of spending their money on 14 miles of parkland when residents could already visit the woods anytime on their own.
6. Losing LaVilla Before The Urban Revitalization Movement
West Forsyth Street near Jefferson Street in LaVilla's Railroad Row in 1928.
LaVilla was an ethnically mixed neighboring city that evolved into Jacksonville's first Jewish enclave and later became the commercial and social center of Jacksonville's African-American community. This neighborhood helped pioneer two of the greatest forms of American music, Blues and Soul. Ray Charles, Ma Rainey, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston all spent considerable time here in many of the buildings still standing. Its train station was the largest in the country south of Washington, DC and one of the city's top employers for six decades.
On the notorious side, with over 60 bordellos confined within a four block stretch, LaVilla's Ward Street red light district, also known as "The Line," may have been one of the largest in the South. As far as Southern urbanism goes, it's hard to find many places that once had the mixed use vibrancy of LaVilla's Railroad Row. A compact place where the railroad, maritime, manufacturing, tourism, and prostitution industries all came together.
Ever wonder where Jacksonville's version of NYC's Harlem, Memphis' Beale Street, or Atlanta's Sweet Auburn is? It's sitting in a landfill. After decades of decline as residents deserted downtown and adjacent neighborhoods for newer areas of town, the City of Jacksonville took a wrecking ball to the entire neighborhood in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, a few years before neighborhoods like LaVilla became desired in the early 2000s as a part of a national trend of people returning to cities.
7. Who Needs Streetcars? GM Says Buses Are Better!
Courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, https://floridamemory.com/items/show/31292
More than a half-century after streetcars were abandoned and burned, several U.S. cities are working to revive them. Why? Because of their uncanny ability to rapidly transform once-decrepit neighborhoods into economic powerhouses by attracting billions of dollars of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) within walking distance of their routes.
Jacksonville's affiliation with streetcars date back as far as the 1870s. 13,828,904 passengers rode the system in 1912. By 1936, with nearly 60 miles of streetcar track, it had become the largest streetcar system in the state.
Unfortunately 1936 was also the year that Jacksonville's system became the first of Florida's major streetcar companies to cease all operations and be replaced with buses.
In later years it was discovered that the streetcars were shut down and replaced by buses as apart of a General Motors streetcar conspiracy. Also known as the Great American streetcar scandal, the deliberate destruction of streetcars was a part of a larger strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency.
Since that time, the 30 square miles of walkable neighborhoods once served by Jacksonville's streetcar system have declined 50% in population, giving our city's heart the characteristic of being an aging rust belt setting in the sea of rapidly growing automobile dependent surburbia.
Now that we know better, a drive down the streets of the city's oldest neighborhoods today reveals that most of the walkable districts like San Marco Square, Five Points, Downtown, and Park & King, are a direct economic result of the defunct streetcar system. This helps validate the nationwide push to invest in streetcar networks to serve as a catalyst for infill economic development and confirms our loss in dismantling our reliable public transit system.
8. Sorry Uncle Sam. Keep Your Jets In Virginia!
Recently, GE Oil & Gas announced plans to open a new advanced manufacturing facility at AllianceFlorida at Cecil Commerce Center. Employing 500, Mayor Alvin Brown called it the city's largest job creation project in more than six years.
However, it's peanuts compared to what could have been landed in 2005 when the Base Realignment and Closure Commission considered closing Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach and relocating nearly 250 jets to Cecil Field.
Under the gun to return Cecil Field back to the Defense Department by December 31, 2006, the economic benefits where enough to make a priest pay for community lap dances at Wacko's. 12,000 new jobs with an annual payroll of $800 million, an immediate influx of 30,000 people to the region, and an estimated first year economic impact of $1.2 billion.
After much community debate, Jacksonville passed on the opportunity due to fear of jet noise and a desire to gamble on the potential economic benefits of landing major manufacturing and distribution centers at Cecil and keeping the westside sprawl growth machine going.
A year later, the real estate market and economy crashed and the rest is history.
9. Hey UNF! You Don't Really Need To Be Downtown
The construction of UNF. Image courtesy of https://www.unf.edu/library/archives/.
Today, the University of North Florida (UNF) is home to more than 16,000 students, offers approximately 200 different degrees, almost 200 clubs, 25 Greek chapters, and covers nearly 1,400 acres in total.
One can only imagine the impact the school would have on Downtown Jacksonville and the surrounding areas if it were located near the heart of the city, similar to what Florida State University and University of Florida have done for Tallahassee and Gainesville.
When UNF was originally established, it appeared that the school's main campus would be located near what is now the UF Health medical complex in Springfield or near McCoys Creek. After being given a generous land donation miles from the city in what would become Jacksonville's Southside, the current campus site was selected in September 1969. Today, sites originally considered for UNF's campus decades ago look like war zones while the Butler Boulevard corridor flourishes with UNF as a major destination.
10. Neither Do You, Florida Coastal School of Law
Florida Coastal School of Law relocated to Deerwood Center near Baymeadows in 2006.
Attracting colleges to invest and anchor in urban environments has become a common practice in many cities across the country. 10 years ago, Jacksonville had an opportunity to land a downtown school of its own. Established in 1996, Florida Coastal School of Law (FCSL) had already overgrown its Beach Blvd. campus by 2002. In 2004, FCSL publicly announced that they were hoping that a suitable downtown location could be found for its new campus. Despite, Florida Coastal's desire for a downtown location, the school would ultimately end up purchasing a 220,000-square-foot Baymeadows office building and 1,400-space parking garage in 2006. According to school officials, a downtown location was nixed because of a lack of available parking. Considering we have more parking spaces downtown than people, it seems like parking challenges could have been overcome if everyone was on the same page.
If given the same opportunity and conditions, one can't help but wonder if local officials in cities like Charlotte and Orlando would have settled for the same result? So we've struck out with landing UNF and FCSL in downtown. Who knows? Maybe third time's a charm.
Article by Ennis Davis, AICP. Contact Ennis at edavis@moderncities.com
Contributions by Stephen Dare. Contact Stephen at stephendare@gmail.com