Friday Musicale: Riverside’s Music of the Spheres, Channeled through Jax

Posted on September 14, 2018 | Leave a comment

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The firebomb lobbed into the Friday Musicale burnt down the old building, but couldn’t end the music. 

Claudia L’Engle Adams, singer and pianist, founded the Ladies’ Friday Musicale in her downtown home in 1890 and died there on East Monroe Street five years later, 29 years old. Newspapers listed no cause.

Across the next century, vampires with violins melted clocks, sopranos commanded, with voice alone, the worldwide night, and frog heartbeats replicated the Music of the Spheres.

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Looking Back at Last Year’s Hurricanes

Posted on September 12, 2018 | Leave a comment

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It’s been a year. As Hurricane Florence bears down on the Carolinas, and scientists prognosticate that Climate Change may bring about Category 6 hurricanes, I look back at the homage I wrote for those unsung heroes, the linemen, after Hurricane Irma.

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Springfield Hospital: Part 3 of 3

Posted on September 6, 2018 | Leave a comment

Click below for the last story in the three-part series on Springfield Hospital. The story has never been fully told before now:

In this last installment, the newspaper-described “tall attractive blonde” speaks in court, an abortionist skips town, another abortionist dies in jail, police find a “little black book” with names of hundreds of possible patients throughout Florida and Georgia, and Dr. Weathers appeals to the Florida Supreme Court.

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Springfield Hospital, Part Two

Posted on August 31, 2018 | Leave a comment

Click below for the second in a three-part series:

The story of Springfield Hospital has never been fully told before now. Part Two brings the disreputable Dr. Alvah Weathers suffering dizzy spells in court, bones found buried on East 27th Street, the testimony of a so-called “comely blonde,” contraception information labeled obscenity, and Celia Settle finding her birth father, 70 years after Dr. Weathers faked her birth certificate. 

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New Story: Springfield Hospital

Posted on August 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

Click below for the first story of a three-part series.

The story’s never been fully told before now. Two decades before Roe v. Wade, disreputable clinics like Springfield Hospital offered dangerous operations for women in desperate situations.

Weathers AP photo

Other women gave up their children, for which Dr. Alvah Weathers faked birth certificates. Seven decades later, men and women who consider themselves “Weathers babies” still try to find the true identity of their birth parents.

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Where Once Stood a Village Called Dames Point

Posted on August 18, 2018 | Leave a comment

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“I’m really scared of it,” 77 year Mabel Emory said of the Dames Point Bridge. It was 1984. The Jacksonville Transportation Authority told her to get her house out of its way. Whether the old Spanish coquina well were still there, wherever the Timucuan artifacts went, where the old village of Dames Point disappeared, the bridge now rises, just down and across from Goat Island.

 On August 23 at 6:30 pm at the Jacksonville Historical Society, Tim Gilmore will launch, read from, and sign his newest book, Goat Island Hermit: The State of Florida vs. Rollians Christopher.

You are invited: https://www.facebook.com/events/314940972382209/

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Goat Island, Christopher’s Pier, Rattlesnake Hunting, a Man Shot in the Face, and Tim Gilmore’s Upcoming Book Launch at the Jacksonville Historical Society

Posted on August 11, 2018 | Leave a comment

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On August 23 at 6:30 pm at the Jacksonville Historical Society, Tim Gilmore will launch, read from, and sign his newest book, Goat Island Hermit: The State of Florida vs. Rollians Christopher. (Your invitation is at the bottom of this post.)

Rollians Christopher, 1955, photograph unattributed, courtesy Florida Times-Union

Here’s an early version of a story that makes its way into the book, a story about Christopher’s Pier, the tavern that protruded from the fishing village over the river for decades, about a Yellow Fever quarantine hospital, about a fisherman whose legs were car tires, about shrimp boats and hunting rattlesnakes, about a man shot in the face.

Goat Island, 1955, prior to its development into Blount Island, photograph unattributed, courtesy Florida Times-Union

You are invited: https://www.facebook.com/events/314940972382209/

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Goat Island, the Bartchletts, and Tim Gilmore’s New Book, Goat Island Hermit

Posted on August 3, 2018 | 1 comment

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On August 23 at 6:30 pm at the Jacksonville Historical Society, Tim Gilmore will launch, read from, and sign his newest book, Goat Island Hermit: The State of Florida vs. Rollians Christopher.

Here’s an archived story about the Bartchletts, who lived on a different part of Goat Island. In it, you’ll find art made on sawfish bills and manatee ribs and a pretty girl milking a goat.

You are invited: https://www.facebook.com/events/314940972382209/

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The City’s Smallest Church (To hell with men who prey on women!)

Posted on August 2, 2018 | 1 comment

Click below for the full story. (Then surf jaxpsychogeo.com for hundreds more.)

Surrounding streets are named for birds. Then there’s Redpoll, where rapist and serial killer Patrick Allen Herald staged the body of a prostitute in 1993.

Nor could I have expected less from the smallest church in the city, this church whose name is bigger than its sanctuary.

“Actually it was my mother’s church,” he says. Ethel Washington founded and pastored it, while Emanuel Washington Jr. co-pastored, despite that Bible verse, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.”

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Death on the Railroad Tracks in Riverside

Posted on July 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

Click below for the full story. (Then surf jaxpsychogeo.com for hundreds more.)

His couchsurfing.com profile says he last logged in 12 months ago. He lived another month. The profile claims he still “Wants to Meet Up.” He’d helped a previously homeless student move into UNF dorms. He’d been arrested for skateboarding. 

There are two eyewitness accounts of his being hit by the train on the tracks between Nighthawks and The Metro in Riverside.

 

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