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self-portrait, Monroe Street, night, 2003, by Jonathan Lux

Three times the poet Alan Justiss sat for the artist Jonathan Lux in 2000 and 2001. They were both living in the back of an old building downtown in the shadow of City Hall. “Unable to die,” Justiss wrote, 11 years before his death, “I live here / one line / at a time.”

slide of a portrait of Alan Justiss, 2000, by Jonathan Lux

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Alan Justiss, photographed by Walter Coker, 1994

The poet Alan Justiss, often on the verge of homelessness, has a new home in Jacksonville Public Library’s Special Collections. He seemed to live on beer alone for years. He wrote thousands of pages of poems. He had few teeth before those too had to be pulled. Those who knew and loved him remember him as a wonderful, awful, terrible, beautiful man. If his hometown of Jax in his time could be embodied as poet, it would have been Alan Justiss.

Alan Justiss, 1990

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Dickey Betts, founding member of the Allman Brothers Band, died this week, 80 years old. Here’s the story of the days when Betts and other musicians played outside, no admission, in Jacksonville’s Willowbranch Park.

Tonight, OneJax will show Atlanta filmmaker Hal Jacobs’s 2024 documentary Just Another Bombing in context of the 70th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education. When Donal Godfrey became the first Black child at Lackawanna Elementary in Jacksonville, the Klan bombed his home. When desegregation court orders merged Lackawanna and Forest Park, a Black school built on incinerator ash, white supremacists picketing multiple schools concentrated their efforts on Lackawanna. Now, Jacksonville Classical Academy, an “anti-woke” charter school, based on the Hillsdale model, built where Forest Park once stood, receives public funding while Duval County considers closing top-performing public schools it says it can’t afford. At Hillsdale College in Michigan, in 2021, Governor DeSantis’s former Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran gave a speech in which he said that education should be “100 percent ideological.” For conservatives, Corcoran said, “Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Education is our weapon.”

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Here’s the story of a short-lived Navy housing project, Dewey Park, opened in 1941, closed in ’63. Navy jets crashed here. And have since. And 20 years of Jax Air News stories make Dewey Park seem quaint, while its strange remaining circular ruins seem mythical and ancient.

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I never expected to see a photograph of the mysterious King Solomon Rathel, the outsider architect who built strange houses on the Trout River. It was Becky Saltford’s grandfather who sold Rathel the land where he built most of his houses. Rathel built for the shipbuilder, or maybe for the shipbuilder’s future daughter-in-law, a house that looked like a ship.

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Still more news of the enigmatic outsider architect King Solomon Rathel arrives. Rathel built the Round House at the end of his most productive period, his tragic end, which is painful to relate, still two decades away. The Tomlinsons bought the house when new and lived here the rest of their lives. Their daughters were “the girls who live in the Round House.”

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King Solomon Rathel and his wife Marvel built this river house by hand. Where Rathel learned to build houses and where his Folk-Art-Deco style came from, no one knows, and nobody seemed to know who’d built these strange houses before Glenn Weiss became obsessed with finding out. One man, 96 years old, remembers the Rathels from 80 years ago.

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They’ve been up there, motionless, for 80 years. When she was a child in the 1950s, Lona loved them. In the late 1970s, she took her daughter to see them. The Tin Man and the rooftop children have survived hurricanes and baking heat and seen tragedy after tragedy. Their days may be numbered.

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Strange that this clean-lined minimalistic house can be interpreted so differently, that it could be such a different house to different people! Strange that James O. Kemp, such a prolific architect, could now be such a mystery! Beautiful that this young, creative couple could bring the house such new life!