New Story: Public School Number 8 Tim Gilmore 8 years ago “I took violin lessons in a room next to the inner brick courtyard,” Victoria says. “For some reason, I can only remember it as cold and wet.” Jacksonville’s first black architect, Richard Lewis Brown, probably designed Public School Number 8, though the School Board employed him only as its chief builder, listing his buildings “architect unknown.” For more than a century, the school’s assumed as many names as its lost neighborhood: Phoenix, East Jacksonville, and several others.
