In the Ghost of Delius’s Lost Orange Grove

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

After he died, his sister said his spirit still visited this place. But how do you lose an orange grove? Two miles down a flooded dirt road, I’m looking for a lost memorial and the ghostly remains of old orange trees. The cottage was moved 60 years ago, but the coquina marker to Frederick Delius and the “sound of place” still stands.

The Monstrous Beauty of the Florida East Coast Railway Bridge at Jacksonville

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

The Florida East Coast Railway Bridge is a thing of monstrous beauty. Its story tells of falling deaths, dolphins and swallowtails and the Sunshine Special, oil spills and bomb threats. It’s spanned the St. Johns River at Jax for a century, but it looks older than time.

The “Pantheistic Mysticism” of the Delius House

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

The Delius House at Jacksonville University has served, at times, as international pilgrimage site. Today it feels forlorn. Saved once, 60 years ago, it feels in need of salvation again. Moved from Solano Grove in 1961, it’s the cottage where the English composer Frederick Delius said he first “felt the urge toward music.”

Unparalleled Successes from the Now Abandoned State Board of Health Building

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

When Florida created its Board of Health in 1889, life expectancy here was 44 years. The successes achieved in making life in naturally inhumane Florida livable stagger the imagination. They’re almost beyond communication. And much of that work happened here — in the now abandoned State Board of Health Building in Jacksonville.  

The Fall of the Thunderbird

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

This week the City of Jax demolished the Thunderbird. I’m glad my sister Wanda and I wandered through it when we did. In its heyday, which now seems to have been just a minute, it was the city’s convention center and an entertainment hub. Supposedly the city was shifting east from Downtown. Now the Thunderbird too is gone.

Into the Horace Richard “Buddy” James Estate Sale on Old Middleburg Road

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

Even as you wander through an estate sale, you must feel crass about it, right? Until you spot this oddity and that one and wonder who set each oddity in motion. Who built this house on Old Middleburg Road? Who replaced the wife the house was built for? And how much might that eccentricity cost you?

A Place on the Water: Alligators, Sponge Fishing and a Sacred Spit in Big Fishweir

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

Ten years old, Melvin Knowles strung up the alligator he’d shot. Later, he’d go sponge fishing off Key West. And it was that spit of land in Big Fishweir Creek behind the house on Morningside that became sacred to him, the same place his daughter once rescued her cat Shadow in a storm.

Recalling Book Burnings at Jacksonville University

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

The 1970 Jacksonville University yearbook, the Riparian, was a collector’s item before the year was out. That fraternity members burned the book helped. So did the national news of JU’s president’s threatening to withhold the editor’s diploma. Half a century later, JU grads treasure it as an almost sacred object.

When Artis Gilmore Led a Whole City to the NCAA Championship

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

In 1970, Jacksonville University marched toward the NCAA championships, David v. Goliath, and enraptured its city in the process. Sports Illustrated called JU a “transformed junior college” and Jax the urban heart of the Okefenokee Swamp. The first page of the yearbook caught the front of one shoe, nothing more: Artis Gilmore stood 7’2″, but some added six inches for his afro.

The Volstead, the Knight Building, and Ghosts of the Fire of 1901

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the search bar or the direction buttons at the top of the page:

The W.A. Knight Building stands on the old homesite of Edward Cleaveland, “the man who burned down the town,” whose business negligence started the Great Fire of 1901. When the building was new, it was illegal to buy or sell alcohol. It now houses the Volstead, a bar named in irony for the Prohibition Act.