Tag Archives: Brooklyn Jacksonville

Because of Poor Planning, Parking Storage is Hollowing Out Downtown Jax

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Call them “parking craters” or “dead zones” or osteoporosis. Mammoth parking garages are eating Downtown alive. When the flâneuX sees only parking storage on either side, they guess Downtown is the “parking district.” Jane Jacobs titled a famous essay “Downtown is for People.” Jax authorities sometimes seem to think otherwise.

LaVilla’s Progress Furniture Company

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Climb the stairs and see there’s more missing than remains of 318 Broad Street. Bernie would tell you, at Progress Furniture Company, 80 years ago, “Buy or Sell…We Treat You Well.” His father was one of two Romanian Jewish immigrants in Jacksonville named Isador Moskovitz. This collapsing commercial building provides a microcosm of decimated and mostly vanished LaVilla. A thistle blooms in bricks near the roof.

Story Cycle: Church Betrayal-The Fat Round Nexus-Trumplican Wedding

Click an image below for the first story. Click the hyperlink at end of the story to get to the next one. Four brief stories comprise the cycle.

the pews left behind in the sanctuary at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church

Fat Round, no longer either, is still a nexus in what remains of Brooklyn

The Sanctuary at Mt. Calvary, the church Reverend John Allen Newman created from the dissolution of Mt. Calvary

Brooklyn’s forsaken Mt. Calvary Baptist Church

Reggie Bridges’s Shotgun House, WATG Radio, and the Unofficial Museum of Brooklyn

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For half a century, Reginald Bridges’s 544 square foot shotgun house has hummed with the magnetic density of Brooklyn’s long life. Most much larger houses have lived far less.

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Reggie and Harold operated WATG Radio from the back yard and transmitted via cable across Spruce Street to Brooklyn Park. The station might not have transmitted far, but the whole neighborhood listened.

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Now we’re looking together at a grainy photograph of a little boy in a suit standing on a Brooklyn sidewalk half a century ago. If you could photograph time, you’d have this very photograph.

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New Story: Brooklyn: The Last Buffalo Soldier’s House

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Twice during the Civil War, black Union soldiers occupied Confederate Jacksonville.

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Confederate veteran Miles Price platted this former plantation into lots and sold them to former slaves and Buffalo Soldiers.

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“A house can be boarded up for years,” Paul says, “and it seems uninhabitable. But all you have to do is live in the house and it returns to its human-shaped life.”