Tag Archives: Consolidation

The Independent Life Building / Wells Fargo Center

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

From lightning strikes to the locomotive buried in its foundation, from loyalty to President Nixon to overtures to the National Football League, from the architectural sketches of Wah Yo Eng to the immigrant family of Bulgarians, Haitians and Jamaicans, the Independent Life Building (now the Wells Fargo Center) has reflected Jacksonville back to itself since 1974.

2 New Year’s Stories: Remembering Kyle Marshall, DJ Chef Rocc, and New Life at Gator Lodge

Click below for either (why not both?) of the two full stories. Happy New Year’s! Here’s where we’ve been. Here’s where we’re going.

1. You shouldn’t die of congestive heart failure at 38 years old. Jacksonville loved F. Kyle Marshall. Some say he personified the city. I first met Kyle, where Rain Dogs is now, at Five Points Barber Shop, in 1931.

2. Lisa King learned to love people, coming and going, learned to love Jax when she first learned to walk at Gator Lodge. Never mind Haydon Burns and Aileen Wuornos. At her birthday party at this crossroads thrums the great untapped strength of the city’s diversity.

Grand Park’s Rap Videos, Pseudo-Gangs and Lynch Mobs

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Grand Park has always been about passing through. The sheriff and state attorney talk of gangs. Desperate young men beg for attention with prop guns and get it, but what’s it mean to be a rapper from a big “kountry” town?

Was Grand Park more or less “kountry” when Sheriff R.E. Merritt forestalled a lynch mob in 1922, the second storming of the jail in three years? Remember when Grand Park fed the cops barbecue, when the police were part of the community, not some outside force?

New Story: Jacksonville Beach: New Trinity, Killing the Devil, and the Murder of Vera Gould

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After the three young people stabbed K.’s grandmother to death in her Jacksonville Beach home, newspapers quoted them calling her “Satan,” themselves “the New Trinity” and Lex Hester, one of the most prominent men in Jacksonville’s political history, “the Antichrist.”