Tag Archives: Ernest Anders

The Many Ways of Knowing Beach and Peach Park

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Once, neighborhood kids rode horses here. Then motorcycles. Now they call it the best place in the city to ride mountain bikes. Each story of the woods once called “Mud Hills,” and now Beach and Peach Park, tells a different facet of human experience. The homeless man in the “hut” of stone slabs knows it differently than the neighbor with his scotch who relitigates fourth-down plays from his days as high school quarterback hero. Beach and Peach is Jax in microcosm.

New Story: St. Elmo “Chic” Acosta House

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When the old man fired his gun over the boy’s head for stealing oranges, the future city commissioner said one day Armstrong’s house would be his. He bought it in 1911. St. Elmo “Chic” Acosta was arrested in 1924 on “false charges” of keeping a “disorderly house” and indicted in 1933 for giving away the city’s “sack of potatoes” and a mule. He made enemies easily, but always fought for urban “beautification.” After the Acostas donated the house in 1966, it became the artistic heart of Episcopal School of Jacksonville.