Tag Archives: Great Fire of 1901

The Myth of Ancient Floridian Giants

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The fiction that the Timucua and other indigenous Florida peoples were seven to nine feet tall spread rapidly in the 1950s. My mother believed it, told me we were descended. Another fiction. Willie Browne and Father Dearing believed it. D.B. McKay — Tampa mayor, newspaper editor, and chief organizer of the White Municipal Party — believed nine foot tall ancient Floridians populated the Garden of Eden. So where did these ideas come from?

The Armory

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Truly this story has it all. The old Armory has stories enough for a hundred cities. There’s no way to tease it adequately. Urban exploration. Thousands of concerts, from opera to Janis Joplin and the Allman Brothers. Political debates and politicians’ funerals and boxing bouts. Stories of integration (James Weldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, Marian Anderson) defiant against Jim Crow. And a call for a future.

The Independent Life Building / Wells Fargo Center

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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.

The Adams Building: from the Vice Wars to “Rehumanizing the Broken Man”

New Story: The Lions of Drew and McConihe

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The lions looked out on Bay Street, facing north, four stories high, for 70 years. Irony brought them down: the life insurance company cut short their reign. Now they stand beneath the glass giant that for years so awkwardly dwarfed the city and await our pilgrimage.

The Life and Multiple Deaths of the Drew Building

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The story of the building at 45 West Bay Street concerns a bear, Jacksonville’s first bookstore, Ottis Toole, the tragic deaths of construction workers, multiple demolition plans, the ghost of a third floor and the love of an architect who refused to let this building die. Now Urban Grind Coffee, Folio Weekly and other businesses call the Drew Building home. Click below for the story.

Where the Jacksonville Woman’s Club Stood

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It’s not a “demolition,” they say. It’s a “salvage.” Either way, the Jacksonville Woman’s Club building is gone. Causes seen as primarily “women’s” have encountered the same contradictory status of being both exalted and discounted that women themselves have historically experienced. The “Woman’s Club

Movement” owns an important place in the history of feminism, leading even to #metoo. The headline declaimed, “Quadruple Amputee to Get Degree and Bride this Week.” Mellen Greeley, the architect who built the Woman’s Club building, “said the secret to living a long life was being a peaceful person.” My daugthers will always identify by their own names. They’ll never be Mrs. Somebody-Else.

Two Christmas Stories

Read one JaxPsychoGeo Christmas story, and get the other free.

Click below for the story of the James E. Merrill House.

And is the toy gun that lies on the child’s bed really Arthur’s? Was it too a Christmas present? And is it really Arthur’s bed? Did Arthur lie here looking through the window onto the sleeping-porch on the second-story back of the house in his last year, his eighth year, 1906?

And / Or … Click below… “Oh ho ho / Who wouldn’t go? / Up on the housetop, click, click, click, / Down through the chimney” to old St. Nick’s Lounge on Atlantic Boulevard?

“May we invite you to enjoy our hospitality?”

 

Sister Mary Ann at the Church of the Immaculate Conception

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Sister Mary Ann braved the jails, whispered with the condemned. She nurtured soldiers shot, stabbed, battered and dismembered in Civil War Jacksonville. She raised the funds to open the orphanage, and St. Mary’s Home opened on August 15th, the Feast of Assumption, 1886. 

Daily, she’d made her rounds among those dying of Yellow Fever, their yellow eyes and the vomiting of blood, the seizures that mocked demonic possession.

By the time she died in January 1914, “Jacksonville’s Angel of Mercy” had selflessly served the sick, the dying, the condemned, the homeless, the lost, and the orphaned in Jacksonville for 50 years.

New Stories: Barnett Mansion and Springfield Tunnels

Two stories. Scroll down for both.

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“There are so many stories in this house,” he says.

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In the 1970s, the police saw William Barnett, 1824-1903, standing in the shadows and drew their guns.

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Click below for the full story about Springfield Tunnels:

Billy says he and his friends slipped through an aperture into a system of extensive tunnels beneath the Barnett Mansion in Springfield.

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The great strength of conspiracy theories and urban legends is that you can’t prove a negative.