Tag Archives: Hurricane Dora

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.

New Story: Casa Marina Hotel at Jacksonville Beach

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 other beach hotels all burned. Whichever presidents stayed here, and whether or not Jean Harlow and Al Capone did, the history of the Casa Marina at Jacksonville Beach includes an organ grinder and monkey, a vanished penthouse octagon bedroom, Victorian lace blouses and kolinsky furs. Here, Rachel and Dan shared wedding vows with their six year old son, a thousand ambitious business plans expanded and deflated, and the old building’s savior had his ashes spread into the ocean by surfboard.

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.