Tag Archives: Jacksonville Housing Authority

Lost Smiles on Moving Day, 1973

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 moment would have vanished entirely, but for these few photos Lon King took in 1973. The Housing Department was demolishing the house and the duplex where the five kids lived next door. Fifty years later, the land is still empty. He’d moved downtown for work, grown his hair, rode his bikes through the empty streets. He still wonders what happened to those kids.

New Story: Hogan’s Creek Tower

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:

Who were they, these women in these earliest photographs? Who called this tower their “poor man’s penthouse”? Opened in 1976, Hogan’s Creek Tower, designed by architect Ted Pappas, is one of Jacksonville’s best examples of Brutalism. Like any community, it has its stories. Like the resident who wandered away and spent his 100th Christmas meandering for 17 hours across the city.

Revisiting Jacksonville’s Trisect, Public Art Milestone

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:

It was the first piece of public art in Jacksonville in 50 years. The city seemed hostile. It stood before public housing, not in a public park in a tony neighborhood. Jax roasted it, but the elderly residents in architect Ted Pappas’s new tower behind it loved it. Almost 50 years later, sculptor Carl Andree Davidt’s Trisect sculpture still interrogates the city.

When Jax Declared Its Center a “Slum Heart,” ‘Evil,” and Demanded Exorcism

Click below for the full story:

The deep baritone drips with condescension, festers with open sarcasm.

“This very plumbing, if you can dignify it with the name of plumbing, can bring disease and death into your home through the medium of your servants.”

“Come to think of it,” Slum Heart recalls, opportunistically, “that servant girl who comes to your house each morning […] Do you know where she goes at night?”