Tag Archives: Mayflower Hotel Jacksonville

Silvertown and My Mother’s Early Childhood Home

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Here’s the story of my mother’s early childhood home in what had been Silvertown, a neighborhood built for black residents after the Civil War and then swallowed up by Riverside. The house is gone now, except for in a few old photos and secondhand memories, and in the letter she dictated in 1940, when she was four years old.

New Story: Casa Marina Hotel at Jacksonville Beach

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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.