Tag Archives: Mayport

The Mystery House at Atlantic/Neptune Beach

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Supposedly the hurricane tossed the house back up on the beach that way and rather than tearing it down, some smalltime Barnum charged admission. At the beginnings of a town called Neptune, the “Mysterious House” stood out beyond the dunes. Inside, gravity went askew. You felt like you were walking up the wall.

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.

New Story: Old St. Johns River Lighthouse

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When I climbed the lighthouse in the year 2000, we found, in place of the light, the nest of a great night bird of prey. The Old St. Johns Lighthouse should stand for hundreds of years, perhaps a thousand, says Herschel Shepard, the architect who restored it. The door’s long buried in the risen ground. Wanton S. Webb called it a “pretty romance,” the story of a retired maritime sergeant who locked his daughter in the lighthouse a century and a half ago.

Someone Save the Heston House

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The bachelors were born in this house and died in this house, at either end of a century. The old boathouse fell into the creek. Linden’s boat, the Rapid Rabbit, became an artificial reef.

Charlie fished the whole world, but Sam Skinner drowned off the dinghy. Paul won tennis championships. Their mother watched St. Paul’s Episcopal Church float away on the creek. The beds are made, typewriter fossilized, and the house still waits.

New Story: Invisible Pirates Just off the Sandollar Restaurant and Marina

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Whether the Sandollar Restaurant and Marina was built in 1988 or 1954, both of which the restaurant gives as the year it opened, the invisible Somalian pirates who operate container barges just off shore still make Jacksonville writer Hurley Winkler smile.

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