Tag Archives: River City Renaissance

Brewster Hospital in Jim Crow Jax

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The year the old house was built is carved into its porch posts: 1885. It birthed the only hospital for black patients in Jim Crow Jax. Nursing student Lakeshia Sutton stayed with her aunt and uncle in the old building when it was a boarding house and she was a little girl. She feels nursing was a calling, but hadn’t known the “mansion” her aunt called home was “Old Brewster Hospital.”

May be an image of 14 people and people standing

LaVilla’s Progress Furniture Company

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Climb the stairs and see there’s more missing than remains of 318 Broad Street. Bernie would tell you, at Progress Furniture Company, 80 years ago, “Buy or Sell…We Treat You Well.” His father was one of two Romanian Jewish immigrants in Jacksonville named Isador Moskovitz. This collapsing commercial building provides a microcosm of decimated and mostly vanished LaVilla. A thistle blooms in bricks near the roof.

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

Pedrica Mendez’s House

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When Padrica was a little girl in the 1940s, the Cuban community in Jacksonville surrounded her and her family with love and a yet larger sense of family.

One night as she left the opera in Rome, a photographer snapped her picture, wrote, “in omaggio alla sua bellezza,” or “in homage of your beauty,” on the back of the photograph, and gave it to her.

The fire that consumed the great two-story house next door jumped sparks at Padrica’s house.

Still what most struck Padrica were the cadences she heard in the Orthodox music of ancient Ethiopia that reminded her dearly, tearfully, of rhymes and end-lines from old “Negro spirituals.”