Tag Archives: Riverside Memorial Park

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.

New story: Normandy Motel

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:

At the shabby old motel where he grew up, where the Ku Klux Klan burnt a cross and moonshine soaked the pastures, the retired judge still practices law. Old family dairy buildings stand back in the woods, while the former “blood bucket of the Westside” is now an insurance office. The judge’s mother was a homecoming queen. No one remembers the puppy’s name in her earliest photos. 

New Story: My Father’s Grave

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the direction buttons at the top of the page:

I never expected my father to move back to the city, but he was contrarian enough that he’d be dead before he did. So here he is. I’ll never forget the sight of my father, 90 years old, trying to lasso a goat. He wouldn’t have minded the Golden Corral in the midst of the cemetery, but I doubt he could eat “the Whole Buffet!” Click below for the story. He’d have liked it.

Gravely Hill Plantation and Graveyard

Click below for this week’s full story:

Why is the world’s oldest man buried here? Or wasn’t he 133 years old? Where are Jim Domingo, Cyrus and Francisco? And who burnt down the old house on the hill? The kids playing hide-and-seek? Or that ageless wanderer who’d lost count of his wars, trying to keep warm on a winter night?