Tag Archives: Roosevelt Hotel Jacksonville

Silvertown and My Mother’s Early Childhood Home

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:

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.

The Carling / Hotel Roosevelt: Deadly Fire, Tongue Sandwiches and Saturday Night Dances

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 deadliest single-building fire in the city’s history, day after the Gator Bowl. Now the Hotel Roosevelt bears its original name again, the Carling, a beautiful place to live and one of five highrises remaining from Jacksonville’s “Year of the Skyscraper,” 1926. Once you could get a tongue sandwich here for a quarter and a whiskey cobbler for 35 cents.