Tag Archives: Southern Gothic Jacksonville

LaVilla’s Progress Furniture Company

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:

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.

Spiritual Lighthouse Church

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 home, in the old days, to Southern preaching, bluegrass mandolin, and séances. Bluegrass gospel musicians Billie and Gordon Hamrick were staunch  Southern Baptists, but Billie had “psychic visions.” The line of Spiritualist pastors here, almost all women, dates back to training by the famous psychic Edgar Cayce. In one of Jill Cook Richards’s first séances at the church, she says, her guardian angel came to her.

Republication National Convention in Jacksonville

New Story: Sloan / McQueen House

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

William has lived his whole life here on Spearing Street on the Eastside. Mable lived here almost half a century. Then tragedy struck. The letters on the pantry door spell, “Mable’s kitchen.” The Reverend McQueen took in boarders, but when a choir member couldn’t make rent, the pastor still paid the community’s mortgage.