Tag Archives: Tim Gilmore Jacksonville

Lives and Afterlives of “The Green House” on Riverside Avenue

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Ed and Ruth Brown called the “Green House” home for about four decades and Ed died on Christmas Day, 2017. The house is most famous for when members of Lynyrd Skynyrd lived here, but its story also includes the Osky’s alligator heiress, a ballet master who studied with Ballanchine and attempts by fire and, yes, developers to destroy it.

Revisiting Jacksonville’s Trisect, Public Art Milestone

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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.

Beat Writers in Historic Springfield: William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Marker in Jax

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In 1952, while the Beat novelist William S. Burroughs awaited trial for killing his “common law” wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City, he wrote most of the novel Queer, in which a fictionalized Burroughs named William Lee pursues a fictionalized Adelbert Lewis Marker of Jacksonville named Eugene Allerton with undisguised lustful aggression through Mexico City.

When Marker sought refuge back home in Jacksonville’s Victorian Springfield, Burroughs came to call, as did Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg wrote novelist Jack Kerouac about drinking rum with Marker on East 4th Street or East 6th Street. Burroughs wrote his first two novels for Marker, said if Marker didn’t like them, he’d never write again, though he seems to have forgotten the wife he’d just shot in the forehead and killed.