Doro Fire and (the Ghosts of) the Doro (Fixture Company)

by Tim Gilmore, 2/16/2024

Four stories above my head, a washing machine hangs by nothing but electrical cords. Disemboweled ductwork spills through splinters the size of doors. Refrigerators dangle at strange heights and angles.

Beside the burnt blasted shell of seven floors of luxury apartments at Adams Street and A. Philip Randolph Boulevard, this early February day, 2024, a three and a half story sign on the intact concrete parking garage for the Rise: Doro Apartments announces, “Now Leasing / Tour Today” and “Studios, 1, 2-Bedroom Apartments and Lofts.”

The George Doro Fixture Company, says Clarence Weaver’s 1927 promotional book Sketches of Jacksonville, Florida, is “one of the coming industrial plants of Jacksonville.” The “management,” Weaver promises, “keeps fully abreast of the times.” The company “specializes in store fronts, besides all kinds of bank fixtures, special furniture made to order, interior store finish, turning, band saw and millwork, etc.”

It’s a minor irony that in these last weeks before the City demolishes the George Doro Fixture Company Building in April 2021, the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department uses the abandoned historic structure for training. Keith Miller, a superintendent for Rise: A Real Estate Company, jokes that firefighters get to practice “breaking down walls, doors and other structures that they typically wouldn’t get to destroy.”

Three years later, you can smell the tragic and much larger irony from several blocks away. It smells like burnt plastic and metal and wood, like the dashed hopes of residents planning to move into the new seven story apartment building in March, or of preservationists who’d hoped to save the older building, the original Doro, three years before. Rise even named the new building after the one they’d demolished, calling it Rise: Doro. It sounds like an incantation.

A door stands ajar, up over palm fronds blackened and scorched. Above that door stand doors above doors above doors. Grand opening was set for next month. Downtown Jacksonville’s residential growth has achieved a stunning momentum and Rise says it will rebuild and it absolutely must.

It’s spectacularly catastrophic irony that the new Doro rises in the dust of the old Doro, then burns. Nobody knows how the fire starts. As history finds patterns, the right understanding of the words “ghost” and “history” makes them synonymous. Why look for the paranormal when far ghostlier is the historical?

George Doro joins the Greek community of Jacksonville from his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island in 1919. City directories list him here at Adams Street and what’s first called Florida Avenue in 1925. A baker, Lorenzo Stein, lives here as early as 1895. In 1985, George Doro, Jr., 11 years after his father’s death, says he remembers “an old sea captain” having a house beside the building. Historians wonder then if Stein builds the structure later called the Doro Fixture Company Building in the 1890s and lives upstairs or lives in a house here, then demolishes the house in 1903 or ’4 to build the commercial structure.

By ’25, when Doro occupies part of the building, Mrs. E.M. Patillo, whose livelihood is listed as “furnished rooms,” lives upstairs, landlord for other upstairs apartments, George Lewis lives here above his grocery and Fairlie’s Pharmacy sells tinctures and tonics and toxins.

In 2024, The Rise: Doro, burning just before completion, contains 247 units, 5,000 square feet of ground floor retail space and an indoor / outdoor rooftop bar, lounge and swimming pool. The style is sometimes called five-over-one, sometimes podium, usually featuring four or five stories of woodframe structure atop a concrete ground floor that houses retail space and parking.

Critics blast five-over-ones both aesthetically and for safety concerns. They’re generic, they say, though others find them an improvement over apartment aesthetics from the late 20^th century. The aesthetic flattens distinctions, they say, between cities and suburbs, since five-over-ones pop up ubiquitously in both. Then there’s the question of the extensive use of cheap woodframing as not durable and potentially a fire hazard.

The Rise: Doro reaches seven stories by building on two stories of concrete, a $65 million development, the first large residential endeavor directly in the Sports and Entertainment District in decades. Rise moves its headquarters from Valdosta, Georgia to Jacksonville and stakes its identity on The Rise: Doro as its flagship project. The City of Jacksonville promises Rise $5.75 million in incentives.

In April 2021, Greg Blais, Rise’s president, refers to the demolition of the George Doro Fixture Company Building, saying, “Talk about a fixture, using a pun off the Doro. They were a fixture in Downtown for a long, long time. Rise is intending to be a fixture in the Jacksonville area for a long, long time.”

Not long after firefighters first respond to the flames at Rise: Doro on Sunday night, January 28, 2024, the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department announces it’s under control. By midnight, it blazes back up again. It won’t finish burning for days.

More than 100 firefighters attack the inferno. They enter the building to charge the fire floor by floor, but some of the same factors that spread the fire so quickly and mysteriously obstruct the battle plan inside.

Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Chief Keith Powers says the fire spreads by shooting through openings left for plumbing and wiring, apertures to be sealed when construction is complete. Incomplete stairwells and the way fire uses what Powers calls “hidden voids” to snake and fork so deviously through the labyrinthine building force firefighters back out. Heat-seeking drones fly over the blaze to find points of highest temperatures and ladder trucks spray 5,000 gallons of water a minute.

History is ghost, ghost history (to paraphrase John Keats). History moves at times like flames through hidden voids. History’s not ghosts; it’s ghost itself (a noncount noun like love or life). History is story, is ghost story, is ghost’ry.

In 1933, Jack Spottswood, who opened his photography studio here in 1915 and operates for decades from West Adams Street, snaps shots of Doro’s lovely Art Deco bar display, wood etched in stylized verticals like Fritz Lang skyscrapers, bottles perched along the back bar, foot rail over a checkered floor. Elsewhere Spottswood photographs cabinetry and a bar display on the flat bed of a truck, open to the air, squat palms in the background, brick road beneath.

In 1985, historians ask George Doro, Jr. about the entablature over the central second story windows, mostly plastered over, surely including a name and probably a date. Remarkably, a D and a Y “show through clearly.” Perhaps Doro, Jr. would “be interested,” say handwritten notes in city archives, “in getting a ladder and having one of his men chip off the appropriate areas to at least reveal the date.” If not, perhaps he’d be willing “to let the fire department do it?”

Another note, dated February 26^th, says “Mr. Doro – not familiar with covered-up sign” and “didn’t seem willing to remove the covering” + “again re-affirmed his belief that the building was constructed before 1900.” The Doro Fixture Company Building seems to have been here before it was here.

In 2021, as the old Doro comes crashing to the ground, St. John the Divine Greek Orthodox Church moves George Doro (Sr.)’s last known remaining artwork, a masterpiece, to its third location. The 1927 Sketches of Jacksonville says, “Mr. George Doro is at the head of this business and has had actual experience as a designer and manufacturer of eighteen years.”

In 1968, Doro’s original iconostasis, or Greek Orthodox icon screen, moves from the church’s original location in the 1902-built Ahavath Chesed Synagogue downtown to a new masterpiece of Mid-Century Modern architecture designed by Ted Pappas, and in 2021, the screen moves from that Atlantic Boulevard location near the city’s center to the church’s newest address far down Beach Boulevard toward the beaches.

Colorful icons of saints stand recessed each between Corinthian columns in the tall white screen. The most important interior element of an Orthodox church, the iconostasis separates worshipers from the inner sanctum. Now Doro’s original screen, having served countless Easters and weddings and funerals and community admonitions, stands in its own chapel, which seems right, its own museum wing, its own place of worship.

The name Δῶρος (dóros) means “gift.” The single floating eye embedded in the screen’s pediment beneath the cross serves as George Doro’s signature and symbol. What more potent ghostorical emblem could there be?

In the Rise: Doro Fire, preservationists see ghostly irony, as though the Doro Fixture Company Building remains in the form of the fire. As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus saw fire as the essential everchanging nonessence at the heart of all things, to see the fire in this New Doro is to see Old Doro’s ghost.

Like love letters and tea leaves, a fire can be misread. People who say the Doro Fire shows Downtown is cursed just aren’t paying attention.

(Any place people set foot is cursed, just as surely as it’s sacred earth.)

A January 11, 2024 story in Forbes Magazine, headlined “Jacksonville Poised for Boom Times Downtown,” calls Downtown Jax “the Florida place most on the move.” It notes more than 100 acres of riverfront redevelopment, the construction of the Emerald Trail connecting 30 miles of “greenways” through the urban core, and the expected doubling of Downtown’s residential population in the next six years.

And so, so easily could this nightmare be worse. By the middle of Monday, January 29^th, at least one floor of the Doro has collapsed and exterior walls bulge outward. If the south wall crashes into Intuition Ale Works and Manifest Distillery, thousands of gallons of gin and rye whiskey will ignite. Beneath the towering Babel of fire read the words, “Bier Hall at Intuition Ale Works.” The Doro burns bright red wooden overhead, as do all those grand verandah’d and scrollsawn wooden hotels at the center of the city on May 3, 1901.

And so, so easily could this nightmare be worse. No one has yet moved in to The Rise: Doro. Downtown has burned repeatedly, both before and after the Civil War, when the United States and Confederate States both destroy, entirely, the city four times, in the Great Fire of 1901, the third most destructive city fire in American history, in the 1963 Roosevelt Hotel fire elsewhere on Adams Street, in which 22 people die and 100 are injured. If Downtown Jax endures its own destruction as many times as many a much older city, yet expand the intervals, and this time, no one dies.

The old fixture company’s a fixture yet. History moves both forward and back. If “management keeps fully abreast of the times,” history, like love, like life, like ghost, too easily, a noncount noun, loses itself in itself. I approach the bar, perch my barefoot gumshoes on the foot rail, try to forget how easily ignited are spirits. George Doro arrives in 1919; when the rebuilt Rise: Doro celebrates its centennial, ask me what secrets I, along with Doro’s Signature Eye, have kept for the past 200 years.