Jacksonville

Jacksonville sits on a bend in the St. Johns, one of the few rivers in North America that flows north, and the city was for a period the winter destination of the American northeast.

The tourist trade began after the Civil War and ran until Henry Flagler\u2019s railway pushed further south in the 1890s and took the money to St. Augustine, Palm Beach and eventually Miami. For that quarter-century Jacksonville had grand riverfront hotels, steamboat excursions up the St. Johns, and a winter season of northerners escaping the cold. The photographs of those hotels and the boats are the record of a resort era most people have forgotten happened there.

The fire of May 1901 is the central event. It started in a fiber factory when sparks landed on drying moss, and within eight hours it had destroyed one hundred and forty-six city blocks, more than two thousand buildings, and left roughly ten thousand people homeless. It is still one of the worst urban fires in American history, and the glow was reported visible in Savannah.

What followed is why the city looks the way it does. Henry Klutho, a New York architect, arrived to take part in the rebuilding and brought Prairie School ideas with him, so downtown Jacksonville has a concentration of early modern commercial architecture unusual for the South.

The film industry is the surprise in this material. Between roughly 1908 and 1922, Jacksonville was a major center of American movie production \u2014 over thirty studios, drawn by sunshine, cheap labor and varied scenery, at a time when Hollywood was not yet dominant. It ended when a reform mayor was elected on a platform of getting rid of the film people, who were regarded as disreputable and who kept staging fake bank robberies and car chases in the streets.

The other constant is the port and the naval presence, which grew steadily and dominates the later photographs.

For dating, the fire is the hinge. Anything wooden and pre-modern is before May 1901; the brick and steel downtown is after.

The winter tourists left a specific photographic legacy. Studios along Bay Street sold views of the river, the hotels and the orange groves to visitors as souvenirs, so a great deal of what survives from the 1880s and 1890s was made to be taken home to Ohio and put in an album.

LaVilla, west of downtown, is the counterpart to the tourist city. A Black community incorporated separately before being annexed, with its own commercial district, theaters on the Chitlin’ Circuit and a musical tradition that produced James Weldon Johnson, who wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing with his brother in Jacksonville in 1900.

The Mayport and Pablo Beach traffic is a smaller subject worth knowing. A narrow-gauge railway ran east to the ocean beaches from the 1880s, carrying day trippers, and the pavilions and boardwalks it served are their own body of photographs.

The bridges are the modern landmark. Until 1921 there was no road crossing of the St. Johns at all, and everything moved by ferry. The Acosta Bridge changed the shape of the city, and later spans made the river skyline that appears in every twentieth-century photograph.

Three Rivers and the Furnaces Between Them