Lawyers, Winos, Pigeon Shit, Football Fans

We now can add another group to the list of inhabitants of the downtown region: football fans. In the 40 years I have lived in Jacksonville there has never been much night life downtown. I moved here in 1964 when I was eleven from Lexington, KY. When I was a teenager you could ride a bus downtown and shop at the many department stores and even find a place to eat lunch. There were a couple of movie theatres but I think most of the night life was nonexistent by the sixties . By the 1970's the downtown area was dying a slow death. That’s when the land developers went to the hinterlands. University of North Florida was built in 1970 about fifteen miles from downtown. There were some folks back then that wanted the University to be built downtown thinking it would help save downtown.. Since the seventies there has been nothing but continuous urban sprawl. All the department stores downtown were closing: Ivey’s, May Cohen’s, Penney’s, Woolworth’s, Sears, etc. Only a few sandwich shops remained open to serve the businesses that were still there. About ten years ago the Jacksonville Landing was built and all the smart people in power said that would revitalize downtown. What, a few shops and restaurants on the river was going to revamp our city? Since then, at one time another, about half the shops and stores at the Landing have gone out of business. About five years ago things started changing; developers with loans from the city and lots of money started ripping out old buildings and renovating them into condos and a half cent sales tax increase was voted on to help pay for the “Better Jacksonville Plan”. So in five years we have gone from, as the saying goes “lawyers, winos and pigeons” living downtown to maybe a few thousand people living in the newly built or renovated high-rises. Downtown is on it’s way to becoming a much desirable revitalized region. We now have the new Veterans Memorial Arena, new Stadium Baseball Grounds, renovation of the old Florida Theatre, the new Times Union Performing Arts Center which houses two beautiful venues, Jacoby Symphony Hall and the Moran Theatre, and of course Alltel Stadium which everyone knows about. We also have few new clubs, restaurants and two new hotels downtown.

Okay, so what’s the point here. Well, even with all the improvement to the downtown region we still have a long way to go to be a city that can properly host such a large event and accommodate 100,000 people. We’ll see. Jacksonville is just not yet a happening place. It’s like Randy Newman say’s “Big Hat, No Cattle”.

A couple of entertaining articles you might like to read from yesterday's NYTimes, free registration: Here's the Lowdown: It's for High Rollers, At This Halftime, Prudence Will Come Out to Play.

r.m.