One-Place Study: Jacksonville, Florida

  Proponents of consolidation in 1933 took to heart the lessons of the failed 1923 effort, and enlisted the aid of the Jacksonville Bar Association in supporting consolidation.  The Bar Association signed on, and appointed a committee to study the idea. The committee reinforced the notion that a constitutional amendment was necessary to allow Jacksonville to consolidate with Duval County.  The committee also supported the contention that consolidation would save money and improve efficiency by eliminating duplication in many areas. (Towers, 67) The Bar Association then wrote the text of a Joint Resolution to be proposed in the state legislature, that the state's constitution be amended to allow Jacksonville and Duval County to become one municipal entity, with proposed wording for such an amendment.  The resolution was passed in May of 1933, and signed by the Governor 25 May, 1933.  Then it was up to the voters of Duval County. The final obstacle, passage of co...

  1968 was not the first time Jacksonville had considered consolidation.   There were two efforts before that year: a proposal in 1923 and another in 1933.  The initial effort to effect a consolidation of the city and county governments was in 1923.  Lack of political effort doomed that move.  Proponents of consolidation failed to realize that they needed to mount a campaign of public education covering the entire state of Florida for the proposal to succeed. (Towers, 64)  A key element in that public education was that an amendment to the state constitution would be necessary for the city and county to consolidate.  People in the other counties in Florida who had no stake in events in Duval County would be hard-pressed to care, and may have been suspicious that "any movement started in one section of the State might spread and eventually include their county." (Towers, 64)  The specter of change often engenders resistance.  Jacksonvill...

Nearly fifty-seven years ago, on 1 October 1968, Jacksonville and Duval County became one, with the implementation of Consolidation of the two governmental entities into one.  I was a student at Florida State University, majoring in government, and the prospect of consolidation of the city and its county had been a hot topic in my class on local government.  I was born in California, but have lived in Jacksonville or nearby since 1954, and I consider it my home town.  I obtained and read a copy of the report of the committee that had been appointed to study the issue and present its pros and cons, and decided that, in my opinion, consolidation would be a good thing.  I wrote a letter to the editor of Jacksonville's morning newspaper, the Florida Times-Union , expressing my support for the proposition.   That got me a nasty phone call from someone who was against the idea.  I was neither intimidated nor swayed.  I was also not impressed when the ca...

About noon, 3 May 1901.   The Cleveland Fiber Company, makers of mattresses using Spanish moss as stuffing, had laid out bundles of moss on outdoor drying racks.  From a humble abode nearby, sparks from a wood-burning cookstove drifted up out of the chimney and landed on the drying moss.  It ignited, and soon a Cleveland company storage shed filled with dried moss caught fire.  Workers made a vain attempt to extinguish the fire, but wind defeated them when the roof of the shed fell in, generating a shower of burning moss and sparks that ignited the wooden roofs of the nearby houses in the low-income neighborhood.  The weather was an ally of the fire, the temperature that day reaching 93 degrees Fahrenheit.  Since March 27, there had been barely one and one-half inches of rain.  The area was considered to be in the grasp of a drought.  Northwest winds drove the flames south and east.  The resulting huge columns of smoke could be seen i...

My family, minus my father who died in California a couple months before, arrived in Jacksonville in the summer of 1954.  Mom bought a house -- first house she had lived in that wasn't rented since she left her family home in Pensacola, a new Navy bride, in 1937.  The house was on the southside, just around the corner from my grandma and aunt in the neighborhood known as Colonial Manor.  I was 7 years old. Jacksonville's downtown at the time was a collection of buildings from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.  Cohen Brothers, the toniest department store at the time, was in the St. James Building, an elaborate structure taking up one city block.  The building was one of the most magnificent in town after the Great Fire of 1901.  It opened in 1912, and was designed by Henry John Klutho, a young architect schooled in the designs of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, who had come to Jacksonville for the architectural opportunities created by that devastating fi...

I was 13 years old, watching television on a hot August afternoon in our home on the south side of Jacksonville, Florida.  The station I was watching overrode the program with breaking news.  Violence had broken out downtown, racial violence that escalated rapidly.  There was a warning for everyone to stay away from downtown due to the violence.  Not much more was said. I briefly thought about going, to see what was going on, but my mother nixed that idea.  And, considering the nature of mob violence, that was probably wise.  But I learned all I could about it, which was difficult for a while, as news of the event was suppressed in Jacksonville.  The city administration of Mayor Haydon Burns, in those days, reflected his segregationist opinions.   Tidbits of information about the violence leaked out, passed by word of mouth, almost like a clandestine samizdat , facts passed around an underground network in the old totalitarian Soviet Union....

 Before Hollywood, California, was a gleam in any film producer's eye, Jacksonville was the queen city of film.  Beginning in 1908, film companies from the north, mostly headquartered in New York, sought a better climate, literally, for making movies.  First to arrive was Kalem Studios in 1908, and by 1914, they had been joined by Fox, Metro, Edison, Gaumont, and others.  Jacksonville had many advantages for the filmmakers: it was a major railhead, connecting with nearly every major city in the United States at the time.  It had a variety of locations available, including wild lands, city streets, the St. Johns River, industrial areas, seaport facilities, and miles of beaches.  Labor there was not as expensive as in the north.  While winter in the north was plagued by grey days and awful weather, Jacksonville was sunny and perfect for filmmaking.   The many touring troupes that visited the city could be enticed into acting in films during the...