This is a very informative and important article to read. I think it should live online for all to read and research, not just in the pages of Folio. I contacted the author and she was more than happy to allow me to reprint the article. There may be some weird breaks in the paragraphs. My apologies to the author. Transcribing from the PDF was a bitch.
Reprinted with permission from the author Gwynedd Stuart. This article origianlly apears in the June 10-16 issue of Folio Weekly Download original article (PDF)
It took Robert Graham more than a decade to win his coveted Avondale mail route. On the chilliest and most suffocatingly humid days alike, he happily hoofs through the affluent suburb’s oak-lined streets and immaculate yards, delivering the day’s mail to residents’ doorsteps, getting what he considers paid exercise in return. Tall and slender with a warm smile, Graham is a walking mailman very much by choice.
Removing himself from the confines of a delivery vehicle affords him the opportunity to get to know the community. “My customers are like my co-workers or family,” says Graham. “I tell people I live in Avondale because I’m there five days a week.”
A decade ago, Graham’s surrogate ‘hood differed considerably. From 1989 through ’95, Graham slipped letters into rusted boxes affixed to dilapidated shotgun homes. He delivered welfare checks by hand to the residents of ancient boarding houses. And he grew intimately familiar with the residents of LaVilla, a downtown Jacksonville neighborhood that was, even then, a mere shadow of the vibrant African-American community it had once been.
During those years, Graham grew attached to the people in what he describes as a proud if poor neighborhood. He remembers better-than-home-cooked soul food at Brown’s Cafe, shouts from front porches reminding him to wear a hat on hot days and, in particular, he remembers an old woman who relentlessly raked her grassless yard, hell-bent on maintaining the little bit she had.
“It was funny to me then,” he says, “but now I understand, you know, grass isn’t free, and that’s why the area looked so bad. When you’re living check to check, you just can’t afford to paint or fix your house up.”
It was during Graham’s tenure in LaVilla that the city’s Downtown Development Authority began a radical process of “revitalization,” buying up entire residential blocks in the urban core, forcing out residents and razing the buildings they once called home. Graham remembers seeing the condemnation notices going up and evictions starting to take place.
Though the city promised to help relocate those displaced, the situation on the streets was disorganized and often hopeless. Some 22 percent of LaVilla’s residents were elderly; many had spent their whole lives there. The most destitute simply disappeared. “That was these people’s home,” Graham says sullenly. “The next thing I knew, it was all gone.”
Literally gone. The 50-block area bounded by I-95, State, Broad and Forsyth streets was leveled, almost to a building. The city’s vision for LaVilla included broad green vistas, recreational facilities and, above all, economic investment. But after more than a decade of broken promises, mismanaged plans and half-baked restoration projects, this once-historic neighborhood remains a sparsely developed scattershot of commercial buildings, empty parking lots and incongruous office complexes.
A few original structures remain, lone monuments to Jacksonville’s rich African-American history, but even they are neglected, and their future remains uncertain. For District 9 City Councilmember Warren Jones, who lived in LaVilla as a child and has represented the area for most of the last three decades, the effort to save the neighborhood was too little, too late. “I hated to see us lose that [history],” he says. [But] what we tried to do in the early ’90s should have been done in the early ’70s.”
Today it’s close to impossible to imagine LaVilla as the cultural mecca it once was. Populated by black Civil War veterans in the mid-1800s, LaVilla was incorporated in 1866, making it one of the South’s oldest black communities. Even though the Great Fire of 1901 began at a mattress factory in LaVilla and destroyed more than 100 city blocks, most of the neighborhood structures survived the blaze, including the old Brewster Hospital on Monroe Street.
LaVilla was home to author and educator James Weldon Johnson (who penned the black national anthem, Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”) and Ray Charles. Area theaters and saloons drew performances by Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway and others, and LaVilla became known as the “Harlem of the South.”
But like many thriving black communities, LaVilla suffered in the post-Civil Rights era. As the vestiges of segregation disappeared, African-American businesses lost customers to white competitors. Wealthier black residents followed the suburban migration out of downtown. Residents who remained were increasingly elderly, poor, or lacked resources. Many businesses failed.
Like other poor urban areas, LaVilla was vulnerable to the crack scourge. Crime grabbed hold of the neighborhood in the ’80s, along with the unique sense of lawlessness that pervaded crack-plagued communities. Lawmakers saw the drug problem as an excuse to intervene, and no one, not even advocates
for LaVilla, offered much resistance.
In 1993, Mayor Ed Austin unveiled his River City Renaissance plan, dubbed a “vision for the rebirth of our city.” The plan, which was intended to address the areas of public concern exposed by a citizen’s forum called Jacksonville Insight, would finally pump much-needed city funds into the LaVilla area.
A seemingly well-intentioned Austin explained in a 1993 press release that his Renaissance plan had a “moral” dimension, one that would provide a “unified community with a better quality of life.” The plan had critics, some of whom believed its LaVilla component was merely designed to clear an aesthetically pleasing path for Jaguars fans. It set aside $33 million for renovations and improvements in LaVilla (as well as in nearby Brooklyn).
One piece of Renaissance-era literature described the area simply as “a blighted section of deteriorating and abandoned buildings” that “projects a poor image of Jacksonville to more than 90,000 local motorists and tourists each day.” The plan promised a greenbelt of parks, infrastructure improvements and the development of a $7.5 million recreation complex, complete with a gymnasium, tennis courts, picnic areas and an aquatics center. There was no mention of housing or existing residents.
It was urban planning in an arrogant, Robert Moses mold, but it did have moderate successes, among them the $4.2 million renovation of the Ritz Theatre. The landmark facility, which once hosted Duke Ellington and the artists of the famed “Chitlin’ Circuit,” was envisioned as a cultural hub for black and white Jacksonville, and to some extent, it has served its purpose.
Even that victory, however, was tempered by poor planning and a lack of vision. The “restored” theater is, in fact, entirely new except for a single exterior wall and the sign; nothing else was salvaged. And the quality of the construction was compromised by a series of “value engineering” changes made to keep costs down. One thing lost in the changes was soundproofing; during a steady downpour, it’s nearly impossible to hear performers on the theater’s stage.
Much of the remaining $28 million of Renaissance funds was spent to acquire property in LaVilla, taken via eminent domain. (In a March 2006 interview with the Jacksonville Business Journal, General Counsel Rick Mullaney, who served as Ed Austin’s chief of staff, estimated the city spent $25 million on acquisition alone.)
In 2000, the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission, which had taken over and subsumed the DDA, unveiled its Downtown Jacksonville Master Plan. It promoted LaVilla as “a vibrant, mixed-use urban district where commercial, cultural, entertainment, light industrial uses and urban housing such as loft apartments and walk-ups coexist side by side and create the synergy needed to sustain a neighborhood.” But aside from the arrival of the LaVilla School of the Arts and a few architecturally interesting new office buildings, a sense of “vibrancy” has continued to elude the area.
Millions of dollars have been spent to acquire what is largely an urban moonscape. “In hindsight,” zays Warren Jones, “the problem was that we never had a comprehensive plan for LaVilla before we spent the money.”
A shell of a building at the corner of Ashley and Jefferson streets in the heart of LaVilla offers a ghostly if potent memorial to poor project management. In this case, however, the city is only partially to blame. Genovar’s Hall was constructed in 1859 as a grocery store. In the early 1900s, the brick building (sometimes know as Lenape Hall) was converted into a saloon, and throughout the 1930s hosted musical acts, including Ray Charles.
A pre-fire structure with a number of unique architectural features, including a mansard roof and hitching post out front that became known as the “rail of hope” by musicians who hung out there, hoping for a gig, Genovar’s Hall was allowed to deteriorate along with LaVilla’s other significant landmarks.
The building seemed salvageable in 1998 when the city decided to give it to Nu Beta Sigma, an eager service fraternity, and assign its membership the task of restoring Genovar’s Hall to its former glory. It’s not clear why the city chose to give away the historic asset, other than its evident disinterest in managing the building’s restoration. But the choice of the fraternity to oversee the seemed peculiar at best.
Nu Beta Sigma had no experience in historic preservation and had traditionally focused on philanthropic youth enterprises, not brick-and-mortar projects. What’s more, its membership is composed largely of professionals with full-time jobs, capable of devoting only part-time attention to the restoration.
Despite that, the city gave the nonprofit organization the building, and the property on which it stands, for a mere $10, the cost of transferring the title. It also provided $200,000 in city funds, money matched by $565,000 in state and federal grants. Despite the time and money spent, however, Genovar’s Hall remains a shell, four windowless walls and a roof. (A cap of corrugated metal has replaced the iconic dormer windows of the mansard roof.)
Reginald Estell, a spokesman for and member of the fraternity, says his organization had only good intentions. “Our theme is culture for service and service for humanity. Our downfall was that we were trying to do it the most economically, and save taxpayer money. We’ve been doing all the work ourselves.” (He insists that no one working on the project has collected a salary.)
Since the project’s inception, two of its biggest champions have been District 9 City Councilmembers Warren Jones and Reggie Fullwood. In November 1999, before the city gave the fraternity the deed to the building, Fullwood wrote a letter to the state Bureau of Historic Preservation, declaring his support for the project and potential state funding.
Fullwood expressed hope that Genovar’s Hall would anchor “The LaVilla Experience,” a tourist attraction to feature an amphitheater, three shotgun homes transformed into museums, and Old Brewster Hospital, all on a single block. Fullwood’s vision would never come to fruition for a number of reasons. For one, the state is reluctant to fund “architectural zoos,” or groups of buildings that didn’t actually exist together in history. But Jones, who introduced the legislation declaring Genovar’s Hall to be surplus property, says that although he still believes in the project, he never expected it would take this long. “I was off council for eight years,” he says with a laugh. “Now I’m back, and that project is still dragging on.”
According to the original ordinance, construction should have been completed by Oct. 27, 2000. Subsequent pieces of legislation extended the project’s timeline, but no deadlines were ever met. In a 1997 Times-Union article, the membership of Nu Beta Sigma said they intended to renovate the building to house a youth cultural center and meeting rooms. Fraternity Chairman Ike Williams estimated that the project would cost between $200,000 and $500,000.
In a subsequent article in 2001, the fraternity upped its cost estimate to $2.5 million. Plans for the building had also changed. Schematics submitted to the city by Civil Service, Inc. (a contracting company that employed fraternity member Ellis Maduaka-Cain) showed that the supposed youth cultural center now featured a bar and dance floor.
Word surfaced that the fraternity had decided the building was better suited to a jazz restaurant. That same year, the group received $200,000 from the city’s Community Development Block Grant Funds to gut the second and third floors, and build a new roof. A year later, in February 2002, they received $250,000, the first of three Historic Preservation Grants from the state, again, for the construction of a new roof, among other things.
Since then, the fraternity has received two more grants from the state, one for $275,000 in 2004 and one for $40,000 (again, partially for roof construction) in 2005, but have yet to accomplish a vast majority of the outlined renovations. One document also indicates that the fraternity was to receive $50,000 from Reggie Fullwood’s District 9 funds, $40,000 from Denise Lee’s District 8 funds and $100,000 from state Rep. Tony Hill. According to the same document, $7,000 would come out of the fraternity’s own account. Estelle says that, to date, $880,000 has been spent on the project.
The deed that granted the fraternity title to Genovar’s Hall in 2000 includes several restrictive covenants, including one that says the building improvements are to be finished before March 23, 2002. A reverter clause allows the city to reclaim the property if deadlines aren’t met, and the city has threatened to exercise this option more than once.
In a 2003 letter, then-JEDC Executive Director Kirk Wendland told Estelle that the city was preparing to act on its right to enforce the reversion clause,” but the city has yet to do so. “They’re thinking about [taking the building back],” Estelle acknowledged during a phone conversation with Folio Weekly in May. “They’re real close.” But Estelle remains optimistic. “I feel like we’re very close to completing the exterior. It’s just a matter of the city letting us get that done,” he says. “It’s not as far off as it looks.”
Sitting on a velveteen sofa in her in a cluttered but cozy living room, Padrica Mendez digs through a pile of mail. After a minute, she finds the correspondence she’s looking for. It’s a letter from Jacksonville’s Office of Municipal Compliance, one that paints a grim portrait of the home she’s ived in since 1946, when she was 8. The vast two-story Victorian on Monroe Street in LaVilla has large rooms, high ceilings and grand Corinthian columns supporting enormous porches upstairs and down.
The 102-year-old home has certain architectural age spots, the finish on the hardwood floors has dulled and sheets of cracked paint hang from the ceiling, but the house appears sturdy. A sign on her front door announces, “The blood of Christ protects this house.” That hasn’t kept code enforcement at bay, however.
According to city inspectors, Mendez’s fascia and bargeboards are deteriorating, as are the roof, eave soffits, siding and the ceiling of her upstairs porch. “That man tried to say that I haholes in my siding out there, and I still don’t know what he’s talking about,” she says with an exasperated smile, “I’m not afraid of them. What’s that they say? ‘I had a little talk with Jesus’? Everything’s going to be all right.”
If Mendez is less than cowed by the city’s threats to begin fining her for the supposed violations, it’s no wonder, they’ve been on her case for more than a decade. In 1995, her house was one of hundreds in LaVilla slated for demolition. The city’s idea of a fair price for her family’s mansion at that time: $30,000. She told Folio Weekly then, “They want my house, but I want it more.” So far, she’s been right.
Apart from the time Mendez spent studying at Bethune-Cookman College, getting her master’s degree from Columbia University and singing at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, Mendez is a life-long LaVilla resident. Her father, a Cuban immigrant and master tailor, bought the house on Monroe Street in 1946. Before that, the family lived just blocks away in a two-story duplex on Beaver.
Mendez remembers her childhood fondly. “When I was a little girl, there were plenty of children in LaVilla. I was the free daycare,” she says with a laugh. “I had everyone’s child over here, I’m talking like 20 or 25 children. I would teach them and pet them and feed them and plait their hair. My momma called me Mother Goose. They thought I was going to have a lot of children, and I wound up having not one.”
Mendez toured Europe during the ’60s and ’70s, performing in a production of “God’s Trombones,” a collection of Negro sermons in verse written by James Weldon Johnson. She visited home often enough to witness her neighborhood’s sad decline. “I came in ’67, and it was beautiful. I came in ’68, and it was beautiful. I came in ’74, and it was still beautiful, but I could see in ’74 that things were starting to change a little. In ’77, when I got back, things had really changed.” Still, she says the area retained its neighborly feel, the kind of place where a neighbor could depend on a home-cooked meal when they’d fallen ill.
Mendez, who operated a tailoring business on the ground floor of the Masonic Temple building on Broad Street after returning from Europe in the ’70s, remains angry at the way the city handled LaVilla’s “revitalization.” “The way they went about it was just so ugly,” she says. “You got these letters telling you about your violations and stuff, and then they sent in these officers to come into your house and look at everything. Anything they could see – if you had a crack in the wall that big,” she gestures with her thumb and forefinger, “they’d say it’s a violation. Anything at all. One inspector had the nerve to tell me that the paint in my attic was peeling.” She continues with a laugh, “First of all, my attic was not even painted.”
The city’s sudden preoccupation with residential upkeep was something of a double standard. The neglected homes the city purchased continued to crumble under city ownership, their tenants and belongings still inside, until the buildings were eventually demolished. During that time, the city also procured a boarding house on Monroe Street, alovely building with gingerbread woodwork on its two front porches. Of course, it wasn’t always a boarding house, and, in fact, once served a much grander purpose.
The two-story Italianate structure, originally at 915 Monroe Street, was known as Brewster Hospital, another pre-fire structure that once served as an African-American hospital and nurses training school. Photographs of the structure when it was first purchased by the city show the building in relatively good condition. But as it sat vacant under city ownership, visited only by vagrants and vandals, it quickly deteriorated.
This was only the beginning of the city’s mishandling of the old hospital. In 2007, the city sold the land out from under Brewster, then attempted to move the hospital onto a vacant piece of property next to Padrica Mendez’s house. (The plan was scuttled only after long-time Brewster advocate Diane Melendez pointed out that the lot was several feet too small for the building.) The city eventually moved the building to a lot across the street from the original location, but Brewster remains at risk.
In 2004, the city set aside $1.6 million for the “restoration and renovation” of Brewster Hospital, ut in the intervening four years, the rising cost of construction materials caused the price to reach $1.9 million. A $350,000 grant from the Florida Division of Historical Resources earlier this year should have compensated for the increase, but the city is tapped out financially. Property contractor and historical restoration expert Mitch McDaniel, who is managing the project, says the city recently notified him that $56,000 from the project’s current phase, Phase II, was being “shifted” to the
third phase, a fancy way of saying the city is short $56,000. (Phase III is cur- rently unfunded.)
After getting word of the shortfall, Melendez and City Councilmember Glorious Johnson asked city Inspector General Pam Markham to meet them at the Brewster site. Markham, whose professional duties include “coordination and responsibility for activities that promote the efficiency, accountability, integrity and transparency in city government,” called to cancel the meeting, claiming, according to Melendez, that she didn’t know anything about the project and didn’t want to get involved.
After some verbal prodding, she showed up. Markham nodded obligingly as Melendez and Johnson explained how important it was that this project not be halted after all of the work that’s been completed, to which Markham said she’d need some time to look into the project’s finances. Exasperated, Melendez replied, “We’re way past taking time to look at papers. We need action.”
Johnson and Melendez asked City Council Auditor Kirk Sherman to review the project’s finances. The audit revealed that although a city ordinance specified the $1.6 million set aside for the project was to pay for “restoration and renovation,” $314,152 of that was used to move the building. Asked by Folio Weekly if she’d ever gotten around to investigating the shortage of funds, Markham explained that she was waiting for Melendez and Johnson to provide her with the necessary documents.
Even after he no longer delivered mail in the area, Robert Graham would visit LaVilla on his days off, to eat breakfast at Brown’s Cafe. He describes driving past the area now as “sad.” “The people didn’t have much, but they treated you with respect. They taught me that money, yes, we all want more of it, doesn’t make you happy. My grandmother always told me, ‘Love things that love you back.’”
It won’t necessarily love her back, but that doesn’t make Padrica Mendez’s Monroe Street home any less a part of her or her heritage. Though most of the neighborhood that once surrounded it no longer exists, Mendez says she still feels the spirits of her neighbors around her. “I do miss talking to my neighbors from the porch,” she says, “taking food over to them. It was beautiful, but I still feel so good. I feel blessed, actually. It’s the good spirits here.”
She continues, “I’ve lived long enough to know that there is a higher power, and it will be all right. There’s another old Negro spiritual that says, ‘He didn’t bring me this far to leave me.’” Councilmember Warren Jones describes the effort to save LaVilla as too little, too late. “What we tried to do in the early ’90s should have been done in the early ’70s.”
