Urban Neighborhoods: Allendale

Images of Allendale



Paxon High School was originally named Paxon Field Junior-Senior High School when it was built in 1954. It included 7th through 12 grades until 1957, when Paxon Junior High was built nearby. Paxon became a college preparatory school and an International Baccalaureate school in 1996 and is now one of the top high schools in the nation.










Norfolk Southern's Simpson Yard anchors the north border of Allendale.










This group of warehouses, offering 316,000 square feet of space on Industrial Boulevard, was originally constructed by the Peninsular Warehouse Company.  Established in 1908 with a focus on food logistics and consumer goods warehousing, Peninsular was acquired by Raymond O'Dell, Sr. in 1912. In 2007, Peninsular Warehouse Company was rebranded as PenserSC and in 2010, the company constructed and relocated to a larger facility on Pritchard Road. Today, the fourth-generation family operated business is one of the southeast's leading logistics companies, operating over 2 million square feet of warehouse space in Jacksonville, Miami, and Orlando.




With as much as 624,000 square feet, the Anchor Glass Container Company is one of the largest companies operating in Allendale.  Paying between $400,000 to $900,000 a month on energy costs, it's also one of JEA's major accounts. Based out of Tampa, Anchor Glass Container Corporation is the third-largest manufacturer of glass containers in the United States. The Jacksonville plant, which manufactures bottles for the local Anheuser-Busch brewery, is one of eight plants operated by the Tampa-based company.

Glass making on the site actually dates as far back as the 1926 when Antonio Scalise founded the Tropical Glass and Box Company. Scalise's clients included Pepsi-Cola of Florida, Dixie Lily Company, and Frostie Root Beer.  Daily tours of the plant were also allowed between 10:30am and 4:30pm. By the 1960s, Tropical Glass and Box had been acquired by the Anchor Hocking Glass Corporation.  In 1983, Anchor Glass Container was carved out of Anchor Hocking by Wesray Capital Corporation, a private equity pioneer co-founded by William Simon, U.S. Treasury secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Over the last twenty years, employment at Florida's only glass manufacturing plant has hovered between 235 and 400.