Jacksonville's Ten Major Missed Opportunities

6. Losing LaVilla Before The Urban Revitalization Movement


West Forsyth Street near Jefferson Street in LaVilla's Railroad Row in 1928.

LaVilla was an ethnically mixed neighboring city that evolved into Jacksonville's first Jewish enclave and later became the commercial and social center of Jacksonville's African-American community. This neighborhood helped pioneer two of the greatest forms of American music, Blues and Soul. Ray Charles, Ma Rainey, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston all spent considerable time here in many of the buildings still standing. Its train station was the largest in the country south of Washington, DC and one of the city's top employers for six decades.

On the notorious side, with over 60 bordellos confined within a four block stretch, LaVilla's Ward Street red light district, also known as "The Line," may have been one of the largest in the South. As far as Southern urbanism goes, it's hard to find many places that once had the mixed use vibrancy of LaVilla's Railroad Row. A compact place where the railroad, maritime, manufacturing, tourism, and prostitution industries all came together.

Ever wonder where Jacksonville's version of NYC's Harlem, Memphis' Beale Street, or Atlanta's Sweet Auburn is? It's sitting in a landfill. After decades of decline as residents deserted downtown and adjacent neighborhoods for newer areas of town, the City of Jacksonville took a wrecking ball to the entire neighborhood in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, a few years before neighborhoods like LaVilla became desired in the early 2000s as a part of a national trend of people returning to cities.