Stories Behind the Concrete Slabs of Jax: Part I

3. The Palace Hotel/The Surplus Store



During the early 20th century, 615-625 West Bay Street was occupied by the Palace Hotel.  At street level, there were a number of retail storefronts, including a Coney Island Restaurant.


Sanborn map illustrating the location of the Palace Hotel/The Surplus Store.

In 1948, Leon Rosenburg started the Surplus Store in this building. His business grew to take up this entire building and an adjacent structure next door. However, Rosenburg was known as being a pack rat who had trouble parting with items for sale in his shops.

"Denise Leigh visited Rosenberg's West Bay Street shop, the Surplus Store, with her daughter and husband. The family was willing to buy, but Rosenberg wasn't eager to sell.

"Everything we looked at and we were interested in, he said he needed to do an appraisal," Leigh said. "Pretty quickly into the visit we realized he wasn't going to part with anything. I think it was his playground." - source

Rosenburg made most of his money through real estate investment and the stock market, so he could afford to be stingy with his items. He operated what grew to 40,000-square-feet of retail space for 54 years, until his death in February 2002. A year later, his son attorney Mark Rosenburg, demolished the building and the former Finkelstein's department store next door. In a 2003 Florida Times-Union article, Rosenburg stated, "They were in really, really bad shape. I wanted to go ahead and get them down."