Jacksonville, Florida: Life is Not a Beach

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

The highway billboard signs we see heading downtown from JAX airport shout their messages: “World’s Largest Harley-Davidson Dealer!”   “Smoke-Free Bingo!”   “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!  Proudly Scaring America’s Families for More than 90 years!” 

Well, we’re not scared. We know this is friendly Florida!

Some visitors fly into Jacksonville, Florida, rent a car and head for historic Fernandina Beach and Amelia Island. Others, who’ve just dragged a punitively heavy bag of golf clubs off a carousel, shoot away like kids for the Sawgrass Marriott Resort and its celebrated golf courses. Indeed, what golfers wouldn’t want to stay at an address like 1000 PGA Tour Boulevard? (David Duval, who won the 2001 Open, was born in Jacksonville.) And some travelers who like the sun on their backs head north away from the state that practically invented tourism and make instead for Southern Georgia and its fêted places like Jekyll and St. Simons Islands.

And if all those tourists have seen of Jacksonville is JAX airport (admittedly one of the most user-friendly airports in America) they’ve missed the best part, Jacksonville itself, the biggest city in Florida – actually the biggest city in the contiguous United States and the 40th largest in the world now that the county and city governments are consolidated.

We’re heading right now for the city. We could drive on a few more miles to the East to the beaches but what we really want to discover is downtown Jacksonville. We want to find what it offers beyond the cliché: the Florida of travel poster blue skies and talcum powder white sands, both stretching to infinity.

We discover the alternative fast. It’s the middle of March 2008, not the warmest time in northern Florida and to prove it the heavens open. Time to stop at a gas station, get our suitcases and pull out our plastic raincoats and travel umbrellas. Only problem is American Airlines has lost our checked luggage -- though we’ll get it on the third day. To be fair, we should remember that Dallas/Fort Worth airport got clobbered with snow the day before, all flights out were canceled and the airlines were under stress.

We weren’t. We happily discovered at our Hampton Inn & Suites on Southside Boulevard a cheerful desk, and hot coffee on the house, and nearby the Seven Bridges Grille and Brewery (a great casual restaurant that didn’t mind patrons dining who were wearing the same clothes they’d traveled in (and slept in) for 48 hours) – and we found, a mile away, Wal-Mart, the patron saint of distressed passengers. That would take care of the clothes and hygiene problem. What more could weary travelers need?

Our Hampton Inn was reasonably priced with mid-week discounts and offered free parking, complimentary WiFi connections and free use of the business office’s two computers, free breakfast – and great ease getting on the highways from its south east location. Many of America’s lower-priced hotels surely leave the luxury hotels in the dust when it comes to providing courtesy services even as the more expensive hotels start squeezing their guests with “resort fees” that can be as high as $25 per day.

You will find a different type of lodging downtown at the river’s edge, the 10-roomed Riverdale Inn. Sisters Linda Wahl and Carolyn Whitmire own this B & B that was built in 1901 by William Kelly who made his money creating turpentine. At that time more than 50 mansions lined Riverside Avenue. The inn is one of the only two that survived. The sisters are the fifth family to own this house; they paid about half a million for it and spent twice that on restoration. It took 18 months. They showed some early pictures of the reconstruction to acquaintances. “Oh, you work as wreckers,” their acquaintances said.

“And are you still talking to each other?” we ask.

“Yes,” comes the reply, “We still love each other. We’re still sisters!”

Carolyn is a former laboratory technician. Linda ran another Florida inn for 10 years. There are seven sisters in their family. “So Carolyn and I came prepared. B & B is like family,” Linda says. Their inn restaurant, The Row, can provide room service dinner for business travelers. The Row’s afternoon teas, brought out in best British fashion, are popular with locals. The inn also hosts bridal and baby showers. At one time the sisters thought their new inn might be haunted by the ghost of a former guest. The television would mysteriously switch itself on. Spooky! No one wanted that room. One night while the room was rented the guest discovered the answer. A previous occupant had programmed the TV.

Rates are about $145 to $185, double occupancy .It’s a simple inn very elegantly presented, its features a tribute to the wealth of the person who built it: solid  pine flooring, attractive wainscoting, wide windows most still showing the original beveled glass. The façade of the house is the original painted shingles. Interiors are beautiful. Linda created all the curtains and museum-quality window treatments herself. Linda also is a very knowledgeable concierge. Plus she has a great location.

The more swanky Hyatt downtown on the river also has a great location -- and an additional asset, the locally owned and locally operated restaurant just off its lobby: Plaza III, The Steakhouse.

Don’t let that designation steakhouse fool you. This is not a rustic cowboy place where you cut steaks with knives like garden tools and gape at old posters showing the Wild West. Here the plates come heated and the dessert forks chilled. The decor all black and gold, like the photo frames on the walls, smacks of Chicago or New York City. You sit on black leather, the napkins are black, the chandeliers are alabaster, the upholstery and carpeting sedate. This is old money, quality décor. The Jacksonville Historical Society provided the art on the walls: photographs of Jacksonville in the early last century, family and street scenes, and a shot of a zeppelin flying over this city. Despite the ambiance the restaurant isn’t stodgy or elitist as can be seen at the next table where an oaf wearing a baseball cap at the dinner table shows he has perhaps forgotten the manners his mother taught him.

The Plaza III is one of eight national steakhouses, the first in Kansas started in, of all places, a hog farm. They are individually owned. The Hyatt took over from the former Adams Mark five years ago and the steakhouse followed three years later. Recent patrons have included, at different times, Russell Crowe, Mike Ditza and Mira Sorvino. We are giving this restaurant some ink because its menu is so reasonably priced. We chose its three-course prix fixe meal costing $35 each. For that we got a thick, tasty seafood bisque, a beautifully cooked-to-perfection filet mignon, and chocolate or raspberry covered cheesecake. With a glass of house wine each and coffee, we paid $101 total.

When a restaurant executive, Carole Morales, comes round the tables asking if we have enjoyed our meal we ask her what future plans Plaza III might have. (We are hoping they might include coming to San Diego.) “We are thinking this room would be perfect for 1940’s-style dinner dancing,” she says. “Our women guests would love dancing here because they wouldn’t have to compete with half-naked 20 year-olds. It would be romantic; it wouldn’t compete with the meat markets.”

A different kind of dining experience lies about ten miles from downtown to the East along Beach Boulevard at the Alhambra Dinner Theatre. The theater, a big cavernous vault, offers a surprisingly enjoyable and well organized buffet before the show starts. We say surprising because there are not many dinner theaters remaining in America and most seem capable of providing a decent meal or a fun show but not both. The Alhambra manages the two but it’s been around since 1967. On the menu was roast beef, fried flounder and seafood Newberg with a choice of four desserts.

The first show the Alhambra produced was Come Blow Your Horn, followed next year with four shows including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe. Clearly management wasn’t afraid to offer shows that required the audience to be attentive and think. The names of some of its past entertainers might not be too well known to today’s youngsters but most of the patrons tucking in and preparing to enjoy the show would recognize names like Don Defoe, Don Ameche and Imogene Coco. In 1973, appeared Betty Grable, the Number One Pinup for the troops in World War II in Born Yesterday, Tab Hunter, a heartthrob for young girls in The Tender Trap, and Mickey Rooney, a few years before he married his eight wife in the aptly named for him See How They Run.

The names continued, a pleasure for older travel writers to relate: Cesar Romero, Richard Egan, Sandy Dennis, Robert Morse and Cyd Charisse. Joey Bishop appeared in The Seven Year Itch in 1981 by which time the shows had become more contemporary but still focusing on Broadway musicals. We saw Stephen Sondheim’s Tony-winning Company the night we were there. We had a lot of company; the house was packed with 386 guests, mostly locals.

Jacksonville has developed a showbiz name for itself downtown also. The Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts is a beautiful theater that would give any major city pride. It’s spacious, comfortable and at the time of our visit was showing Lord of the Dance. Liza Minnelli was performing downtown a few days later.

Jacksonville -- like San Antonio, Texas and Providence, Rhode Island -- took a long time to develop its river front. The result was worth waiting for. The Landing which lies on the north bank of the St. Johns river with 30 stores and nine restaurants has become the city’s in-place especially in the evening. Its landmark is the statue of Andrew Jackson 1822 for whom the city was named. Jackson became the first governor of Florida under the United States flag and the statue is a replica of the one in Washington, DC by sculptor Clark Mills which was the first equestrian statue erected in the United States.

You can ride horseback on the trails in Jacksonville but there’s a better option. No, not golf. We mean get up on a Segway 16 miles from downtown on an EcoMotion Tour, the only Segway tour in any Florida State Park. An absence of passion for golf might be an asset here as the special tours in the morning on XT cross-terrain Segways use part of a 9-hole former Donald Ross-designed golf course now being allowed by the park system to go back to nature. In the 18 years since the Rebault Club folded on Fort George Island mother nature has shown her capabilities to overcome the design of man, even the skills of the famed C19 Scottish golf course architect himself, designer of more than 400 top courses worldwide including Pinehurst’s legendary No. 2.

The Segway tours on big wheels with fat, low pressure tires that make no impact on the trails. They are battery powered and have zero emissions. On pavement the Segway battery will give you 20 miles; cross country you get only 10 as the demands on the battery are so much greater then. The tour operators, Maren and Greg Arnett, conduct the tours, usually with Greg in front speaking into a microphone system whose words are picked up by the receivers worn in the group’s ears. Thus we learned that the sand dune just more than 30 feet high has been dignified over the centuries of Fort George Island history with the name Mountain.

“You have to trust the technology,” says Greg. “if you want to go forward, you have to lean forward.” Behind us a beginner leans forward but forgets to steer. “Oops,” says Greg, “Some one has gone off to visit the woods!”

The Timucua Indians who lived here a thousand years ago have disappeared with no trace other than mounds of sea shells. They had an idyllic life until the European explorers and invaders came and enslaved a contented people. The tour takes us over easy, gentle, rolling ground, past bright jasmine clambering over its neighbors, giant magnolias and live oaks festooned with Spanish moss, past butterflies and an enclave of herons and brings us at the halfway point to Kingsley Plantation, a popular source of sea cotton and the dye indigo.

Zephaniah Kingsley came to this island in 1814. His wife, Anna Madgigine Jai, had been a slave from Senegal. Kingsley bought her and set free in 1811. He became a wealthy landowner owning more than 32,000 acres. Although he had more than 200 slaves, he was against the restrictive oppressive laws Florida enacted against its black population and ultimately moved his family to Haiti in 1837 “the only free black republic in the hemisphere.”

The Segway tour can be handled by any age group. If you can walk up a couple of steps without falling you’re good to go.

Those preferring to be less active can check out the World Golf Hall of Fame, the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens or the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens. The latter, the second largest art museum in Florida, (the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach is bigger) on Riverside Avenue is a treasure house of Old Masters and American art. It also has a magnificent display of 18th century Meissen porcelain, the third largest collection in the world. It has John Singer Sargent’s In The Alps 1911, Thomas Hart Benton’s June Morning 1945 -- and Norman Rockwell’s Second Holiday 1939. This painting accompanied a Richard Sherman story in American Magazine and portrays an elderly couple dressed in their best waiting at the Mayo Clinic. The wife is significantly ill but pretends to her husband she’s going for a vacation. He has inadvertently found out but maintains the pretence for his wife’s sake. The Cummer has a lot more including a magnificent huge oil on canvas 1877-78 mural of Ponce de Léon in Florida by Thomas Moran and in the room next door an 1641 bust of Cardinal Richelieu, the powerhouse behind Louis XIII, that was created in the Bernini Workshop with details so exquisite one of the Cardinal’s buttons is shown half undone.

The Cummer has all that and more, but what it doesn’t have is the friendliness of the Lightner Museum, an hour’s drive to the South in St. Augustine, where visitors on arrival are welcomed with the comment, “Be sure and take pictures!” There are many valid reasons why museums don’t allow photography: some exhibits are on temporary loan and don’t belong in the museum, flash can fade paintings, photographers can impede the flow of other visitors, the images taken may be so poorly processed they demean the quality of the originals -- and gift shops won’t sell so many pictures if visitors take their own and so on. True. But many museums including the Vatican museum in Rome and the Prado in Madrid allow casual photography in these days when photography has never been easier.

But of course the easiest photograph to take in Florida is when the sky is blue, the sand is white, the sun is warm and couples can wander holding hands on a happy holiday.