So Jacksonville gathers a French fort and a cow ford, a great fire and a Prairie School phoenix, a film capital and a jazz district, a Navy river and a city the size of a county onto one north-flowing waterway — and our Jacksonville designs gather that into wearable form. Whether Jacksonville is your hometown, your river, your beach, or the city you still mean to know, wear the history. On the St. Johns since 1822.
What’s with the Prairie School? Jacksonville holds one of the largest collections of Prairie School buildings anywhere outside the Midwest — and the reason is fire. Walk through downtown and you find something that shouldn’t be here: the clean horizontal lines, deep eaves, and art-glass of the Prairie School — the Midwest’s modern architecture, the style of the Chicago avant-garde — transplanted onto a north-flowing Southern river. On May 3, 1901, nearly the entire downtown burned — 146 blocks, more than 2,300 buildings, the glow visible in Savannah — the largest urban fire in the southeastern United States. Into the ashes came a young New York architect named Henry John Klutho, who rebuilt the city in straight modern lines: the Laura Street Trio, the Dyal-Upchurch Building, and the St. James Building of 1912 — now City Hall — which stands among the largest Prairie School buildings in the world. River City is the modern Southern city nobody expects.
Why People Visit Jacksonville Florida
Jacksonville offers a Prairie School downtown no one expects in the South, a great river running the wrong way to the sea, beaches without the resort crowds, live oaks and marsh preserves, shrimp boats and naval carriers sharing one river mouth, and neighborhoods that kept their bones. Visitors come for the beaches, the river, the architecture, the parks, and the easy room of the biggest city in America. On the St. Johns since 1822.