The Gilded Age made the river a resort. Steamboats worked the St. Johns and winter visitors filled grand hotels — Jacksonville sold itself as the Winter City in a Summer Land — until the fire of 1901 reset the town, and the rebuilt city found a stranger industry: the movies. Between 1908 and 1922 more than thirty silent-film studios set up along the river, drawn south by mild winters and long light, and Jacksonville called itself the Winter Film Capital of the World — Hollywood before Hollywood claimed the title. The studios eventually went west, but the era left its mark in Arlington, where one silent-era studio complex survives as a National Historic Landmark.
The Great Fire of May 3, 1901 destroyed 146 blocks and 2,300 buildings; its glow was seen in Savannah — and the rebuild gave Jacksonville one of the largest Prairie School collections outside the Midwest.
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.