A few blocks from the film studios’ offices, the LaVilla district rang with another kind of genius — a center of Black business, jazz, and blues through the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, and the boyhood home of the writer and civil-rights leader James Weldon Johnson, who with his brother wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing in Jacksonville in 1900, while he was principal of the Stanton School. The song went out from this city to the nation. LaVilla’s enterprise built fortunes too: A.L. Lewis, Jacksonville’s first Black millionaire and founder of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, created American Beach on the sands to the north — a seaside haven for Black families in the segregation era. LaVilla’s stages hosted the great touring acts of the era, and its story is being told again today in a district the city is bringing back block by block.
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.
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.