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.
Bessie Coleman, the first African American and first Native American woman to earn a pilot’s license, came to Jacksonville as the invited star of the 1926 May festival and spoke to the city’s schoolchildren about flight; her 2023 quarter carries the date of her license.
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.