By the late 1800s Jacksonville was the largest city in Florida, a busy river port shipping timber and cotton and a winter resort billed as a "Winter City in a Summer Land." Then came the Great Fire of May 3, 1901 — one of the largest urban fires in American history, which leveled the downtown in eight hours. The rebuild made the city. Klutho's Prairie School towers rose from the ashes, and within a few years Jacksonville reinvented itself again, this time on film.
Hollywood before Hollywood. Between 1908 and 1922 more than thirty silent-film studios set up along the river, and Jacksonville called itself the Winter Film Capital of the World. The mild winters and river light drew the cameras south years before California claimed them; Norman Studios, in the Arlington neighborhood, survives today as a National Historic Landmark. A few blocks away, the LaVilla district became known as the Harlem of the South — a center of Black business, jazz, and blues, and the boyhood home of writer and civil-rights leader James Weldon Johnson.
Why People Visit Jacksonville, FL
Jacksonville rewards travelers who like a city that surprises them: Prairie School architecture in the Deep South, a river that flows north to the sea, miles of Atlantic beach, and a deep Navy heritage at Mayport and NAS Jacksonville. It is a lived-in River City, not a postcard — and that is the appeal.
