A river that runs the wrong way. The St. Johns is one of the few major rivers in North America that flows south to north, draining toward the Atlantic past seven bridges inside the city limits. The river is the reason Jacksonville exists and the spine it still grows along — and a Navy town besides, with generations of sailors stationed at Mayport and NAS Jacksonville who carry River City with them wherever the fleet sends them.
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.
