Our Jacksonville design carries the Florida alligator beneath an arched JACKSONVILLE and the line Florida Territory · Est. 1845, printed in a black, woodcut-style mark. The alligator is old Florida itself — the river-and-swamp country the city grew out of — and the 1845 date marks Florida statehood. It is a River City emblem: not the tourist Florida of postcards, but the lived-in city on the river that runs north.
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.
