Sunshine and surprises in Jacksonville, Fla.
BY LORI RACKL May 11, 2011 4:26PM
Downtown Jacksonville, Fla.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE: Multiple airlines fly non-stop between Chicago and Jacksonville. The city is on I-95, a popular East Coast road trip route.
STAYING THERE: The old Sea Turtle Inn — a longtime favorite of author John Grisham, who featured it in his thriller The Brethren — underwent a $37 million makeover to become the upscale boutique hotel One Ocean Resort. Located on Atlantic Beach, One Ocean has 193 rooms but feels much more intimate. Guests’ mini-bars are stocked with their favorite (and free) snacks, and complimentary coffee can be delivered to your room in the morning. One Ocean also has a pool and fitness center, a kids’ club, a high-end restaurant and a luxurious spa, where you’ll want to give yourself plenty of time to enjoy the serene relaxation room overlooking the ocean. You’ll also want to send me a thank you note after getting a seashell massage from Ian. Overnight rates start at $149 in the low season; (904) 249-7402, oneoceanresort.com.
EATING THERE: The best meal I had in Jacksonville was at a restaurant that’s been around for more than a decade. Chef Tom Gray, a James Beard Award semifinalist in 2009 and 2010, mans the kitchen at Bistro Aix in the San Marco neighborhood. The lively bistro has a seasonally-driven menu, but you can always find favorites like the creamy French onion soup and homemade potato chips topped with blue cheese; (904) 398-1949, bistrox.com.
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Updated: June 13, 2011 12:24AM
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Kathy Collins wasn’t sure what she’d gotten herself into — except better weather — when she moved from Chicago to Jacksonville a dozen years ago.
“I remember walking around downtown on a Sunday and there was nothing going on,” Collins said. “There were a lot of chain restaurants. It was a much different scene than Chicago.”
Twelve years later, no one is going to mistake Jacksonville for Chicago. But this sprawling city on Florida’s First Coast has done plenty of growing up.
“Downtown has gotten so much better,” Collins said. “So has the food scene.”
Collins can take a little credit for that last part. She’s executive chef at the sleek Cafe Nola in Jacksonville’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Like many of Jacksonville’s top toques, Collins relies heavily on locally sourced ingredients. During a lunch last month at Nola, the pea tendrils on my plate came from the museum’s roof top garden. Collins plucked the carrots that morning from her own backyard.
Jacksonville’s recent improvements aren’t just of the culinary kind. The city has been working hard to change its less-than-flattering image of an industrial port along I-95, sandwiched between a couple of Florida’s tourism darlings: Amelia Island to the north and St. Augustine to the south.
Revitalization efforts are rippling through Jacksonville’s downtown and across the city’s historic neighborhoods, from the hipster haven of Riverside to Springfield, dubbed one of the South’s top comeback ’hoods by Southern Living magazine.
Springfield is worth a stop if for no other reason than to visit Sweet Pete’s, a Willy Wonka-worthy candy shop — 20 flavors of organic cotton candy! — that opened last year in an old Victorian home.
In downtown Jacksonville, “ambassadors” dressed in orange shirts and pith helmets patrol the urban center’s streets, pointing people to the nearest parking lot, pressure washing the sidewalks and getting rid of graffiti. A new program called “Off the Grid” makes the most of vacant storefronts by turning them into exhibition space for artists, who get a sizeable break on the rent.
“People used to complain that there wasn’t anything going on in the city,” said Cabeth Cornelius, who grew up here. “Things were happening — you just didn’t know where because Jacksonville is so spread out. That’s where social media has really helped.”
At a recent outdoor fine arts fair in the Avondale neighborhood, a woman was handing out brochures labeled “Kiss boredom goodbye.” The brochures were touting the website experiencejax.com, an arts, sports and entertainment calendar. Festivals, concerts and other events also get publicized on an online community forum aptly titled udontknowjax.com.
I, for one, didn’t know much about Jax before my first visit here last month.
I didn’t know that Jax is named after Andrew Jackson, who served a stint as Florida’s military governor but never actually set foot in Jacksonville.
I didn’t know the city is widely considered the birthplace of Southern rock, producing the likes of the Allman Brothers, 38 Special and Lynryd Skynyrd, named for a Jacksonville gym teacher who didn’t care for a couple of the future band members’ long hair.
I also didn’t know downtown’s Florida Theatre — a landmark that’s still standing — is where Elvis Presley gave one of his first indoor concerts in 1956. A juvenile court judge sat through the whole show to make sure Presley’s hips behaved.
And I certainly didn’t know just how ridiculously big Jacksonville is. Geographically, it’s the largest U.S. city outside Alaska, spread across 848 square miles. That’s about 100 miles shy of all of Cook County — with one-sixth the population.
At that size, it’s little surprise that Jacksonville isn’t a walkable city. People here like their cars. And those cars often sport bumper stickers that say something to the effect of “I don’t drive over the ditch.”
The “ditch” is the intracoastal waterway that separates the city’s downtown and historic neighborhoods from the beaches. It’s also a metaphor for the dividing line between Jacksonville’s opposing lifestyles.
On one side of the ditch, you have the beach-dwelling, flip-flop wearing Margaritaville crowd.
The urban side feels more like South Georgia than Florida, right down to the Spanish moss dripping off the trees.
I dig both sides of the ditch. But this is Florida. When I come to the Sunshine State, I want a beach. Luckily there was plenty of that right outside my hotel, the swanky One Ocean Resort, which had been the not-so-swanky Sea Turtle Inn until three years ago.
I hopped on a comfy cruiser bike and rode at least a dozen miles along an uninterrupted stretch of perfectly packed sand.
It sounded like a crackling fire as I pedaled the bike’s fat tires over a carpet of seashells. Little kids built sandcastles and gingerly poked the occasional washed up jellyfish, while surfers tried to ride the modest waves and fishermen cast long lines into the Atlantic.
I pedaled inland at Neptune Beach, past pricey boutiques, pretty homes lined with palm trees and — what’s this? — Pete’s Bar, a dive that’s been around since the Great Depression. At Pete’s, you can still smoke cigarettes inside (and believe me, they do). A game of pool costs 25 cents. And the sign out front promises that “once you’re hooked, you’ll never leave.”
The fingerprints of revitalization and change may be all over Jacksonville, but it was nice to see they’d missed a spot.
Information for this article was gathered on a research trip sponsored by Visit Jacksonville.
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