QuoteLong-time residents in Jacksonville's Brooklyn neighborhood look to hang on amid major changes
By Andrew Pantazi Sat, Dec 6, 2014 @ 10:46 pm | updated Sat, Dec 6, 2014 @ 10:56 pm
One afternoon in Jacksonville's Brooklyn neighborhood, Fresh Market shoppers sampled wines and cheeses, bought $13.99-a-pound Alaskan cod and listened to Bach waft from the supermarket's speakers.
Five blocks north, neighbors and former residents packed the street — playing dominoes, sitting in white patio chairs and watching toddlers.
Brooklyn has long been a small, mostly black community, tucked between Riverside and downtown, cut off naturally by McCoy's Creek and unnaturally by the Fuller Warren Bridge and Interstate 95.
The neighborhood was never the same after the highway construction in the 1950s.
The population dwindled, tumbling from more than 6,000 in 1950 to 1,500 in 1970, then 800 by 1980. The 2010 Census workers found only about 60 people living in wooden shotgun houses on narrow streets where three empty lots compete with every building.
For 40 years, city leaders rolled out plans to redevelop Brooklyn. Residents want the neighborhood to improve, but they worry the development might push them out.
Anyone driving down Riverside Avenue can see the changes.
About $160 million in construction has gone into southern Brooklyn over the past decade, bringing in the Brooklyn Station shopping center, and the 220 Riverside and Brooklyn Riverside apartment complexes.
The apartments are almost ready. Developers will offer 600 apartments for rent next year with another 200 units on the way. Next door, Fresh Market is open. "Top Chef" winner Kevin Sbraga soon will open a restaurant alongside other fancy and casual dining options.
Though prices fluctuate, the cheapest apartments at 220 Riverside fetch about $1,000 a month for 618 square feet. The Brooklyn Riverside apartments don't have an official price range, but the developer says the 650- to 1,200-square-foot apartments will go for between $900 and $1,600 a month.
SANDWICHED BETWEEN VACANT LOTS
Les "Paul" Garner's home faces the development on Jackson Street. To the left of his house sits an empty lot. Another empty lot sits to the right.
His parents bought the home for $64 in 1982, according to city property records. Three of every four of Brooklyn's 358 lots are empty, according to city records.
Garner's house is the last one standing across from the apartment development, the last house south of Park Street.
In front, his sidewalk is in shambles. Shoes, clothes and rubble mix with overgrown grass. It's the result, he said, of construction workers parking trucks on the sidewalk.
Garner injured his leg at work. At the moment, he's collecting workers compensation and going to rehab and walking the neighborhood.
Like most residents, Garner knows all his neighbors, and they know him. Most families have lived here since before World War II.
Garner, 51, knows change is coming. He doesn't know if the change is going to be good for people similar to him.
One recent day, he limped from his home and walked past workers building the Brooklyn Riverside apartments.
When the 310 units at Brooklyn Riverside open, the first-floor apartments will have outside stoops so residents can interact with neighbors, the developer said.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a gas station was there, Garner said with his finger pointing to a corner of the complex.
For decades, Fred Abboud's grocery store was there, he said, pointing to another spot now covered with the framing of new buildings.
Garner walked two more blocks to Spruce Street, right by the J.S. Johnson Center. Inside, elders gathered in the front of the building, and children rehearsed holiday songs in the back.
The last concentrated population of Brooklyn natives live near Spruce and Jackson streets, two blocks from the closest developments.
On this day, like just about every one, the narrow road filled with Brooklyn's ex-pats — men and women who grew up here, whose parents grew up here, whose grandparents grew up here. They moved when a landlord sold a house, or a husband got a good deal on a home, or a house was condemned and torn down.
They moved from Brooklyn, but they came back as often as they could.
Harriett Riggins-Clark, 63, moved to the Eastside 45 years ago. It never felt like home. She kept attending the old Mount Moriah AME Church, built in the late 1800s, until developers tore it down to build Brooklyn Riverside's apartments. She now attends the New Mount Moriah AME Church, which is not in Brooklyn.
Her son died from a shooting in Northwest Jacksonville the night before Halloween four years ago. At the time, her old Brooklyn neighbors came to her home and brought food.
She keeps returning to the neighborhood.
A MAGNET TO MANY
Dee Walker stood outside, throwing the football with one of the younger kids. He's 28 and a recording company sound engineer. He's never lived outside Brooklyn. When he heads to other parts of the city, he said he feels lost.
For 10 years, Hallmark Partners, the company building 220 Riverside, has dominated a citywide conversation about the need for Brooklyn development.
"Now everyone wants to know what Brooklyn is," Walker said as he strolled down Spruce Street, giving a tour.
He points to the field. They used to be filled with houses, he said.
Now, his children won't get to see where his mom and his grandma grew up. The house was demolished.
Still, the feeling of community remains, he said. The kids still eat with other families, get spankings from other moms and treat neighbors like extended family.
He then pointed to a pair of portable toilets. That's where Mount Moriah, his old church, used to stand.
"Why y'all doing it like that? Not why y'all doing that, but why y'all doing it like that? There ain't even any street signs right here letting you know that Mount Moriah was right here. That was Mount Moriah Church, a historic landmark," Walker said.
Fresh Market looks nice, he said. The apartment buildings look nice.
He wants Jacksonville to look nice. "This is improving now. It's bittersweet. It's like: I want it, but at the same time, I think about what was there before this. So it's like bittersweet."
The Brooklyn Riverside apartment development spans four blocks and cuts off access to Stonewall and Oak streets. He said he wishes the developers also built a cheaper apartment complex. He worries property values and rent will rise and the original residents will leave.
CHANGES TOOK YEARS
The neighborhood began changing long before the current development.
First, the state built the Fuller Warren Bridge and separated Brooklyn from Riverside to the southwest. Interstate 95 also separated Brooklyn from Mixon Town to the northwest. In the 1990s, I-95 expanded.
The government condemned homes, Garner said, and tore down the houses.
Across the street from the community center lives Reginald Bridges, vice president of the neighborhood association and a 59-year-old kidney cancer survivor.
The entrance is a cramped room filled with dozens of filing cabinets of Brooklyn history. He has so many recorded cassette tapes and photo books and presentation boards that the pile reached the ceiling.
He brought out the newspaper clippings and neighborhood association meeting fliers he's collected for 35 years.
Plenty of stories and fliers describe the plans of developers and the mayors — Jake Godbold and Tommy Hazouri and Ed Austin. Again and again, they came and declared they would fix Brooklyn.
Austin promised to spend $35 million on a park, one story read.
The Downtown Development Authority said it might expand McCoy's Creek and clean it.
About 100 people celebrated the opening of a community-owned laundry in 1984.
Neighbors worried at that time homes would be condemned and people pushed out.
Year after year, news stories quoted residents saying things like what former neighborhood association president Willie Mae Shiggs said in 1993: "We don't want to be pushed away. We won't take it lying down. We want to keep Brooklyn as a neighborhood and want to be a part of the making of a new downtown."
"Rising from the dilapidation of one of Jacksonville's oldest and worst-kept neighborhoods is a row of nearly completed, designer-look homes that developers say could be the hope for Brooklyn's tomorrow," read the first paragraph of a newspaper story from the early 1990s.
The solution, the developers believed, was building suburban-style neighborhoods in the urban area.
Neighbors waited and waited. Solutions never came or never worked when they did.
WILL IT SURVIVE?
Bridges is a real believer in the development.
"I think it's great. It's fabulous. The one thing is: It looks like it took so long," he said. "When you keep telling somebody something and it doesn't materialize, then they all become Doubting Thomases. And that's what happened here."
What it comes down to — for Dee Walker, for Paul Garner, for Reginald Bridges — is that they're afraid Brooklyn's going to lose its culture.
The neighborhood will become "New Brooklyn," they say. Or it'll just become an extension of Riverside.
Recently, leaders of the 220 Riverside development laid out their vision for Brooklyn's future. "We are writing a new chapter in the history of Brooklyn," said Dave Auchter, Hallmark Partners' executive vice president and chief operating officer. "It's setting the stage for the next 100 years."
"We're not creating a new history," said Jen Jones, executive director of Unity Plaza, a nonprofit organization that will run a park adjacent to the 220 Riverside apartments. "We're just creating a new chapter."
Alex Coley, head of the company, spent 10 years promoting the development, and he informed the community of what's happening. "It's pretty much exactly what we said," he said. "They are aware of it, and we are interacting with them as well."
Coley made it clear he wants to keep Brooklyn's culture in the neighborhood. "We really want to have the people in that community involved," he said. "It would be incongruent for one street over for us to be having a good time and the other street over not be involved."
He said he was careful not to view Brooklyn as just a blank canvas but as a community with a rich history.
Unity Plaza, Jones said, will host Brooklyn children's holiday recital, along with restaurants, health classes and other activities. "The entirety of Unity Plaza will serve as a catalyst to draw people to the Brooklyn area," she said, "the renaissance of a New Brooklyn."
The three were surprised to hear Brooklyn's residents are scared the development might push them out.
"The community was marginalized by the DOT [Florida Department of Transportation]," Auchter said. "The good news is we're the good guys. We know there is community heritage, and we're celebrating it."
Ayesha Covington, the neighborhood association president, wants people to come to Brooklyn, and if it takes a Fresh Market to do it, that's fine. If she can pick up lunch from the grocery store, too, that's even better.
"I'm never against the progress," she said, but she's also worried. "I'm disappointed that a lot of the older houses were torn down for progress. I think we have to find a place where we can embrace our past and move into the future without tearing down our past."
She said she worked in corporate America, moved to Deerwood, raised children, then felt called back to her home in Brooklyn. Her grandma lived there and took buses to Riverside and Avondale where she cleaned people's homes.
Covington said she asked to be on the board of directors for Unity Plaza, and nothing happened. Others repeated her complaint.
The reason, Auchter said, is because there is no board of directors yet. He also said the type of people who move into 220 Riverside will use the apartments to sleep and reheat food, but they'll spend their time outside in the neighborhood.
Regency Centers developed the Brooklyn Station on the Riverside strip center where Fresh Market is.
HIGH-END NEIGHBORHOODS ATTRACTED DEVELOPERS
The developers and Fresh Market came to the area, leasing agent Patrick McKinley said, because of nearby high-income neighborhoods. "The factors that really pushed them to that site and pushed us to the site is it's close to the Riverside, Avondale, Ortega, San Marco, Murray Hill, Miramar, St. Nicholas areas," he said. "As you can imagine, a lot of income is around where there is water."
The development, he said, bridges a gap between Riverside and San Marco and downtown.
He said the development will create a new neighborhood. "I think we still want to have as much similarities to Riverside as we can because I think it's a good thing. The Riverside community is strong."
Though new businesses and new employees will work in Brooklyn, until the shops and restaurants move in, no one knows if the new jobs will go to Brooklyn residents.
The businesses that lease in Brooklyn Station will need to decide on their own if they want to hire from within the neighborhood or not, McKinley said.
With apartments moving into the neighborhood, Downtown Investment Authority leader Aundra Wallace said, the city will need to push for affordable housing in the mix.
Wallace came to Jacksonville after working in Detroit and Miami. He said he understands why Brooklyn residents are scared.
"What's happening is change. Your neighborhood looked one way, and now there's new product coming in," he said. "That's something they haven't seen in some time."
EMPTY LOTS REPLACE SHOPS
Back in the neighborhood, Paul Garner pointed out empty lots and buildings that once housed grocery stores, laundries and candy shops. "Regardless of where you go, you're still in Brooklyn," he said. "You're still in 32204 Brooklyn."
The businesses, he said, should come to the community center and hand out fliers letting the residents know they can apply for jobs. "We have no input on certain things because they're the ones controlling the money, making the money. They have all this capital. Small guys don't matter."
A woman walked up to him. "Those are prisons," Tee Craig said, pointing to the apartments. Without a front yard, she asked, how can anyone relax by staying inside? That sounds like confinement, she said.
"Half of those people who are going to live in that building aren't going to know each other," Craig said as she looks at Spruce Street. Here, she said, "everybody knows everybody's name.
"Them people right there aren't going to know their neighbors. You're never going to see them. Out here, we're going to throw a picnic. This is a community. Over there is never going to be a community."
She can't imagine choosing an apartment over a house with a front yard.
Walker, 28, agreed. "Like she said, those are condos up there," he told Garner, "and this is a community.
"This ain't a 'hood," Garner said. "This a neighborhood."
Andrew Pantazi: (904) 359-4310
http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2014-12-06/story/long-time-residents-jacksonvilles-brooklyn-neighborhood-look-hang-amid
Need to get Reggies files and verbal histories into a digital form. You could probably build a historical/interpretative center just with his materials alone.
I fail to understand why modern urban architectue is avoided so heavily?
Thanks for sharing! It is a good look at the flip side of the exciting new era in Brooklyn.
I don't really understand the beef. If you bought a house back in the day for the price of a pair of shoes in a neighborhood that was on its last legs, wouldn't you be tickled pink that its getting new life breathed into it & is now charging people upwards of $1600 a month to live there in an apartment, when you have a HOUSE? Would they have been happier to just let it slide further into the abyss??
I understand longtime residents not wanting the area to change, but that area has not been doing well for a long time. The new development might not fix things permanently but at least it's something.
And gentrification is unfairly maligned anyway, I think. Here's a story from NPR that I remember vividly that explains longtime residents do far better in gentrified areas than common knowledge would seem to indicate... http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264528139/long-a-dirty-word-gentrification-may-be-losing-its-stigma (http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264528139/long-a-dirty-word-gentrification-may-be-losing-its-stigma)
From the article:
Quotethe population dwindled, tumbling from more than 6,000 in 1950 to 1,500 in 1970, then 800 by 1980. The 2010 Census workers found only about 60 people living in wooden shotgun houses on narrow streets where three empty lots compete with every building.
The fear is that they won't be a part of a revitalized neighborhood and that the century of cultural/family/neighborhood history, etc. will be lost. From 6,000 to 60? Yeah, that's a valid fear, imo. Heck, just look at LaVilla.
yeah, the neighborhood was pretty much gone anyway. 60 people living there. it's a nice look at the neighborhood, but it's hard to see how the developers owe the residents anything because they're building something on Riverside.
Quote from: thelakelander on December 07, 2014, 06:22:40 PM
From the article:
Quotethe population dwindled, tumbling from more than 6,000 in 1950 to 1,500 in 1970, then 800 by 1980. The 2010 Census workers found only about 60 people living in wooden shotgun houses on narrow streets where three empty lots compete with every building.
The fear is that they won't be a part of a revitalized neighborhood and that the century of cultural/family/neighborhood history, etc. will be lost. From 6,000 to 60? Yeah, that's a valid fear, imo. Heck, just look at LaVilla.
They are part of it because they live there now, all they have to do is embrace it & not have a chip on their shoulder about it. Seems pretty easy IMO.
And with numbers like that, I'm afraid most of that history is already lost anyway. There is no "fear about it going away". Its already gone. It'll never be the same (which sucks, because it sounded really cool), but at the very least the neighborhood is being revitalized & not thrown in the trash can like we do with so many others. The things that brought it to that point were a mistake & unfortunate though.
I could think of worse things than owning my own home that I bought for a song in an up & coming neighborhood thats being invaded by Millennials & Fresh Markets. Especially if the alternative was looking at abandoned lots & ghosts of a past gone by.
Quote from: river4340 on December 07, 2014, 06:28:16 PM
yeah, the neighborhood was pretty much gone anyway. 60 people living there. it's a nice look at the neighborhood, but it's hard to see how the developers owe the residents anything because they're building something on Riverside.
No, no developer owes them anything. If anyone should do something, it should probably be the city. For example, perhaps some areas should be preserved so that there is an eventual good mix of old and new. Another thing would be some type of affordable housing policy. There are examples out there of policies where new development can happen without total displacement of existing residents. After all, there's only 60 people left. Neverthless, my advice would be if the remaining residents can afford it, hold on to the property....or at least take top dollar if in a financial position of needing to sell.
Quote from: peestandingup on December 07, 2014, 06:42:40 PM
And with numbers like that, I'm afraid most of that history is already lost anyway. There is no "fear about it going away". Its already gone.
I was just over there giving a tour yesterday. There's still some stuff left, primarily along Park Street and west of Park. A few houses even date back to the 1860s. However, without some type of acknowledgement or plan for inclusion into a "new" Brooklyn, it probably won't last long though.
QuoteIt'll never be the same (which sucks, because it sounded really cool), but at the very least the neighborhood is being revitalized & not thrown in the trash can like we do with so many others.
It needed to change. While once dense, there was a lot of crime and little public investment in the area.
QuoteI could think of worse things than owning my own home that I bought for a song in an up & coming neighborhood thats being invaded by Millennials & Fresh Markets. Especially if the alternative was looking at abandoned lots & ghosts of a past gone by.
I don't think anyone is complaining about new development and infill. I didn't get that out of the article. Just a fear from those who call that neighborhood "home" that the "new" Brooklyn could possibly totally erase the memories and unique sense of place of the "old" Brooklyn.
I agree there needs to be plans on salvaging what is left (commercial & residential) to incorporate old Brooklyn with new. If not, it'll end up looking like your run of the mill urban mini mall. If it means helping the current residents out in some way with incentives & whatnot, then so be it. Better to do that then have the remaining fabric get mowed down. Plus, they probably do owe it to them.
Pay them a premium and get them out of the way