Metro Jacksonville

Lost Jacksonville:  Wharves, Merchant Marines and Port

(http://www.metrojacksonville.com/photos/thumbs/lrg-4859-main-street-bridge.jpg)

Today, the majority of Jacksonville's water based industry is located north of the Hart Bridge.  During the mid 20th century, the downtown riverfront resembled cities like San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego and New York City.  A bustling district filled with wharfs, seafood markets, shipyards, and wholesale water-based industry.

Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2010-sep-lost-jacksonville-wharves-merchant-marines-and-port

I can remember shipyards on both sides of the river.

One of my favorite articles ever, thanks!

Great photos, and a nice history lesson. BTW - it's Merchant Marine or Merchant Mariners, not "Merchant Marines"

My grandmother used to go to Bay St  every Friday and buy fresh fish, since they were Catholic. She used to tell me how busy the street was. She was young then so she would always wonder around or watch people before getting the fish. She said it seemed to be so active back then.
  She then tells me she road home on the bus with the fish wrapped in newspapers. I am sure her bus companions loved her for this. Especially on summer days.

Wow. Looks like CSX USED to be creative. That American flag thing is really neat. Now they have a sign you can barely read, and not mention it is not lit at night. But I dont believe they are finish. I just looked out the window and now they are putting the CSX up there. CSX is big, but the other words are way too small.

Love seeing those old photos. When I was a kid, my dad worked in a small office part of the Weisenfeld Warehouses which were where the CSX building is now. I used to go frequently with him to his office through a maze of salty, fishy smelling wharves and warehouses. The places were always bustling, lots of people, shipments of exotic fruits or more common ones like bananas piled on the loading docks. All kinds of people working there. Manatees in the water, dolphins swimming down the river, tarred pilings and noisy boat horns. It was wonderful and something I miss today.

Jax may have not been as "refined" in the past, but it sure looked a lot more vibrant.

I remember the CSX/ACL building with the American Flag light set up.  They used to do this as a backdrop for the Fourth of July fireworks.

Somewhere along the way, it looks like Baptist acquired some of Prudential's (now Aetna) riverfront property.

Now:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=jacksonville&sll=30.32527,-81.642152&sspn=0.014391,0.033023&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Jacksonville,+Duval,+Florida&ll=30.316979,-81.657815&spn=0.007196,0.016512&t=h&z=17 

Then:
(http://www.metrojacksonville.com/photos/thumbs/lrg-4847-prudential-1955.jpg)

As always, Awesome pictorial of days gone by.  I really hate that so much was allowed to be destroyed , so that today we suffer with a nearly , by comparison to then , Urban core struggling to survive.


All in the name of progress

The port of Long Beach-Los Angeles looks similar to this (the old school pictures.)
http://www.polb.com/about/default.asp

Agree Ock!!

So it seems that we managed to systemically dismantle the engines of commerce that fueled economic growth here, and now we're all wondering why the place is stagnant? The only thing keeping this place going since the 1990s was the Florida real estate boom, as it takes a lot of construction guys, roofers, contractors, mortgage people, office people, etc., to build all those McMansions. Now that that's dried up, it's hardly surprising we have the highest or second highest unemployment in the state. Looking at all this destruction of industry, we got rid of most of the actual jobs beginning in the 60s and 70s. And the city has been on the decline since then. Even the suburbs have suffered, look at Arlington and parts of Orange Park. Those areas aren't old enough to have suffered such a steep decline. Without the 2 military bases propping up our local economy, it would be even worse.

Some of you folks confuse me. 

I have a hard time believing that if these pictures were taken today, many of you would be decrying the destruction of one of our greatest natural resources here in Jax.  All I see in these pictures is buildings and a river with a nice oil sheen.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Quote from: redglittercoffin on September 11, 2010, 08:50:51 AM
Some of you folks confuse me. 

I have a hard time believing that if these pictures were taken today, many of you would be decrying the destruction of one of our greatest natural resources here in Jax.  All I see in these pictures is buildings and a river with a nice oil sheen.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

That "sheen" is just texture created by wind moving over the water and the sun refracting off of it.

And in any event, you should contact Riverkeeper and get some actual information on this subject. Our river is more polluted now that it has ever been, I have 3 dead fish and 6" worth of white chemical foam floating outside my living room window as we speak. The river is terrible now, but the tradeoff is we have a downtown comprised of nothing but parking lots, and no jobs to show for it. I'd take the original waterfront back in a heartbeat.

Had they just left it the hell alone, these things generally develop into commercial/tourist areas, look at Seattle.

Looked for info on one of the ships pictured.  It was a Liberty ship... built for WWII transport.  Looks like a total of 82 of these were built in DT Jax for the war effort...

http://www.shipbuildinghistory.com/history/shipyards/4emergency/wwtwo/stjohnsriver.htm

More info...

http://www.liberty-ship.com/html/yards/stjohnssb.html

QuoteThe St. Johns River shipyard at Jacksonville, Florida, was established in 1942, being constructed by a local ship repair firm which combined with a New York firm of contractors to build this southernmost East Coast yard.
The plans for construction here closely followed those adopted by the Marinship yard, this being a layout known as a 'horizontal yard with a turning flow.' Its basis was that the transit of steel and components was parallel to the shoreline until it reached the head of the ways. Then it turned and flowed across the assembly platens down to the shipways. There was, in fact, no duplicated transit of materials - it was a straight flow, although not in a straight line. This form of yard layout was generally used when inland expansion was not practicable and growth had to be spread along the shoreline.

In August 1942 the Maritime Commission offered rewards for suggested improvements to efficiency. All suitable suggestions were shared between the yards and by the end of 1944 the overall savings to the Commission amounted to some $45 million and thirty-one million man-hours. In this drive for reductions in cost, the St. Johns River yard ranked second in total savings.

As with most types of war material, the profits from wartime shipbuilding, taking into account the fact that many contracts were not re-negotiable, were always the subject of criticism and shipbuilders were frequently singled out for attack because many of them operated plants owned by the government. At a Congress hearing of 'Investigations in Shipyard Profits' in 1946 it was reported that from a total investment of only $23 million by shipyard operators, profits had totalled $356 million. Also in these hearings one of the Kaiser companies was alleged to have made a profit of 11,600 per cent; Bethlehem Fairfield was charged with a profit of a mere 1,200 per cent. In the extreme case, the private interests in the St. Johns River company supposedly made 50,000 per cent on an investment of only $400. However, all these figures were strongly contested by the builders, whose sound basis of argument was that they had backed their efforts with all their resources and that putting their specialized know-how into the new companies was sufficient justification for profits.

Liberty ship output: 82 vessels, at an average cost of $2,100,000 each.


USMC Numbers Yard Numbers
1193-1222  1-30 
2467-2518  31-82 

Wow; our city sure did change; I think we got everything  bass ackwards now. As a child in the early to mid-60's, I can remember my Mother walking me down Bay Street (for what I can't remember).  I remember that Bay Street at that time was full of activity, restaurants, clubs, and filled with Sailors; also remember whore houses (bordellos) but can't remember exactly where and in what area; the Sailors frequented them and Bay Street back in the day.  Houston Street was also much busier.

"HU"

The decline of the shipping industry downtown was a byproduct of one simple change in technology; containers.

An American invented freight containers and all of the cranes, ships, trucks, railcars, etc. that go with them in the early 1950's.  Every wonder why containers are 20 feet and 40 feet long and not some metric measurement?  All freight volume in the world is measure in units of 20 foot equivalents, not metric tons because it was an American invention.  The US had one of the largest if not the largest merchant fleet in the world at the time.

Cargo was no longer taken off ships in slings and nets and put on hand carts then moved it to warehouses by stevedores.  Ships got bigger.  Specialized ships and cranes were necessary.  Intrastate shipments began to move more and more by truck.

Downtown Jax docks were not big enough or equipped to handle the change in shipping technology.  The volume of freight that moves through JaxPort now is much larger than it was then.

But Bay street is certainly less vibrant and entertaining now than it was then.  When it took several days rather than several hours to unload a ship, the ship's crew wanted to come ashore and be entertained.  Bay Street was lined with bars, that had "rooms for rent" over them aka "seaman's hotels" aka brothels.

I can remember walking along Bay Steet past Benny's Seaman's Supply and the Onyx Rail Bar with my father and asking why there were posters in some of the stairwells leading up to the rooms that read, "These premises off limits to military personnel". "Don't they want the sailors to meet the pretty ladies that live there?", I asked him.  Don't remember his answer.

I have to agree wholeheartedly with Chris...  I wish they had left our downtown as it was and not demolished everything.... We have suffered ever since.  I also agree that the River is in horrid shape today, mostly because of pesticides and lawn fertilizers, running off into the river. 

The river today and the river yesterday has had it's problems. My ex-law relatives that came to town in the 30's used to tell me about raw sewage and dead bodies floating in the river.

Quote from: Overstreet on September 13, 2010, 08:28:10 AM
The river today and the river yesterday has had it's problems. My ex-law relatives that came to town in the 30's used to tell me about raw sewage and dead bodies floating in the river.

And now we have oodles of cancer-producing chemicals instead, which you can't just turn off a sewer tap and let flow out to sea. The river's modern problems are far more serious, as there is no easy cleanup method.

When I was a kid running the river there was a lot of organic stuff in the river from about Green Cove to the ocean, but the river was also full of bottle-nosed dolphins, manatees, huge schools of mullet.  I am sure the river is more "sanitary" now, but is in far worse shape from inorganic pollution and over nutrification.  It is becoming dead.

There are a lot fewer "point sources" like sewage plants, but now many more people on the shores and tributaries each adding a little bit of poison.

Quote from: Dog Walker on September 13, 2010, 01:05:47 PM
When I was a kid running the river there was a lot of organic stuff in the river from about Green Cove to the ocean, but the river was also full of bottle-nosed dolphins, manatees, huge schools of mullet.  I am sure the river is more "sanitary" now, but is in far worse shape from inorganic pollution and over nutrification.  It is becoming dead.

There are a lot fewer "point sources" like sewage plants, but now many more people on the shores and tributaries each adding a little bit of poison.

+1

When I was a kid there used to be these giant islands of hyacinths floating everywhere. They were very pretty, but I hated them back then because they'd plug up the raw water intakes on your outboard motor, and you'd have to stop all the time and clear them. Up in JAX you could just go around them, it's wide here. But once you got down south of Palatka and especially down south of Lake George, the river isn't as wide and you had no choice but to go through them. Sometimes I'd just wait if it was a weekend for a big inboard boat to come through and get behind it.

Now the river is covered by a couple inches of foul-smelling chemical foam, and there are no plants, not as many fish, alligators, manatees, or even birds as when I was a kid. I'd rather have the hyacinths back, as annoying as they were. Don't know what you got till' it's gone. From what I remember about 10-15 years ago the state came through with a team of boats and ran the whole river spraying huge quantities of weed-killer all over the banks and marshy areas, which got rid of the long grass, a lot of the lily pads, and the hyacinths. They said the hyacinths were pollution and impaired navigation (ok I agree with the latter observation), but who knows wtf that stuff was that they sprayed all over.

Just FYI, this is what's floating outside my window as I type this. Disgusting brown foam and garbage, and it smells;

(http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk137/chriswufgator/82c2b5cf.jpg)

The river is far worse today than it ever was in the past. Never saw anything like this when I was a kid. I'm guessing the people disagreeing with me on this point don't live on the river, or else they'd understand.

Chris...............have no idea what the heck that stuff is! It does not look like something that nature produced by any means!

I read Jacksonville: Riverport-Seaport today... the author makes an interesting point about the changing of the downtown seafront.  Like Dog Walker said, switching to container based shipping had a huge effect. 

But in reading this book, the author made other comments that the downtown wharves were in very bad disrepair(many piers were falling into the river), the City Council stop making payments of 800k to the Jax Port Authority for 11 years starting in 1974, and that in the 70's until the very early 80's the Port was singularly focused on Westinghouse and the idea of offshore nuclear power plants. 

Although the author didn't mention it specifically, but these things(poor facilities and effectively JPA's stagnation during this time, although they did manage to keep Crowley from moving to Savannah) along with organic trends in the ship repair business(something that is now done far more and more overseas due to costs) is what caused the ship industry to move out of downtown.

i could be wrong, but wasn't this article posted once before on this site?