LaVilla: 'A story of fits and starts'

[stjr]

Have to hang this one on Ed Austin.  He had no real urban plan for La Villa.  City developed it akin to a suburban office park.  Buildings set back from the street with big, surrounding surface lots.  Interline Brands and the Credit Union even have gated properties.  Not what makes a successful downtown.  Another piece to the lack of vision in this City.

Jacksonville's grand plan for LaVilla: 'A story of fits and starts'
Posted: May 19, 2010 - 8:10pm

By Tia Mitchell

Depending on whom you ask, the empty lots remaining in LaVilla are either signs of a failed revitalization project or a promise of what is to come.

Some blocks contain thriving office buildings that were the goal of a 1993 decision to virtually gut the neighborhood west of downtown Jacksonville and start anew. But many other blocks remain vacant, awaiting developers that have yet to come calling.

Nearly the entire neighborhood looms in the shadow of the oft-maligned and under-construction Duval County courthouse. Many believe that project may finally kick-start the revival initiative that has, at best, sputtered over nearly 20 years.

Mayor John Peyton said LaVilla suffered because City Hall didn't stick to a plan.

"LaVilla is a story of fits and starts," he said, "that I think reflects poorly on our ability to execute a master plan."

The city's failures with LaVilla are now part of Peyton's stump speech on Cecil Commerce Center. He is attempting to build City Council support for hiring a Texas firm to serve as master developer of the former Navy jet base.

Peyton said LaVilla is what Cecil could become. He said the city did not have the tools necessary to carry out its vision to spend $30 million revitalizing 30 blocks of the then-blighted and crime-ridden neighborhood.

"That is an example of exactly what you don't want to do," Peyton told a group of council members this month.

Architect Ted Pappas disagrees. He says LaVilla is a success story compared to the city's struggles with revitalizing its downtown.

Since 2000, Pappas and a group of partners have built two medical office buildings in the neighborhood, and a third is on the way. He said he has made good on his promises to the city, and LaVilla has served the group's interests well.

Pappas said the few failed LaVilla projects - such as a planned restaurant and the Genovar's Hall restoration project - should not overshadow the many successful ones.

"We feel like the only action downtown has been what we've done," Pappas said. "You never hear about it, but we did it."

It was Mayor Ed Austin's decision to start over in LaVilla.

Bungalows and two-story homes once lined the streets of the bustling neighborhood, hub of the city's African-American community. During its heyday in the early- and mid-1900s, the area was known as "Harlem of the South" because of its prominence as a culture and entertainment hub where the country's most popular black artists performed and sometimes even lived.

However, desegregation of the 1960s was tough on the businesses of LaVilla: Their clientele began to live and shop in other neighborhoods newly open to them. By the 1980s, the crack cocaine epidemic hit these city blocks hard, leading to poverty, crime and blight.

Then, as it is now, the easiest way to enter downtown from Interstate 95 is to drive through a handful of LaVilla blocks. Chamber of Commerce leaders began to complain that the neighborhood was the wrong way to introduce visiting business executives to the city.

Instead, they would detour across the river, through San Marco and over the Main Street bridge just to avoid LaVilla.

Austin's River City Renaissance plan allocated $30 million to redevelop the areas bordered by Water Street to the south, State Street to the north, Broad Street to the east, and I-95 on the west.

Roads were widened, palm trees planted and new signs added. The city bought or condemned tracts of land, most of the old houses were demolished and the lots were cleared. Austin's hope was that the vacant tracts would lure developers who would buy up the land and start something fresh.

He envisioned LaVilla as a place were people lived and worked, making the neighborhood part of the overall solution for re-energizing downtown.

"It wasn't to displace [people]," Austin said. "We were looking to create an environment that encouraged the private sector to get in there and rebuild our central city."

Austin said his administration did its best to reach out to LaVilla property owners during the planning process.


But the Rev. Odell Smith Jr., pastor of Second Missionary Baptist Church for 23 years, was introduced to the River City Renaissance project when the church received a bill of sale for property it owns along Union Street.

Smith marched downtown and gave the city a piece of his mind.

"You just can't take it," he remembers telling them. "How are you going to send me a bill? We didn't say we wanted to sell it."

The city backed down from buying the church's property, but it moved forward with purchasing or condemning many other blocks. Now Smith and Freddie Starks, the church's secretary who has been attending since she was a toddler, gaze at the new buildings and remember the movie theaters, barber shops and fire stations that used to stand there.

The good thing is dilapidated and abandoned properties are gone, and so is the crime that resulted from it, they said. They also welcomed opportunities for businesses to replace the neighborhood's slums.

But the revitalization has also cost the church.
"The relocation has robbed us of members - big time," Smith said.

The church's roster is about half of what it was before the redevelopment, when many members lived within walking distance. As people moved out of LaVilla, businesses moved in.

In 2000, the Downtown Development Authority suggested John Hirabayashi move his growing credit union's headquarters to the neighborhood. The city agency offered land for cheap, highlighted redevelopment efforts and said the Duval County courthouse, at one time scheduled for a 2006 opening, would make it even better.

"We envisioned at the time it would bring more restaurants, perhaps more ancillary businesses feeding off of the courthouse," said Hirabayashi, CEO of Community First Credit Union.

As the courthouse stalled over the years for political and financial reasons - it is now scheduled to open in 2012 - related business projects faltered, too.


Austin said his goal was for LaVilla to return to its roots as a neighborhood where people live and work.

Though he doesn't blame his successors - John Delaney, who became mayor in 1995, or Peyton, who took over in 2003 - he is disappointed that progress has been slow.

"I think the community gets behind initiatives," Austin said. "This one just seems to be one that has sort of been dead in the-water for a number of years."

When River City Renaissance was first implemented, the Downtown Development Authority worked with Pappas and Hirabayashi to lure them to LaVilla. Peyton eliminated the DDA in 2006 under a government streamlining plan.

Since then, some downtown advocates say, there is no longer anyone in City Hall whose sole focus is building up the city core. Austin said he believes the LaVilla redevelopment needed exactly that.

"It just won't happen if you let it flop around and don't have somebody pulling these pieces together," he said.

Also contributing to the issues are the different ideas of what LaVilla should be. Though Austin and others hoped for residential and commercial businesses, Pappas insists that bringing housing back to the neighborhood would be a mistake.

"That's going in the wrong direction," he said. "Let's not make LaVilla another Riverside or another Springfield."

Then there is the goal of preserving the neighborhood's history as an arts and cultural center, widely supported but harder to achieve.

The city allocated $8 million to rebuild the Ritz Theatre on the site of the original structure and attached an African-American history museum to it. But its budget far surpasses revenue, and Peyton threatened to shutter the landmark last year.

Efforts by a local fraternity to save Genovar's Hall, where Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald once performed, received $900,000 in state and local money. After a promising start, the project has been abandoned.

The proposed LaVilla Bistro restaurant on the corner of Davis and Union streets received $1.9 million in city aid, but it, too, remains an incomplete project.

Even LaVilla School of the Arts, a magnet program that has become one of the city's most sought-after middle schools, was shrouded in controversy during the planning stages.

Initially, city leaders lobbied the School Board to build a school in LaVilla to jump-start development. Later, when private companies showed interested in that same property, city leaders begged the school system to reconsider. But the project was too far gone for board members to pull back.

Some consider the Prime Osborn Convention Center in the southernmost portion of the neighborhood a wasted opportunity. In recent years, the city and state have floated the idea of creating a transportation hub there. Others advocated that the center undergo renovations and expansions to increase its viability for conventions and other special events.

Still looming over LaVilla, both literally and figuratively, is the courthouse being built right on its border with downtown. When the $350 million project is finished, the city's legal community will be shifting its eyes westward.

Peyton has made building a courthouse -- a task left over from the Delaney era -- a priority of his administration.

"The courthouse is going to be a catalyst project that will spawn economic development in Jacksonville's front porch," he said.

Hirabayashi can see the construction cranes and rising structure from his office window.

"If things start to fill in and we get a few things on the west side of that courthouse building like eating establishments," then more demand will be created, he said.

"I think there could be some business there. We're patient."

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-05-19/story/future-jacksonvilles-longtime-lavilla-project-good-or-bad

[thelakelander]

LaVilla is a complete failure.  Completely eliminating a historic urban African-American neighborhood for the development of a suburban downtown office park is anything but success.  Its wrong on so many ethical and social levels (just my two cents).

Nevertheless, here are some images from the time when LaVilla happened to be a neighborhood where people really lived, worked and played.



In its heyday, LaVilla was one of Jacksonville's most dense urban neighborhoods with a population well above 5,000.  In this photo, Broad Street is the commercial street running towards the river on the left side of the image.  Today, the LaVilla School of the Arts occupies a large section of this image at the bottom right and center.



This 2006 aerial shows the destruction of a once vibrant community reduced to rubble, in the name of progress and urban renewal.  Although the neighborhood had declined by the early 1990s, Ed Austin's River City Renaissance put the final nail in its coffin, transforming it into a wasteland of vacant lots, surface parking lots and non pedestrian friendly suburban office complexes.

Examples of buildings and scenes in LaVilla that no longer exist

[stjr]

La Villa typifies Jacksonville planning which is (1) tear it down and do it double speed if it might be historic (2) leave it vacant due to failure to have any idea what to do next as visioning isn't our thing.

And, we wonder why decades of "urban renewal" haven't renewed anything but demolition contractor's pockets.

[iloveionia]

Wrong on every level.  I do not and will not ever get demolition.  Very sad.

[thelakelander]

I can't believe anyone can make an argument that kicking out residents and leveling an entire neighborhood should be considered a success.  Imagine how popular and unique Savannah would be today if they implemented this type of redevelopment strategy with their Victorian District?  My guess is the streets would be just as full and vibrant as the streets of LaVilla are today.

From this:




To this:

















Just beautiful.....

[vicupstate]

Why does Pappas think adding residential would be so deterimental?  I don't get it?  Does he only want more office buildings? 

[Jim]

Here's a couple more heartbreaking pics of classic LaVilla.

1940's




1950's

[stjr]

Jax looks like a bigger, or at least more vibrant, city in the 1950's than today.  It proves that having tall buildings doesn't mean squat if nothing is happening on the ground.  If we had more concern for historic low rises than modern high rises, we would likely be better off than now.

Why does Pappas think adding residential would be so deterimental?  I don't get it?  Does he only want more office buildings? 

Ted Pappas isn't going to win architect of the year in my book anytime soon.  I think he just likes getting his next commission, not whether it fits in to LaVilla, Downtown, an urban environment, or whatever.  My guess is he doesn't due residential (but, clearly, he does do office buildings) so why promote it 

[mtraininjax]

There is no critical mass in La Villa. Leave it alone, focus on downtown and growing 1 place at a time. Jax is good at tearing up neighborhoods, but piss poor at replacing them with anything other than parking lots or grass fields. Did the same thing around the Arena, leveled all the homes that now house more parking lots.

[Steve]

Of all of the statements that prominent people in the city have made, this one might be the most outrageous.  Sorry - LaVilla has been a collossal failure.  It's a sugurban office park, no different than driving down Baymeadows Way on the southside.  Can we really call that a successful development?

Holy cow.

[Keith-N-Jax]

How long will this area continue to waste away. I said in another post everything was fenced off,,thanks for the pics to prove it. I drive downtown often, and imagine what could be.Jax should be the place to be in the North, but were just a stop for fuel and a snack, and then people head further South.

[thelakelander]

Here are a few sketches of what LaVilla was supposed to be replaced by.





The two illustrations above were scanned from the LaVilla redevelopment plan.  Although they show a revitalized community with its historic housing stock remaining, along with residents, the end result of the plan resulted in people being kicked out of the neighborhood they grew up and operated businesses in, as well as those structures being attacked Godzilla style and erased from existence.



ALTERNATIVE PLAN 1

shows the entire LaVilla residential section being demolished and replaced by a massive recreational park with baseball & soccer fields, basketball courts a lake and a jogging track.  A massive five block section between Adams and Monroe Streets, from I-95 to Jefferson Street was to be leveled and converted into surface parking.  Not exactly a pedestrian friendly idea one would equate with living or being in the urban core of a city with 800,000 residents.




ALTERNATIVE PLAN 2

This alternative shows the recreational area being reduced in size, allowing for residential mixed use space on the blocks between Davis and Broad, while saving six buildings in the process.  In this plan, the surface parking along Adams and Monroe remain, while planners also introduced the idea of cul-de-sacs within the urban core.  Its unfortunate, that as late as the mid 1990s, the planners and leaders of this city still considered surface parking lots and essentially access controlled subdivisions as the idea gateway to downtown from I-95.




This image shows the surface parking blocks in detail.  Were we restoring an urban neighborhood or attempting to open up a car lot?  Since when did it become popular for pedestrians to stroll wide sidewalks facing parked cars instead of sidewalk cafes, retail shops, urban housing and parks?

[thelakelander]

The city would have saved a ton of money with a plan that incorporated most of the neighborhood's building stock.  Land acquisition and building demolition money could have been used for other needs. That pedestrian scale historic building stock would have been instrumental in creating opportunity for small local businesses and urban pioneers.  Now an entire section of the CBD's future is limited to new construction projects that typically have no relation whatsoever to the immediate surrounding environment.



http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-05-19/story/future-jacksonvilles-longtime-lavilla-project-good-or-bad

[Miss Fixit]

This is, clearly, what my La Villa School of the Arts student daughters would describe as an "EPIC fail."

What can we do to improve the mess the City has made?  There actually is a (small) critical mass to work from.  LASOTA is a wildly popular magnet school, with around 1200 students and frequent performances that draw crowds into the area.  There are several medical office buildings nearby; the Ritz Theatre and Museum, the Prime Osborne and the skyway are within walking distance.  The restored Brewster Hospital buildng is around the corner.  By the way, that's another epic fail.  Shockingly high cost of restoration (Springfielders, how'd you like a couple of million dollars to spend on your home renovation?!?!), fighting over what the appropriate use of the facility should be, now sitting empty.

There are a few historic structures in need of rehabilitiation left, both residential and commercial buildings, including epic fail number 3 - Genovar Hall. And finally, unused new building and epic fail number 4, the city financed La Villa restaurant.

I'm not a planner but I have some ideas.  And I know that more than a couple of folks on this board could come up with a plan that would salvage what's left of Lavilla.

[Jaxson]

I remember when I was in high school and my father advised that I should never quit a job until I have another one lined up.  When he said, "lined up," he meant that it was a 100% sure thing.  The fits and starts in our city planning (or lack of planning) seem to include the wanton destruction of buildings without having a definite plan for replacing those structures.  We seem to keep hoping that vacant lots will attract construction.  Instead, these vacant lots attact litter.