Lost Jacksonville: Wharves, Merchant Marines and Port

[BridgeTroll]

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

The 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 

[heights unknown]

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"

[Dog Walker]

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.

[Timkin]

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. 

[Overstreet]

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.

[ChriswUfGator]

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.

[Dog Walker]

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.

[ChriswUfGator]

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.

[ChriswUfGator]

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



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.

[CS Foltz]

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

[fieldafm]

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.

[JaxNative68]

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