When did it all go wrong?

[dougskiles]

When he died, few mourned him, and no one wanted a replacement.

When was the building downtown named after him (Ed Ball)?  The one that currently serves as the City Hall Annex?

[Tacachale]

Jacksonville had plenty of powerful leaders during the time Ed Ball was active. Haydon Burns, Hans Tanzler, Jake Godbold; Ed Austin investigated Ball's DuPont trust when he was state attorney, and eventually won. That's a story in and of itself.

[Tacachale]

In my opinion the best planning in NE FL takes place at UNF.  I suggest going over its master plans and seeing what they have done over the decades to get to where they are.

I agree -- UNF has been growing and could be a huge shaper of Jacksonville in the future. I visited Richmond, VA recently and noticed that VCU has swallowed downtown Richmond the same way that NYU has swallowed Grenwich Village. It made me think that UNF could do the same thing here. They already acquired the MOCA and I've already seen UNF art students walking and biking around downtown. Can you imagine a downtown campus that reused old buildings for classes, offices, and student housing?

We are missing that university-government-industry synergy that Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., and Wall Street have; the kind of vortex that sucks in money and talented people.

I agree. Unfortunately higher education in Florida is pretty lacking in diversity. There are bright spots and I really believe UNF is one of them.

[cityimrov]

I need to know something.  Was Ed Ball feared or was loved by the general public?

Both actually.  He was widely feared, and he drove many many groups of people out of town, but the group of business men with whom he  travelled were fiercely loyal

Was he hated by any of the public? 

If Ed Ball was as powerful as the history books say he was, I'm starting to see why Jacksonville's local government was so weak.  A strong local government would have gotten in the way of his agenda.  The local businessmen who were loyal to him wouldn't have liked that either.  He was their personal piggy bank.  A private man, not the government, was giving them money.  If it was the government that was giving them money, it was a government they controlled. 

For all the reverence this city has given him, he wasn't really a self-made millionaire.  It would be like if Bill Gates died and gave all his money to one of Jacksonville's highly controversial city council members (pick one, there's quite a few).  Someone who was just smart enough to not waste it but not great enough to make it on his own.  Not only that but this was a time when other places were growing.  If you had artistic talent, what would you do?  Fight Ed Ball and be miserable or move to California's growing creative industry and be welcomed with open arms?

Ed Ball is a major piece to the puzzle but with him comes another question.  Who were the ones willing to do his bidding? 

To add to that, what happened to the city when Ed Ball retired from power?  Logic suggests that the people who stayed behind would be desperate to find an Ed Ball replacement.

It's kind of a tricky anomaly.  He was a once off.  The DuPont fortune was literally vast, and it was sufficiently well placed that it made him nearly all powerful.  Luckily for all of us, DuPont never trusted Ball, and so Ball never inherited the money, when he died, by a provision in DuPonts will the bulk of the fortune was given outright to the memoirs children's hospital.  Ball never really did it for the money anyways.  He was solely in it for the power, by all accounts.

When he died, few mourned him, and no one wanted a replacement.

Wasn't Ball in charge of those funds to Nemours?  Didn't he get to pick where to invest that money at?  I think one of those articles mentioned Delaware sued the Fund due to misappropriation.  The articles seem to infer that Ball used the Fund to gain power. 

When Ball died, the entire system that he had control over still existed.  How fast was it disassembled?

[Tacachale]

^Yes, that's what I was alluding to. After Alfred duPont's death Ball and several other trustees controlled the DuPont trust, which they used to start the St. Joe Company. In the early 70s, following the death of Jessie Ball duPont, Ball's sister and Alfred duPont's wife, the DuPont assets were supposed to go help children.

However, Ball and co. shirked a state law that said 3% minimum of the dividends must make it to the charity. For over ten years the trustees payed only a fraction of a percent, keeping the rest. They were literally stealing money from crippled children.

And they would've gotten away with it too, if not for some meddling state attorneys. Two attorneys general (Robert Shevin, and then Jim Smith) and Ed Austin, then Jacksonville state attorney, investigated the trust to make them pay up. Finally in 1980 they agreed to cough up the 3%. Ultimately this led to the creation of the Jacksonville Nemours Children's Hospital.

[cityimrov]

Nominally.  What he did was he parlayed an unclear estate instruction into a lifetime control of the money.  Had he died earlier the money would have reverted over to the foundation.

The empire slowly disassembled and each of the entities found their own voices.

Was this an orderly breakup or did it produce a gigantic mess?

Of course the st loe's paper company continued his racist policies for a good while and featured a floor of all black employees until fairly recently

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/st-joe-paper-company-history/
Is this a charity or a hidden corporation?   

^Yes, that's what I was alluding to. After Alfred duPont's death Ball and several other trustees controlled the DuPont trust, which they used to start the St. Joe Company. In the early 70s, following the death of Jessie Ball duPont, Ball's sister and Alfred duPont's wife, the DuPont assets were supposed to go help children.

However, Ball and co. shirked a state law that said 3% minimum of the dividends must make it to the charity. For over ten years the trustees payed only a fraction of a percent, keeping the rest. They were literally stealing money from crippled children.

And they would've gotten away with it too, if not for some meddling state attorneys. Two attorneys general (Robert Shevin, and then Jim Smith) and Ed Austin, then Jacksonville state attorney, investigated the trust to make them pay up. Finally in 1980 they agreed to cough up the 3%. Ultimately this led to the creation of the Jacksonville Nemours Children's Hospital.

1980?  That's too late.  By that time, the rest of the world are starting to pass by Jacksonville or the seeds they planted early on are beginning to sprout. 

Was there any major private force at the time who was in Jacksonville but wasn't close to Ball?   

[Ocklawaha]

Whatever Ball was, Jacksonville had stumbled badly long before his empire came into being then continued the errors.

The original question was how did the city get so backward? WTF happened? Who was responsible... or irresponsible as the case may be. Laying this on Ed Ball might be correct in some sense but it's a WAY over simplification of the compound errors made by our city's mis-leaders.

Today we have a new leader at city hall, one swept in by a deep desire for CHANGE. But as we roll past the second year and into the third, it's starting to appear that absolutely NOTHING is being done. Again we have sputtered and stalled on some apparently insurmountable mountain.

HISTORY HAS SHOWN US THAT MOST CITIES AGE LIKE FINE WINE, BUT JACKSONVILLE HAS AGED LIKE MILK!

TO WIT:

Driving away the film industry in the 1920's was suicidal. The worlds greatest PR machine in our pocket and we spat it out due to a pissing contest over filming without permits... 

Another stupid stunt was shredding our large fixed rail transit system in exchange for empty promises and well publicized bribes.

Letting National Airlines escape to 'greener pastures' in Miami, at a time when we could have been 'MIA' may have been an act of conceited laziness.

Shooting ourselves in the ass with the Disney/Busch Garden's courtship may have been our single greatest opportunity and undoubtedly most notable failure. And the blame for this colossal blunder does indeed land at Ed Ball's tombstone.

Failure of the then Duval County government to restore the boardwalk, midway and theme park rides at Jacksonville Beach after hurricane Donna, took us from the last vestiges of 'The Queen of the Winter Resorts' to 'Ho Hum' decay.

Carving up our urban neighborhoods in order to be, temporarily at least, the city with the most FREEway lanes per capita in the USA, has come back to bite us in the butt.

Trashing a colorful, albeit somewhat decayed and rotting waterfront and converting it into parking spaces for automobiles has to rank as one of the all time stupid urban decisions. Why would ANY CITY take it's most picturesque and valuable real estate and turn it into a parking lot... Hum, the Parador project anyone? Duh!

Bridging our ports main channel with high tension power lines and a multimillion dollar bridge, BOTH TOO LOW, was just plain stupid and a major job killer. Likewise the Shand's bridge in Green Cove Springs, cost Palatka a shipyard and it's sundry jobs was equally scandalous, while not our fault, we certainly could have made a difference.

Selling our soul for 'Off Shore Nuke Plant's' was another fantasyland adventure that ended up holding up development of the port for a decade or more.

Building a nationally renowned urban monorail, but failing to follow the recommended starter route (Shand's-Hogan-Bay-Old Courthouse/City Hall) or finishing a single route left us with a national disgrace. A Skyway that runs from nowhere to nothing and doesn't pass through a damn thing in the process was a badly flawed scheme from the get go, but we managed to amplify the insanity.

Allowing Amtrak to withdraw to the distant burb's leaving us with the largest EMPTY railroad station south of Washington DC, has to rank is a shazam moment. The empty train station was almost as bad as an incredibly dysfunctional convention center named for 'Prime Osborn,' an important railroad official, more appropriately, it should have been named for 'Forrest Gump.'

Thinking we can 'improve' the transit assets by returning to the post-streetcar era and build a system of 'new and improved' buses isn't going to gain any traction either.

No folks, Jacksonville with all of the natural assets of a veritable 'Garden of Eden,' has not only chosen 'stupid' as our Modus operandi we've excelled in it, expanding the horizons of what it means to be clinically brain dead.

OCKLAWAHA

[If_I_Loved_you]

In intensely studying the era, I don't think it is an oversimplification at all to credit Ball with the lions share of the responsibility with what went wrong in Jacksonville.

He destroyed the old growth forests, drained the aquifer, launched wars against his own unions, promoted outright bigotry against women, gay people and African Americans, drove the liberals and intellectuals out of town, persecuted anyone different from him, stole money meant for crippled children, and used his vast wealth to promote his credo of greed and hatred.

Ed Ball was the Sith LOrd of Jacksonville.

"Ed Ball was the Sith LOrd of Jacksonville." He isn't the only one?

[cityimrov]

In intensely studying the era, I don't think it is an oversimplification at all to credit Ball with the lions share of the responsibility with what went wrong in Jacksonville.

He destroyed the old growth forests, drained the aquifer, launched wars against his own unions, promoted outright bigotry against women, gay people and African Americans, drove the liberals and intellectuals out of town, persecuted anyone different from him, stole money meant for crippled children, and used his vast wealth to promote his credo of greed and hatred.

Ed Ball was the Sith LOrd of Jacksonville.

In a way, it was DuPoint that empowered Ball to do all this.  I can really only see two lessons to learn from this.  First one is if your rich and wealthy, make sure you know exactly what will happen to that wealth after you die.  There will be people out there more than willing to use it for their own agenda. 

The second one is harder.  The community as a whole needs to learn to not sell it's soul for money.  The community itself could have taken a strong chance and said NO to building a paper plant.  It could have said NO to the disasters Ock pointed out but it didn't.  Of course, it's hard to say NO when your in the middle of the Great Depression but if it did, Jacksonville could have excelled at being one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the planet. 

Imagine, if the community in Jacksonville held large scale protests against building the paper plant.  Imagine if every politician it elected received thousands of letters every day from concerned citizens, who, while poor, choose to wait out instead of accepting the immediate jobs a paper plant would have produced.  The power that Ball had would have dissipated no matter how much money he had.  Think of cities like San Francisco and what things they gave up to get where they are today.  I might be wrong in this but it looks like the community sold it's soul for short term money at the tremendous cost of long term gains.

[dougskiles]

^Sadly, I believe that attitude overwhelmingly exists today.  I see it regularly on an individual level.  People are willing to do what they know is wrong for the community for personal financial gain.

[Ocklawaha]

Ock all of the early stuff you mentioned was Ball led, including the film industry hostility.  In fact it was railroad politics that led to  Ball lighting a gas bomb in the general direction of the film studios.

Stephen Lynch, the business partner of D W Griffith made a damned serious attempt to wrest away the control of the FEC away from Ball.  He lost, naturally, and that was when Ball turned his antipathies toward 'carny folk'.

Maybe so Stephen, but it was John W. Martin, who was elected mayor (Democrat) in 1917, on the campaign promise of cleaning out the film industry. At that time Ed Ball was 29 years old, fact is he didn't start working for his brother-in-law until 1923, and that job was in Delaware.

When the DuPont's, Jessie and Alfred moved to Florida in 1926, the film industry was already trashed and a franchise 'war' was already raging between the Jacksonville Traction Company (streetcars) and the city. The streetcar franchise likewise, already trashed, when the company sold to 'Motor Transit Company,' which was a part of 'National City Lines,' part of General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum, Twin-Coach, Greyhound and Mack. They didn't need a young Ed Ball to show them how to kill the urban railways. The die was cast for the streetcars to be exterminated by 1936. Ball didn't become the 'acting' trustee of the family fortune until 1935, by which time the streetcars were a done deal.

Ball might have been involved in the 'mopping up' operation's of these fiasco's but the real damage was done before he arrived on the stage.

My point being that with, or without Ed Ball, the City of Jacksonville has shown itself quite capable of completely screwing the pooch at any given opportunity. This city has a track record of making bad decisions not seen since the days of Isis and Osiris and the Pharaoh Memeptah...

OCKLAWAHA

[simms3]

^^^That's interesting.  I was always under the impression the track record started in the late 40s, but was totally unaware that we had a track record the entire time.

Recently I listened to a pitch by a historian speaking at our office on the need to vote yes on a transportation referendum this summer, and he equated this moment with the Olympics, and other various major milestones (he's not the only one).  His take on the history of Atlanta is an interesting one.  There SHOULD NOT be a city here, let alone a 5 million person one.  The soil is bad, there's no water, and it's in a hard to reach place.  3 entities worked to extend railroads from Savannah to Chattanooga in the 1850s, and somehow a city formed, and ever since the city has exceeded itself (Civil Rights, federal air mail route to Delta hub, MARTA, Olympics, etc etc).  The details are a lot more interesting.

I feel like in Jacksonville's case there was always so much more potential.  There should be a 5 million person city where Jacksonville is given the resources and location and history.  Unfortunately the city didn't take on any opportunities, but squashed every single last one of them.  Sad.

Jacksonville should be the seat of the state government when you think about it.
It should be the hub of the film industry.
It should have a thriving tourism industry.
It should have a massive port to the tune of Long Beach, Houston, NY/NJ, Norfolk or Savannah.
It should have Busch Gardens.
It should have a much larger naval base.
It should have a much more developed Jax Beach that resembles South Beach with a NE FL flair.
Jax should be a banking and insurance hub, still.
Mayo Clinic should have its largest operations here.

Tons of shoulds.

[Ocklawaha]

During the Great Depression the duPont trust bought a majority ownership of the bankrupt FEC Railway, the company had been incredibly unprofitable since the death of Flagler and the artificial injections of cash he lavished on it.  The FEC Railway's bonds were held by a group of people led by one S. A. Lynch, Lynch was financially tied to the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, (part of today's CSX) and they had their own 'designs' on reorganization of the FEC. The ACL RR had been stopped by the lack of venture capital from entering Miami over a joint FEC - ACL route around the south end of Lake Okeechobee. This forced all of ACL's Miami bound traffic to divert over the FEC from Jacksonville southward. Had Ball not stuck his foot in the door and prevented the Lynch group from taking charge, today we'd spell 'FEC.' with the letters 'C - S - X.'

Because FEC RY remained independent, freight from the midwest coming down the Norfolk Southern Railway interchanges at Jacksonville for points south along the east coast. This means that Jacksonville is one of the few railroad gateway cities, with active interchange yards on a map where hundreds of other gateways have closed.

I'm sure Ball didn't do this to 'help' Jacksonville, but in the long term, what he did saved the railway and our status as a railroad gateway.

[Tacachale]

Shooting ourselves in the ass with the Disney/Busch Garden's courtship may have been our single greatest opportunity and undoubtedly most notable failure. And the blame for this colossal blunder does indeed land at Ed Ball's tombstone.

Other than the fact that it didn't happen, you may be on to something.

[Tacachale]

Shooting ourselves in the ass with the Disney/Busch Garden's courtship may have been our single greatest opportunity and undoubtedly most notable failure. And the blame for this colossal blunder does indeed land at Ed Ball's tombstone.

Other than the fact that it didn't happen, you may be on to something.

Past.  Neither did the San Francisco Earthquake.......

In contrast, there's plenty of evidence that the San Francisco Earthquake happened.