Jacksonville's Bridges

 

The Bridges of Duval County

 

by Alec Newell





The Main Street Bridge against the Jacksonville skyline

Henry Holland Buckman

There are only two of the world's great rivers that flow north, the Nile is one and the St. Johns River is the other.   As the St. Johns flows into Duval County it passes the first of the eight bridges that span the river on its way to the Atlantic Ocean.  The Buckman Bridge, built in 1970, connects Mandarin to Orange Park, and is named for Jacksonville lawyer and State Legislator Henry Holland Buckman (1858-1914).  At its west end, the bridge lands at the north-south boundary between Clay and Duval County.   As the river moves through Jacksonville, it flows past seven more bridges on its way to the Mayport  Jetties.  Can you name them?  If you said the Fuller Warren, the  Acosta, the Main Street, the Isaiah D. Hart,  the Mathews, and the Dames Point Bridges, you'd almost be right.
 

Crews replacing the single track swing bridge with the double tracked "bascule lift" Florida East Coast 
Railway Bridge, taken from the original Acosta Bridge circa 1925
 

The first bridge to span the St Johns river at Jacksonville was the Florida East Coast Railway Bridge.   Built by Henry Flagler in 1889, it was a single track swing bridge that allowed direct rail access from Jacksonville to Southside and the beaches beyond.   That bridge was replaced in 1925 by a double tracked "bascule lift" bridge that still operates.  It runs closely parallel to the west side of the Acosta bridge, and since it carries no automobile traffic, many people forget that it's even there.  Until 1921, all automobile traffic that crossed the river near Jacksonville had to go by ferry.

Original Acosta Bridge (foreground) FEC Railway Bridge (middle ground)
Fuller Warren Bridge (in the distance)

 

 

The St. Elmo W. Acosta home circa 1885

Jacksonville's first major bridge built for pedestrian and automobile traffic was named for St. Elmo W. Acosta (1875 -1947).  Informally known as Chic Acosta, he had been a City Commissioner, a State Legislator, and is still remembered as one of Jacksonville's first "green" politicians, and an opponent of women's suffrage.  The home that he and his family lived in at Empire Point is now part of the Episcopal High School Campus, and is currently used for classrooms and studio space by the Fine Arts Department there.
 

The Acosta house as part of the Episcopal High School Campus

By July of 1941 Jacksonville had its second automobile bridge.  Commonly known as the Main Street Bridge, or simply called the "blue bridge" by some; it is officially neither.  In 1957 the bridge was named as a tribute to Jacksonville's only 18 year, seven term Mayor.  There is a seldom noticed sign over the south entrance of the structure to indicate the span's official name, the John T. Alsop Jr. Bridge.

 

 

Governor Fuller Warren

The original Fuller Warren Bridge was completed in 1954, and named for Florida's 30th Governor, who had also served as both a State Representative and as a member of the Jacksonville City Council.  For a time, the Fuller Warren was one of Jacksonville's three toll bridges.  The tolls were lifted in 1988 during Mayor Tom Hazouri's administration, and in 2002 the original bridge was replaced by an eight lane prestressed concrete span of the same name.
 

Another one of Jacksonville's (former) toll bridges connects the Arlington Expressway to Downtown Jacksonville.  It was built in 1953 and named for John E. Mathews, a Florida State Legislator who had also served as Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme court.  In 1984 the bridge was painted maroon red to celebrate the Jacksonville Bulls who were then members of the now defunct U.S. Football League.

John E. Mathews Bridge

The Isaiah D. Hart Bridge completed in 1968, also called the Green Monster by some commuters, was named for the Patriot War veteran and plantation owner Isaiah David Hart (1792-1861) who is credited with founding Jacksonville in 1822.  Several of Jacksonville's downtown streets are named for his children:  Julia, Laura, and Ocean, which is named for Ossian B. Hart, who would become Florida's 10th Governor in 1873.

The Isiah D.Hart Bridge from North Florida Shipyards



The Napoleon Bonaparte Broward Bridge to Dames Point

Napoleon Bonaparte Broward

The newest and probably the most visually impressive span, commonly known as the Dames Point Bridge, is officially the Napoleon Bonaparte Broward Bridge;  it is named for Florida's 19th Governor.  Broward (1857-1910), who was orphaned at twelve, decided on a maritime career, and came up through the ranks as a tug boat operator, riverboat captain, and bar pilot.  He served a stint as Jacksonville's sheriff but left that office to become a gun runner during the Spanish American War.  At that war's end, he returned to a political career that culminated in a Florida Governorship.  Broward's old home still stands facing the St. Johns River, near the entrance to the Kingsley Plantation on Ft. George Island.  The address is 9953 Heckscher  Drive, 9.3 miles east of the Napoleon Bonaparte Broward  Bridge.

Home of Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward
9953 Heckscher Drive, Ft. George Island



Florida-Georgia Weekend 2014

 

 

Florida-Georgia Weekend 2014:  Halloween Night

by

Alec Newell

   

 

Anyone remotely familiar with the annual Florida-Georgia classic will tell you that the intense rivalry associated with that game always makes it an odds makers' nightmare to call.   No matter how the season seems to be going for either team,  anything can happen.  Upsets seem to be the rule rather than the exception, and yet, they always seem to leave the fans and the pundits stunned when they occur.

With the Gators fresh off of a Homecoming loss to Missouri, and a tepid performance in the conference standings, UF fans were already grumbling about head coach Will Muschamp's job, and the broadcast sports gurus were predicting that Muschamp would be fired if, and more probably when Florida lost to Georgia.
 

Georgia by contrast, had already beaten everyone on their schedule except South Carolina, and according to Bull Dog  fans, were well on their way to a South East Conference Championship.  And so it all seemed that Halloween night before the big game.

My wife received a call from her old college (UF) roommate with an invitation to meet up with the roommate and her husband's entourage of Bull Dog fans for a pre game dinner at a restaurant in Fernandina.  When we arrived my wife and her former roommate were the only two decked out in Gator garb.   I was the only one in the party of twelve not in costume (Georgia or Florida).

After a round or two of drinks and some polite table chat, the roommate's husband asked me, "Well, who do you like in tomorrow's game?"

I explained that I had technically been born a Gator, and while most of my family (including my wife and in-laws) were all Florida graduates or fans, I had finished up at UNF and wasn't betting on the game.

The man sitting next to the roommate's husband leaned over and asked, "What did he say?"

Roommate's husband:  "He says he's the smartest one in his family."

P.S.  The final score:  Florida 38 - Georgia 20
   

American Beach Roots

 

American Beach Roots: Kingsley, Sammis, and Lewis

by Alec Newell



Strawberry Plantation House at Clifton Point - photo by Newell

 

Photo by Newell

The extended family of Zephaniah Kingsley, Anna Jai, and their descendants have been major players  in shaping the history of Northeast Florida during three colonial periods, American territorial times, Florida's early statehood, and on into the 20th Century.  Between Lake George and the St. Mary's River, the fingerprints they left seem to be everywhere.  Most of us are familiar with the story of how the slave trader Zepheniah Kingsley bought a 13 year old "African princess"  Anna Madgigine Jai in Cuba, and brought her back to his Laurel Grove Plantation in what is now Orange Park, Florida.  The couple produced four children, and Zephaniah never waivered in his acknowledgement of Anna as his wife.

Headstone next to Anna Kingsley's
 unmarked grave - photo by Newell

Later Anna, as a freed woman of color, would own her own slaves, plantation property, and live at various other family residences along the Lower St. Johns River.  These properties included: Mandarin (later owned by Harriet Beecher Stowe),  Kingsley Plantation (Ft. George Island), Chesterfield (now part of the Jacksonville University Campus), Floral Bluff (where the Arlington Road meets the river), and Strawberry Plantation (now Arlington Bluff or Clifton Point) where Anna is buried.  Probably less well known, is the Kingsley connection to the Afro-American Life Insurance Company and American Beach.

In 1830, Zepheniah  married his youngest daughter, Mary Elizabeth Kingsley, to "Colonel" or "Captain" John S. Sammis, a white New York shipbuilder with practical experience in milling lumber.  At the time of his marriage Sammis had not only been chief overseer at Kingsley's White Oak Plantation, but had also been managing planting, lumber production, cotton ginning, and a grits milling operation for the Richard Family who owned Strawberry Mills and the 6,000 acre Strawberry Plantation at what is now Clifton Point.  The mills were some of the first water operated machines of their kind in the area and were powered by same Strawberry Creek that crosses under Cesery Blvd. and the Arlington Road today.



The red star indicates the location of John Sammis' plantation house - photo by Newell





A. L. Lewis 1865-1947

John Sammis acquired Strawberry Plantation and the mills from the Richard family following the death of Francis Richard Jr. in 1839.  Surviving headstones at the Clifton Cemetery indicate that members of the mixed-race, extended  Kingsley families (Baxter and Sammis) were buried there from 1841 until 1870.  In 1850 John Sammis had a large plantation house built on the property that is still in use today as a private residence.  The Clifton Cemetery is not far from that house, and Anna Kingsley lies in an unmarked grave next to the headstone of Emile V. Sammis, her grandson.  Many of the original grave markers were made of cedar or cypress and have long since returned to the elements.  In 1884 Mary Francis Sammis, the octaroon granddaughter of John Sammis and Mary Kingsley Sammis, married Abraham Lincoln Lewis.  Lewis, the son of former slaves, would become a founding President of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company and Florida's first black millionaire.

Motto:  "Recreation and Relaxation Without Humiliation"

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, access to public beaches by "persons of color" had been severely limited.  In 1935, A.L. Lewis bought a 200 acre tract of ocean front land on the south end of Amelia Island, that would become American Beach.   Lewis wanted to not only provide recreational perks for his black employees, but to also establish a private, all black, beach-front community where African Americans could afford to buy land and build homes.  In the years that followed, the community flourished.  It quickly became a prime recreational destination.  In time, it also became a unique retirement settlement and a magnet  for black celebrities and entertainers like Cab Calloway, Zora Neal Hurston, Ray Charles, Hank Aaron, Joe Louis, Ossie Davis, and James Brown.

Next year the community will be celebrating its 80th anniversary.  The current residents of American Beach are understandably proud of their unbroken connection to the cultural legacy which A. L. Lewis had originally envisioned for them.



Afro-American Life Insurance Company
101 East Union St. - photo by Newell

 

Hurricane Dora

50 Years Ago: Hurricane Dora Remembered

by Alec Newell



10th Street and Oceanfront Atlantic Beach, in the wake of Hurricane Dora

In September of 1964, I was 15 years old.  My family lived on 12th Street in Atlantic Beach.  We had experienced hurricanes before, but Dora would leave us with our most memorable impressions.  During a lull in that storm our whole family decided to walk down to the beach to see for ourselves what was happening.  There was an eight foot high curved seawall along the beach that had been designed to redirect the force of a storm surge back onto itself, but it had not been designed to withstand the kind of pounding we witnessed that day.  Waves were surging over the seawall and the force of the current was washing away the sand behind it.   As the erosion accelerated, it exposed the heavy metal cables that anchored the seawall back to the ocean front yards it was supposed to be protecting.

The Bull House



At the foot of 11th Street, between the Old Bull House and the house just south of it, there was a 20 ft. high palm tree growing above the level of the seawall.  Several waves surged over that tree forcing the palm fronds at the top of that tree back down over its trunk.  The waves were a heavy dark grey that matched the color of the sky and there was a strong current moving debris in the surf north with a force I'd never seen before.  I remember seeing another full grown palm tree with bright green fronds float by us at an amazing clip indicating an even more serious erosion problem somewhere to the south of us.

 

Atlantic Beach Hotel pool with covered promenade, before Dora

We walked south another block to the foot of 10th Street to get a better look at the Atlantic Beach Hotel and its pier which were also taking a beating.  The hotel had a giant swimming pool that was flanked by a two story frame building  and a stucco masonry bathhouse, just south of where we were standing.  In front of the swimming pool there was a wide veranda with a planked promenade and a row of heavy Adirondack beach chairs that faced the ocean.

 

Atlantic Beach Hotel from the air, after Dora 1964

As waves crashed over the seawall, we watched the roof of the veranda collapse. Surging waves pushed floating debris from the veranda and some of the Adirondack chairs back into the swimming pool.  What didn't settle in the pool was dragged back over the seawall and washed out to sea when the waves retreated.  The pilings under the pier began to wobble, lean, then fail, taking whole sections of lumber into the heavy surf.  Just weeks before, some of the boys who regularly surfed the Atlantic Beach Pier had been out testing their mettle in the giant waves that had accompanied Hurricane Cleo earlier that season, but no one went out during Dora.

Atlantic Beach Hotel from the beach 1964

Being a teenager and not a property owner, I remember being mostly exhilarated by the event.  My mother had filled white plastic bleach bottles with drinking water; the bathtub had been filled with water for washing dishes and flushing toilets.  We had a battery operated transistor radio and flashlights. Our concrete block house felt secure against the wind and rain, and we played cards or board games at night by the light of a Coleman lantern that was normally used for night fishing in better weather.  The whole experience was like being on an extended time-out from school and the real world.

The damage to our house was minimal.  We lost a few roofing shingles, and there were downed palm fronds and tree limbs all over our yard, but we had experienced no real flooding.  Standing water covered most of the yard and all of 12th Street, giving the visual impression that our house sat on a small island surrounded by a vast moat with palm trees growing out of it.  We had been lucky.

Damage along Old A-1-A in South Ponte Vedra Beach



It wasn't until days later, riding around in a car, that we began to appreciate how much real damage the hurricane had inflicted on other parts of the Beach.  Trees and power lines were down everywhere, sea walls had been breached and homes and businesses were severely damaged or gone.  Some ocean front home owners had had junked cars towed to their homes and rolled into the trenches behind their seawalls in an effort to slow the erosion which was undermining their house foundations.  It was days before the storm water began to  recede, weeks before the mountains of yard trash could be removed, months  to repair, and years to replace some of the damaged buildings.  President Lyndon B. Johnson and his entourage personally toured the Jacksonville Beaches and declared Northeast Florida a national disaster area.  The property damage left in the wake of Hurricane Dora was estimated to be 280 million dollars in 1964, or the equivalent of 2.07 billion dollars in today's money.


 

Florida Lobster








Photo by Newell

 

 Showing My Age

by

Alec Newell

 

Back in late March of this year, after what seemed like an endless winter, I fished about 30 miles off-shore, near Blackmar's Reef, with a young crew that included Matt Evitt, Mike Conte, and divers Tim Cullen and Mike Shipe.  We had a great day, with about a dozen pink snappers, our bag limit of B-liners (vermillion snapper) to 19 inches, a very nice haul of large spiny lobsters, a sheephead, several triggerfish, a large mangrove snapper, half a dozen large red snapper that, of course, had to be thrown back, and some lion fish that I let the divers clean.

 

There are some huge mounted langouste or spiny lobsters on the wall of the Marine Science Center in Mayport, but not being a scuba diver, I tend to forget how big the lobsters here actually get.  I used to free dive for "bugs" or spiny lobsters in the Keys, but the last time I was there in 1972,  you could still order sea turtle steaks from the menu at Sid and Roxy's Green Turtle Inn on Islamorada.  According to Tennessee Williams' Memoirs, the turtle steaks and drinks there were excellent;  he looked forward to eating sea turtle, and (mostly) drinking there whenever he was staying at his house in Key West.

I never ate at the Green Turtle, but remember the restaurant, with its chalkboard menu out front, as a landmark when I stayed at Marathon.  We'd fish and dive Marathon for lobster by day, then head down to Key West to drink at Sloppy Joe's Bar at night.  I remember seeing old eight by ten inch black and white photographs, on Sloppy Joe's walls,  of  1930's and 40's era celebrities.  One was of a very nicely dressed Johnny Weissmuller perched atop a  barstool, wearing a double breasted tropical suit, with an open necked sport shirt.  He is mugging grandly for the camera but his unfocused gaze betrays his extreme intoxication.  The picture offered an entirely new perspective on the childhood image I had of Tarzan.

photo by Newell

Sloppy Joe's always reminded me of Pete's Bar.  Ernest Hemingway had hoisted a few in both places, but he is more often associated with Sloppy Joe's, where he'd left some personal affects and a trunk full of old manuscripts parked in a back room of the bar.  Shortly after his death, the trunk was opened and found to contain an unfinished manuscript for what would later become Islands in the Stream.

Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary, had the manuscript edited, added to, and posthumously published (1970).  The book was later adapted to a movie starring George C. Scott (1977) and became the inspiration for a Bee Gees' song (1983) that was originally performed by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.  Islands in the Stream became a block buster enterprise which earned a financial bonanza for the Hemingway estate.

But I'm not here to count the Hemingways' money or to digress over Tennessee Williams' culinary habits; this is a fish story, or rather a lobster story, and we all know what fish stories are about: "mine's bigger than yours is," right?  So I'll just cut to the chase, and since a picture's worth a thousand words, here they are.

Photo by Newell

 

His Eye is on the Sparrow

by Alec Newell

 

Mayport Presbyterian Church, photo by Newell



Not long after moving to Mayport, I began to notice that if I'd look out the kitchen windows just about sunrise or sunset, there would often be a covey of quail under my grape arbor.  I had mentioned this to an old fisherman in the neighborhood named Stoddard Andreu who, in turn, told me about his recipe for quail purlieu, which had been something of a Mayport legacy from a time when villagers often ate quail, dove, pigeons, and even winter robins, when hard times warranted it. "You get me a mess o' quail Capt'n," Stoddard offered, "an' I'll show you how to make purlieu."

The grape arbor photo by Newell

About that same time, a teenaged Eddie Thompson stopped by the yard and allowed that he not only knew about the quail, but had a wire mesh quail trap that I could borrow if I wanted to use it.  The bargain was struck.  We'd set the trap under the grape arbor, bait it with chicken scratch feed, and if we trapped a mess of quail, we'd contact Stoddard for further instruction.  That was on a Saturday evening, and I had planned to attend services at Presbyterian Church, across the street from my house, the next morning.

I slept late the next morning, but when I got up, noticed that there was a trap full of frantic quail under my grape arbor.  I was ecstatic!  I'd soon be tasting quail purlieu, but in the mean time, I had just enough time to get dressed and make it to church.  The birds would just have to wait until the service was over.

By the time I'd crossed the street, I noticed Miss Blanche Williams, one of the grand dames of the church, regarding the grape arbor with a disapproving scowl, "Mr. Newell, I see you've got some quail trapped over there in your yard.  Are those your quail?"

"Well, good morning Miss Blanche, yes I do.  Aren't they beautiful?"

"Yes they are, Mr. Newell, but are those your quail?"

"Well yes, since those quail are in my trap, I expect that they are my quail."

"I don't think so, those look like Mr. Coopers quail to me."

"Mr. Cooper's quail?"

"Yes, he whistles for them every evening.  He calls them up into his back yard where he feeds them.  I think those are Mr. Cooper's quail in your trap, and he will be very upset if they go missing.  And just what are you planning to do with Mr. Cooper's quail?"

"Well I, ah, my brother-in-law, well, he has these bird dogs he takes hunting, retrievers, and I thought that he might like to borrow these quail for training his dogs, and that we, ah he, could maybe just let them go whenever he, ah we, were done with them."

Miss Blanch never uttered another syllable.  She just turned on her heel and huffed up the steps, and into the church to occupy her usual pew at the far eastern side of the building.

I gave it a few seconds, then eased on into the church to take a seat behind hers on the far west side of the building.  I slunk down in the pew then looked up to the hymn board on the wall behind the alter. The very first hymn on the list for the day's service was number 624.  I opened the hymnal to the corresponding page and there it was, hymn number 624, "His Eye is on the Sparrow," (...and I know He's watching me).

It was probably at that very second, that a great miracle began to take shape right there in the Mayport Presbyterian Church;  for sure as Pharaoh freed Moses and the Israelites from their bondage, within mere minutes of the benediction, those birds were free and on their way, because in Mayport, just as in Ole Egypt, that could only have been accomplished by the hand of Divine Providence.  Ask anyone.

USS Saratoga

Of Gamecocks and Aircraft Carriers:

The USS Saratoga 20 Years Ago

by Alec Newell

USS Saratoga (CV 60)

 

The Decommissioning Ceremony for the USS Saratoga was held on August 20, 1994.  The following article was written earlier that same year.

This week the USS Saratoga will steam into Mayport from her final deployment and be decommissioned later this year.  It will be the end of a career that has spanned the administrations of nine U. S. Presidents, and five decades of distinguished military service.  It will also mark the end if a long affiliation that I have had with the ship since before moving to Mayport Village in 1976.

My house lies directly west of "B" Pier on the Naval Station, in a direct line with the old St. Johns Lighthouse.  From my yard I can throw a stone and hit the abandoned St. Johns Lighthouse or read the hull numbers on the ships in the basin.  From the signal bridge of the Saratoga, you can look through the stationary binoculars called 'big eyes" and see the chickens in my yard flying up to the roost poles in their fly pens; and every evening at sundown, the chickens can hear taps being played as the ships lower their flags during "colors."
 

 USS Saratoga commemorative decommissioning ball cap

When a carrier comes in after a long deployment, it is very much like the circus coming to town: balloons, banners, and streamers.  Tugboats toot, bands play, wives, children, and sweethearts, all wave and throw kisses to the sailors that line the flight deck in their dress uniforms.  The mooring lines go over, the brows go up, and for the next two hours it seems that every taxi cab and car in Duval County is pouring out of the Navy base, choking the Mayport Road with traffic.



USS Saratoga's Homecoming after Operation Desert Storm in 1991

 

Days before her arrival, the Mayport Road is festooned with billboard messages, more banners, placards, yellow ribbons and hand- made signs welcoming home crew members of the carrier and the ships from her carrier group entourage.  Television cameras are always on hand to record young sailors embracing parents, kissing wives, or holding infants that were born while they were away at sea.  What the narrow focus of the camera cannot convey is the enormous economic bonanza that impacts a community when a floating city of 5,000 people or more, flush with cash and high spirits, is dumped into a middle sized suburban community of bars, motels, restaurants, and movie theaters.  Local merchants and fast food restaurants have been quietly beefing up their product inventories and personnel schedules for days, to accommodate the financial windfall that a carrier homecoming brings.

Within hours local shipyards are busy setting up work compounds in hangar bays of the ship and a frenzied work pace begins, often 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to meet the stringent demands of rigid deployment schedules.  The temporary shipyard compounds  resemble a miniature industrial complex of office trailers, modular shops, tool rooms, time clocks, water coolers, fax machines, phone lines, and electrical networks that are completely independent of the ship's own power and communication systems.



When you spend hundreds, or even thousands of hours working on a ship over the course of years, that ship begins to take on an almost flesh and blood quality of its own.  Some you like better than others.  Often two ships of the same class, like identical twins, can have radically different personalities.  The steel itself seems to magically hold, or give at critical moments on one ship, while you can expect sheared bolts and cracked welds from the twin.  The Saratoga, though stressed with metal fatigue from age, and cluttered with wire-ways for communications and weapon systems that she was not designed to accommodate, she has always had a good work ethic, and has always shown the game heart of a game cock which has always been her mascot.

 



When she limped back into port after Operation Desert Storm, you could feel the exhaustion and the pride.  The non-skid on her flight deck was worn bare for the length of two football fields, and was red with rust.  Only two of her four original catapults were fully operational, and with several of her boilers shot, her propulsion systems had been taxed to the limit.  In an eight month, history making, extended deployment, she had launched 2,626 long distance combat sorties, and had delivered 4.3 million pounds of ordinance in her mission to liberate Kuwait.  The only air to air "kill" of a Mig jet by a U.S. Navy pilot was in a FA-18, launched from the Saratoga.

I am not an overly sentimental person, but I will probably miss the bustle and activity in the hangar bays, with the noise and exhaust from the forklifts and high-reaches, or the aggravation of countless fire and security drills.  I will miss seeing the insigniae of flight squadrons above the divisional doors and the hand painted mural of a gray gamecock that crows defiantly in Hangar Bay One.  I will think about the heavy, chrome plated gamecocks that top the ceremonial rope stanchions on the forward quarterdeck, and I will wonder what has become of them.