Gentrification: A perspective from a long time resident

This article by Dr. Tim Gilmore of jaxpsychogeo.com explores the redevelopment of Jacksonville's Brooklyn neighborhood from the perspective of long time resident Les Paul Garner.

photo by Hurley Winkler</i>

In 1978, when Les was 15 years old, he walked Brooklyn selling The Florida Star, the preeminent black newspaper first published in 1951 at a time when the city’s mainstream newspapers refused to report Civil Rights stories, or now-infamous events like Ax Handle Saturday in 1960, when whites, some wearing Confederate uniforms, attacked black citizens in the streets around downtown’s Hemming Park with ax handles and baseball bats.

The Florida Star was a community newspaper that sold well in the community that was Brooklyn. Looking at the empty lots on vacant streets now, it’s hard to imagine how easily Paul could walk every block in Brooklyn and sell 150 or 200 papers. He delivered them on Thursday nights, before they hit the stands Friday morning, just before his basketball practice.

florida-star

“I got to know this neighborhood so well,” he says. “Now all the storeowners, they knew Brooklyn well too, but they were stationary. I walked every block and knocked on every door.”

He remembers the elderly ladies who sat outside on their porches every evening. He recalls Abboud’s Grocery and Jimmy’s and Gary’s and Tad’s Restaurant. Though the neighborhood’s population had declined from more than 6,000 in 1950 to around 800 in 1980, Brooklyn still employed itself and was self-sustaining. He remembers playing pinball as a teenager at Fat Rounds’ hangout at the southwest corner of Chelsea and Dora Streets.

the corner where Fat Rounds once stood, photo by Hurley Winkler

As interstates ploughed through cities across the continent, however, a curse fell upon Brooklyn. While new apartment developments tout the area’s closest proximity to interstates running north, south, east and west as a reason to move in, the nexus of east-west Interstate-10 and north-south I-95 developing rapidly in the 1960s and ’70s terrified the multi-generational Brooklyn residents of shotgun houses and 19th century “crackerwood” cottages and two-story wood-frame homes.

“The most frightening phrase anybody had ever heard was ‘eminent domain’,” Paul says. “You have lots of people who grew up here and later owned their own homes here, and these was the first homes they ever called their own.”

the last house on Elm Street

Rumors of new expressway development crisscrossed Brooklyn constantly. The City of Jacksonville paid large sums of money for neighborhood development plans, imagining various new highway configurations, but never invested in the community.