Reclaiming Jacksonville: Stories Behind the River City's Historic Landmarks

By Ennis Davis and Robert Mann

The city of Jacksonville has hundreds of buildings that have withstood the test of time. Yet these lasting landmarks tell only a portion of Jacksonville's history. Dozens of other buildings have been abandoned and left to wither, turning into shadows of their former grandeur. Each place has a rich and storied history that belies modern appearances, like the Annie Lytle Elementary School, now known as the most haunted landmark in the city, and the Jacksonville Brewing Company, which had to come up with a creative way to stay afloat (think ice cream) when Prohibition hit. Join local writers Ennis Davis and Robert Mann as they go behind the scenes of fourteen crumbling but ethereally beautiful structures to reveal their true pasts. Enhanced with stunning color photography, Reclaiming Jacksonville is a must-have for every resident of the River City.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781614238256

Ennis Davis

Ennis Davis is the founder of MetroJacksonville.com, an organization known for educating and increasing public awareness of Jacksonville and its history through the use of online media and technology.

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Ambassador Hotel

Now known as the Ambassador Hotel, this building was originally known as the 310 West Church Apartments. Twenty years after the Great Fire of 1901, and nearing a population of 100,000, Jacksonville was in the midst of an unprecedented growth period. Jacksonville’s rapidly urbanizing landscape created an opportunity for dense, multiple-level residential living that had not existed previously in the state of Florida. Atlanta-based Adair Realty and Trust Company commissioned Hentz, Reid and Adler to design the building for the company’s Jacksonville branch office clients.

Founded in 1909 by Hal F. Hentz and Neel Reid, and later joined by Rudolf Adler in 1915, Hentz, Reid and Adler was one of the South’s leading architectural firms at the time and was described as undoubtedly the most outstanding of the Atlanta firms practicing Beaux-Arts eclecticism in the early twentieth century.

The $300,000 apartment house would offer amenities found in larger urban cities, such as a street-level cafés, elevators, switchboard connections in all units, panels in each unit’s entry doors to allow grocery deliveries, garages and a private rear entrance to accommodate motorists. The site’s address served as the project’s name due to Adair Realty and Trust Company’s policy of incorporating addresses into project names to make them distinctive and easy to find. Hentz, Reid and Adler designed the six-story brick and limestone Georgian Revival–style building in an H pattern so that the majority of the building’s fifty units could occupy corner locations.

With a restaurant in the basement and all units rented out before completion in 1923, 310 West Church Apartments was said to be Jacksonville’s first big downtown apartment building. The original tenant mix included a who’s who of influential Jaxsons at the time. Unit HA4 was occupied by Harold and Persis Meyerheim, while unit HA5 was leased to Fred and Cordelia Meyerheim. Fred Meyerheim was the president of Furchgott’s department store. Founded by Leo Furchgott in 1868, the store had earned a reputation for its designer departments. At the time, his son Harold was a manager with the retail institution. In 1945, Harold would take the place of his father as company president. The owner of 48 West Bay Street’s Union Clothing Company, Arthur DuQuette, lived in unit D4. Unit T3’s first tenant was Margaret Blum. Mrs. Blum was the widow of Charles Blum. Before Prohibition, Charles, with his brother Jacob, established the Charles Blum Beverage Company, a wholesale wine, liquor and beer distributor that sold Pabst, Jung’s Cincinnati and Wiedemann beers from its West Bay Street warehouse. Dannette and Helen Mays occupied unit N3. Dannette Mays was the vice-president of the Jones Lumber Company, located on East Eighth Street near Railroad Avenue. Carl and Margaret Oltrogge lived in unit H1. Carl was a manager for the S.B. Hubbard Company, while Margaret operated a restaurant in the building’s basement.

The Ambassador Hotel shortly after its opening as 310 West Church Apartments. The building was said to be Jacksonville’s first big downtown apartment building, shaped as an H to provide most of its fifty units with corner views. Courtesy of the City of Jacksonville Historic Preservation Office.

During the next two decades, the area around the residential building continued to increase in commercial activity, creating the demand for additional downtown hotel space. In 1943, the property was purchased by Charles B. Griner and converted from an apartment building into a 120-room hotel called the Three-Ten Hotel. Griner, a personal friend of financier Ed Ball, executor of the DuPont estate, was the vice-president and manager of the Floridian Hotel (now demolished) and the Hotel Roosevelt (now the Carling). Before selling the club to a local syndicate led by Charlie Morrison, Griner had been the owner of Southeastern League’s Jacksonville Tars baseball team. In 1947, the Three-Ten was renamed Hotel Southland, only to be changed again in 1949 to the Griner Hotel.

On May 2, 1950, George Smathers occupied room 105 at the Griner. A friend of Griner’s, Smathers set up his campaign headquarters in the hotel. This was the night Smathers defeated Senator Claude Pepper for nomination to the United States Senate in one of Florida’s most memorable electoral contests. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Smathers moved to Miami in 1919 and earned a law degree from the University of Florida, where he was captain of the Gators basketball team and president of the student body. After serving as an officer in the United States Marine Corps during World War II, he was elected to two terms in the United States House of Representatives, representing Florida’s Fourth Congressional District from 1947 to 1951. He was known for being a moderate who was resolutely anti-communist. In 1950, President Harry Truman summoned Smathers into a meeting where he reportedly stated, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to beat that son-of-a-bitch Claude Pepper. Pepper had been part of an unsuccessful 1948 campaign to dump Truman. Smathers would end up defeating Pepper by a margin of over sixty thousand votes, partially due to his repeated attacks on Pepper for having communist sympathies, pointing out his pro–civil rights platform and campaign for universal healthcare and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s claim that Pepper was a man Americans could trust.

However, the race was most famous for a speech Smathers never gave. A reporter made up a hoax that Smathers gave a speech to a rural audience implicating that Pepper was sinister. Smathers reportedly had said, Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy.

While it is sometimes said that Time magazine reported these items, the magazine actually referred to the quote as a yarn. The leading reporter who actually covered Smathers said the politician always gave the same humdrum speech. No Florida newspapers covering the campaign ever reported such remarks contemporaneously. Smathers offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove he said it, and there were no takers before his death. After defeating Pepper, Smathers would remain a senator until 1969, when he declined to run for reelection to become a lobbyist. The Griner Hotel suite where Smathers stayed the night he defeated Pepper became known as the Senator George Smathers Suite.

Following Charles Griner’s death in 1955, his widow, Doris Griner, sold the property to Ralph Schwartzberg and Isadore Fishman of Chicago, Illinois. Schwartzberg and Fishman hired Harvey Johnson to be the hotel’s manager and immediately changed its name to the Ambassador Hotel. Nevertheless, Doris Griner would regain ownership upon default by the mortgager. On that occasion, she recalled, Ed Ball advised her to demolish the building. However, Mrs. Griner objected because, according to her, they had already torn down every other hotel around there.

In 1973, the Easton Land and Development Company purchased the deteriorating structure and continued to operate it as a hotel. In 1983, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, while its downward spiral of dilapidation continued, with code enforcement regularly citing the structure and multiple drug busts and raids scarring its name. A year later, the hotel’s first three floors were being rented to transients for the price of fifteen dollars per day and forty-five dollars per week. The balcony that anchored the building’s original Church Street entrance had been removed, and the entrance served as the entry to the hotel’s seedy Downtowner Lounge.

In 1997, the temporary residents received notice that the building no longer complied with code and that it would have to be fixed in order to remain open. Every single room had a sticker with the date of condemnation on it. In 1998, the entire building was condemned and closed up.

In September 2000, Jacksonville voters approved then mayor John Delaney’s Better Jacksonville Plan, 57 percent to 43 percent. The Better Jacksonville Plan was a $1.5 billion public project capital improvement plan that would be funded by a countywide half-cent sales tax. The plan would fund several major downtown projects, including the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena, the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville, a new public library and a massive county courthouse complex, all partially intended to bring vibrancy back to a declining downtown environment.

Originally estimated at $190 million, on December 19, 2003, the city and its engineer filed site plans for a $232 million, multi-story courthouse, which would include over 850,000 square feet of enclosed space spread out over seven square blocks of downtown.

Located less than one block from the planned courthouse, the abandoned Ambassador Hotel’s owner developed plans to take advantage of the structure’s location. In January 2004, a partnership consisting of Easton, Sanderson & Company; Sofar Properties, Inc.; and attorneys Eddie and Chuck Farah announced plans for a mixed-use development at the Ambassador Hotel’s site. The proposed 100,000-square-foot, nine-floor office building, known as 323 Duval, would be located just south of the Ambassador Hotel. Desiring a prominent location adjacent to the new courthouse, the Farah & Farah law firm intended to relocate its one hundred employees and occupy at least 30,000 square feet in the new office tower. In addition to the office tower, the Ambassador Hotel’s owner, Easton, Sanderson & Company, was in negotiations to sell the building to a group led by Amelia Island–based Matott Development Company. Matott’s $8.5 million acquisition and renovation would bring the Ambassador Hotel back to life as an apartment complex. The last major component of the mixed-use project included the construction of a multi-level, 207-space parking garage with street-level retail intended to serve 323 Duval’s customers and employees and the Ambassador’s tenants.

In August 2004, 323 Duval LLC would alter the development’s plans due to a soft downtown market for leased office space. The revised 323 Duval development consisted of two 100,000-square-foot, ten-story office condominium buildings, a 330-space parking garage and 15,000 square feet of retail. To make way for the second building, the Ambassador’s neighbor, the Marine National Bank building, would be demolished. However, while redevelopment plans for the Ambassador’s site were moving forward, the budget for the Duval County Courthouse was spiraling out of control. In October 2004, then recently elected mayor John Peyton’s decision to scrap the courthouse’s plan, which had ballooned to $300 million, and start over indefinitely delayed the construction of 323 Duval and the restoration of the Ambassador Hotel. By May 2005, the Ambassador Hotel site’s redevelopment plan had been modified again. Under the new development plan, the Ambassador would be restored as a $50 million, fifty-two-unit apartment building. The plans for 323 Duval, on the other hand, had been significantly modified into one twelve-story office condominium