In honor of National Preservation Month, recognized during May, the Jacksonville History Center celebrated three of Jacksonville’s great success stories for historic structures at its annual Endangered Historic Properties Program.
Held at the former Florida Casket Company building on Wednesday, May 14, the lunch and learn program focused on what can come out of a successful historic renovation, restoration, or adaptive reuse and how it can impact a community by highlighting The Corner at Debs Store, the Jessie Ball duPont Center (formerly the Haydon Burns Library) and the casket company building itself.
“We want to demonstrate to people that there really is a path to a successful adaptation in the 21st century,” said JHC CEO Dr. Alan Bliss. “So we were thinking about not just examples, but examples that we can associate with recognizable places and for which we could find people who actually had hands-on experience with leading and guiding and influencing those restoration projects.”
Indeed, the presentation included speakers David Garfunkel, founding president and CEO of LIFT Jax and current public affairs chief for the Jacksonville Civic Council, Brooke Robbins, principal architect and interior designer of Robbins Design Studio P.A., and Bliss himself.
The Corner at Debs Store
Garfunkel discussed the resurrection of The Corner at Debs Store, the 100-plus-year-old grocery store that, thanks to the collaboration between the Debs family, Historic Eastside CDC, Lift Jax, Goodwill Industries of North Florida and VyStar Credit Union, continues to serve its neighborhood after it celebrated its grand reopening last September following an extensive restoration.
Debs Store was a family-owned grocery store built in 1913 by its original owner. It was operated until 2011. In the years following, the ground level slowly slipped into disrepair and dilapidation. Today, Debs Store continues to serve its community not only by providing healthy and nutritious groceries, but also by providing jobs for area residents. Restoring Debs Store was not just saving a historic structure; it returned a vital and long-standing component to its community.
Garfunkel said it was not only the role Debs Store played in the community but also its history that drew Lift Jax’s attention.
“…As an organization, literally coming in from the outside and saying we have aspirations to support the neighborhood, to bring back the neighborhood to its better days and to work with the community – this was the place to start for us,” Garfunkel said.
“We could have picked another plot of land, built something new,” Garfunkel added. “We could have knocked it over and built something in its place. We said, as an organization, it’s critically important for us to come in and rebuild what’s there and work within this community.”
The Jessie
The Jessie Ball duPont Center, on the other hand, represented a success story for the adaptive reuse of a historic building, and Robbins shared insight on the process of transforming the original library into the nonprofit hub it is today.
The Haydon Burns Library was built to replace the Jacksonville Free Public Library, built in 1905 after the Great Fire of 1901. By the 1960s, the library had become too small for the city’s population. Architect Taylor Hardwick, of Hardwick and Lee Architects, designed the new library, which opened in November 1965. It was named for Jacksonville’s longest-serving mayor.
The 126,000-square-foot library served its community until 2005. It would be another seven years until Jessie Ball duPont Fund then-President Sherry Magill envisioned the dilapidated building as the fund’s new headquarters. The fund purchased the building in June 2013 and began the two-year transformation.
Today, The Jessie provides state-of-the-art technology to several nonprofit organizations that call it home.
“I would say that’s another kind of layer of the intent of the building was, from the duPont Fund’s side, to use [the building] as an example that you can retrofit these buildings and you can bring technology to them,” Robbins said.
A New Home for the Jacksonville History Center
The program was the first event JHC hosted at its new center, in what will be the event space of the building’s second floor. The building is currently undergoing its own adaptive reuse transformation.
The event coincided with the release of JHC’s annual list of endangered historic properties, which includes Jacksonville architectural icons like the Laura Street Trio, the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, the Independent Life Building, and more. Bliss pointed out that each building is carefully vetted and considered before earning a spot on the endangered property list.
“They wouldn’t have gotten on the list if they really didn’t merit an advocate and merit really having attention called to them as a deserving project for conversion, adaptation,” Bliss said. “…I don’t have every historic, every old building on the list – there’s a reason for that. We single these out for a good reason.”
