It was chance that brought David Engdahl and his wife, Hope, to San Marco.
Engdahl grew up in Pennsylvania, completing a degree in architecture at Penn State before working at a few different firms for the next seven years. He began looking for other opportunities when he got the feeling he wasn’t learning as much as he could, and he started looking everywhere.
He’d been searching for a year or two, he said, when he found an open position with acclaimed architect William Morgan.
“It was totally random. We were willing to go anywhere in the U.S. – we weren’t particularly interested in LA or New York City – but we were willing to go anywhere in the U.S. or Canada,” David said. “I didn’t know anything about Jacksonville; I didn’t know anything about Florida. I mean, my vision was snakes and alligators.”
David was still working full-time, which meant he had only nights and weekends to dedicate to his job search. This resulted in weekend trips to various cities or states for job interviews. In 1972, David and Hope drove down to Jacksonville for an interview with Morgan at his firm in the Universal Marion Building downtown, just beneath The Embers, a revolving restaurant at the top of the tower.
“My wife came along and she was reading a book in the lobby and I was sitting there just talking briefly with William Morgan and [his wife and office manager] Bunny and Bunny said, ‘Well, would your wife like to come in?’”
The double job interview was successful, but it would still be another year before David and Hope returned home from a date night to find a message the babysitter had taken down for him: William Morgan’s office had called and offered him a job.
Once the job was secured, David and Hope returned to Jacksonville for a weekend to find their new home. They found themselves driving around Jacksonville looking for a home to rent, armed with a road map and some guidance from Jim Rink, another architect at Morgan’s firm. By Sunday, they were getting nervous: They were running out of time and hadn’t liked any of the options they’d seen so far.
That’s when they found a home on Belmont Avenue in San Marco. They lived there for four years.
“So happenstance on getting to Jacksonville, happenstance on settling in San Marco, but we’ve been here ever since in three different locations,” David said.
Indeed, 52 years later, David remains in San Marco. He retired in 2007 from Haskell, which he’d joined in 1979 and risen to the position of senior vice president and chief architect. Over the years, he and Hope moved to two different homes on Sorrento Road: one on the first block of Sorrento Road, where they lived for nine years before settling into what would be their forever home on the second block of Sorrento Road, which they purchased in 1986.
Nearly a century old, the house is one of the first to be built in the San Marco development, David said.
“I can’t dig a hole anywhere in the yard without hitting brick,” he said.
Today, David said he doesn’t get out much beyond his daily walks. Hope passed away in 2008. Their daughters, Ellice and Kirsten, are grown. Ellice moved out to Michigan, and Kirsten remains in Jacksonville. In his golden years, David has dedicated his time and energy to his art, which he has fostered for much of his life.
“I’m in my shop every day working on sculptures,” he said. “I tell everybody when they retire, getting close to retiring, you better have something, a challenge, that gets you up every morning, because if you don’t, you won’t.”
For David, art remains that challenge. His work has been displayed at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens, the Jacksonville International Airport, as well as in exhibits across the country.
