As cities age, they must figure out what to do with historic buildings that have outlived their original purpose.
For many years, Jacksonville’s most common solution to this dilemma was to just demolish the buildings. It’s why there are so many surface parking lots and parking garages downtown, and why LaVilla is full of empty lots rather than the historic buildings that once sat there.
But increasingly, over the past few decades, local historic properties have begun to receive the respect they deserve. Adaptive reuse projects – that is, projects wherein an existing building is repurposed after losing its original tenant – have sprung up across the city, from downtown to San Marco to Springfield and beyond.
These are just a few of the prime examples of what can happen when a developer is willing to put in the time, money, and patience required for an adaptive reuse project.
Not many cities have a city hall like the St. James Building.
The historic building, designed by Henry J. Klutho, was originally built as an old-school department store – namely, the Cohen Brothers department store. It was completed in 1912 on the site of the former St. James Hotel, which burned down in the Great Fire of 1901.
The store occupied the bottom two stories of the four-story building, with office space on the floors above.
In the ‘50s, Cohen Brothers became May-Cohens. But the suburban shopping mall craze would soon draw most shoppers out of downtown Jax, forcing May-Cohens to limp along until closing in the late ‘80s.
In the early ‘90s, then-Mayor Ed Austin proposed that the city purchase and renovate the building for use as a new city hall. The project cost $24 million and involved restoring some of the original details from Klutho’s design that had been removed in renovations over the years.
The building re-opened as the new city hall in 1997, and it still serves that role today.
