For many years, downtown Jacksonville’s beautiful historic buildings were left to rot away without a purpose. For a variety of reasons, most of them had been vacant since the 1970s.
The ones that weren’t left to wither away either retained their original tenants or were unceremoniously demolished to make room for something new – usually a poorly-designed parking garage.
But within the past few decades, the tide has begun to turn on historic preservation within Jax’s urban core. Several of those long-vacant buildings have been painstakingly restored and revitalized, and they now live on with new purposes that will likely keep them around for decades to come.
To honor the growth of adaptive reuse and historic preservation in downtown Jax, we’ve compiled a giant collection of our existing downtown-centric Jax Evolved pieces.
Located at the corner of Adams and Hogan streets in downtown Jacksonville, the historic Levy Building currently houses two local law firms, a dentistry practice, and an eye care center.
But back in the day, it was home to one of downtown Jax’s most prestigious department stores.
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The Levy Building was built in 1927, with its beautiful Chicago school-style frame being designed by noted local architects Marsh & Saxelbye. It was built to host Levy’s Department Store, a department store founded in the 1910s that was known for carrying stylish, upscale apparel.
Levy’s took up all four floors of the building, carrying jewelry, accessories, and men’s and women’s clothing. It hosted Jacksonville’s elite shoppers, who trusted Levy’s to help curate their expensive wardrobes. It operated alongside a large collection of department stores in downtown Jacksonville in the mid-1900s.
Levy’s would later rebrand itself as Levy-Wolf in honor of a key executive. But by the time that rebranding occurred, the mass exodus of department stores from downtown Jax to suburban malls had begun. This led to reduced foot traffic downtown, which would eventually spell the end for Levy-Wolf.
The store closed its doors permanently in 1984. A year later, the building was reconfigured into office space.
One of the main tenants of the new office space was Saxelbye Architects, a spinoff of the same Marsh & Saxelbye that designed the building back in the ‘20s. During their tenure, the building took on the title of the Saxelbye Building.
In 2000, the local law firm Cole, Stone, Stoudemire, Morgan & Dore purchased the building and took over much of its office space. Another local law firm, Boyd & Jenerette, moved into the building in the mid-2000s.
By 2008, Cole Stone and Boyd & Jenerette had reached an agreement to merge into one firm. The firms combined under the Boyd & Jenerette name and occupied two floors of the Levy Building.
Today, Boyd & Jenerette occupies the top three floors of the Levy Building. Jax Vision Care, law firm Plata Schott, and cosmetic dentistry practice Edwards & Cavendish PA share the building’s ground floor.
