Looking Northeast from across West Adams Street at the intersection of Pearl Street in downtown Jacksonville. To the left in the background is the St. Johns apartment building which is still standing and renamed the Residences at City Place. The Federal Courthouse building built in 1933, which also contained a post office, can be seen in front of that and now functions as the State Attorney’s Offices. Across the street on the portion of the block not occupied by a parking lot is the Hotel George Washington which was built in 1926 and demolished in 1973. That lot is now completely cleared. The photograph would have been taken from a building that was located where a parking garage across Adams Street from the new Duval County Courthouse now stands.
The note that Loyd Sandgren left with this image dated it as 1950 which should be correct. Often the cars in the photographs can give the best clues as to the year that the photographs are taken. In this case there are only a couple of cars in the entire image that don’t have split windshields and around 1950 was when the first wraparound glass windshields started to appear. By the mid 1950’s, with a few exceptions, split windshields were history in new cars.
Tags: 001814, Adams Street, cars, Federal Courthouse, historic photograph, Hotel George Washington, parking, Pearl Street, St Johns, transportation, vintage photograpy