Brooklyn, Jacksonville

Brooklyn is the narrow riverfront neighborhood on the west edge of Downtown Jacksonville, wedged between LaVilla to the north, the Riverside neighborhood to the south and the St. Johns River to the east, with McCoys Creek along its northern side. Riverside Avenue runs through the middle of it. Visit Jacksonville counts Brooklyn as part of the Downtown area, along the Northbank Riverwalk a short walk from the Florida Theatre and the arena district.

The name surprises people who know only the new apartment towers on Riverside Avenue. Brooklyn is one of the oldest African American urban neighborhoods in Jacksonville, laid out right after the Civil War, annexed by the city in 1887 and then cut apart in the late 1950s by Interstate 95. The Jaxson notes the neighborhood carried a distinctly Northern name even as its east-west streets were named after Confederate generals and its north-south streets after trees.

The ground was a plantation first. According to Jacksonville Today, Philip Dell received an 800-acre Spanish land grant in 1801 for a plantation on the south side of McCoys Creek and the west bank of the St. Johns, known as Dell's Bluff for the 16-foot bluffs along the shore. Enslaved Africans there grew corn and Sea Island cotton, and during the Civil War the property served as one of a few U.S. Colored Troops regiment campsites during the Union occupation of Jacksonville.

The split with Riverside came next. News4JAX reported in 2013 that Miles Price, a Confederate veteran, bought the land in October 1858 for $1,528, and in 1868 sold 500 acres to Edward Cheney, acting in trust for railroad investor John Murray Forbes, for $10,000 in gold. That southern tract was platted and named Riverside. Price platted the remaining northern portion as Brooklyn, in 1868 by the News4JAX account and in 1869 by The Jaxson's 2025 account of McCoys Creek.

Brooklyn filled quickly. It had 356 residents by 1870, and the area west of Commercial Street, today's Riverside Avenue, drew African American families seeking work, housing and the protection of the Freedmen's Bureau. A streetcar line added in 1879 brought more growth, and by the time Brooklyn was annexed into Jacksonville in 1887, its population had grown to 1,000. Jacksonville Today describes Brooklyn as a centralized destination for Gullah Geechee freedpeople, so much so that in 1875 Price platted the adjacent community of West Lewisville as an expansion.

A handful of buildings carry the story. The Allen Chapel A.M.E. congregation was organized in 1905, moved to its present Swan Street site in 1923 and built its church there in 1924; the church was designated a Jacksonville local landmark in 2019. It is one of the last buildings left from Campbell's Addition, the section on the north bank of McCoys Creek largely erased by Interstate 95 and urban renewal, according to Jacksonville Today.

The former Mt. Calvary Baptist Church on Spruce Street is one of the largest 20th-century buildings still standing in Brooklyn. The Jaxson reports the congregation held its first services in 1896 and counted United States Colored Troops veterans among its early members; its later church was the work of James Edwards Hutchins, one of the few Black contractors in Jacksonville who also designed his buildings. The congregation left the neighborhood for the Northside in 1999.

The oldest survivor is small. A boarded-up cottage known as the Buffalo Soldier House predates the 1868 plat, which makes it one of the few Brooklyn buildings tied directly to the Reconstruction era. A 2013 request to make part of the neighborhood a local historic district failed, and much of the old Gullah Geechee section has since been replaced by new construction.

Brooklyn grew up beside the rail yards. Modern Cities reports that in the mid-1880s Henry B. Plant's Jacksonville Street Railway Company extended its streetcar line from Downtown to Five Points through Brooklyn and built car barns at what is now Riverside Avenue and Leila Street. That yard is now the maintenance yard for the JTA Skyway, and the former Times-Union building stands on the site of the old Jacksonville Traction Company power plant just north of it.

Below Interstate 95, the Myrtle Avenue Subway was constructed by the Jacksonville Terminal Company in 1909 to carry people and a streetcar line under the yards west of the Jacksonville Terminal, linking Brooklyn and Campbell Hill to LaVilla and Downtown, The Jaxson reports. The Riverside Viaduct once lifted Riverside Avenue over the Florida East Coast tracks to Broad Street in LaVilla until the Acosta Bridge interchange replaced it in the early 1990s.

The highway changed everything. By 1950 Brooklyn's population had grown to over 6,000, but by the end of that decade construction of Interstate 95 displaced a large share of residents, according to The Jaxson, and it was the first of many urban renewal projects over the next sixty years. What remains of the older housing stock is mostly west of Park Street.

Neighbors across the creek fared the same way. Campbell Hill, developed in the 1880s on the north side of McCoys Creek just west of the old Jacksonville Terminal passenger station, was named after Alexander B. Campbell and became a home for workers who powered the rail economy. The Jaxson reports that Campbell Hill thrived until the construction of Interstate 95 in 1957, and only a handful of its buildings remain. Before the Myrtle Avenue bridge over McCoys Creek opened, Campbell Hill was physically separated from Brooklyn.

The city also put its waste in Brooklyn. In 1910 Jacksonville built the Forest Street Incinerator between Forest Street and McCoys Creek, next to homes and Forest Street Park. The National Youth Administration built the Forest Park Community Center there in 1940. After a 1999 city investigation with the Environmental Protection Agency, the site was fenced and cleaned, with 90% of the site clean by 2019, and it now holds Jacksonville Classical Academy, as Jacksonville Today recounts.

Since the 2010s Brooklyn has become one of the main places Downtown Jacksonville adds residents. The Downtown Investment Authority reported on April 29, 2026 that 2025 brought 1,380 new downtown residents in 958 newly built units, led by projects including One Riverside in Brooklyn, Artea on the Southbank and Johnson Commons in LaVilla. Unity Plaza now stands on Riverside Avenue near Magnolia Street, one of the changes Modern Cities documented in 2020 by setting 2006 photographs beside current views.

The creek is the next project. Groundwork Jacksonville reports that the City of Jacksonville has committed $105.4 million to fix McCoys Creek flooding, after the creek was channelized and bulkheaded years ago, and to restore it with trails, habitat and creek access. The Emerald Trail is planned as more than 30 miles of trails, greenways and parks linking at least 14 historic neighborhoods to Downtown, McCoys Creek, Hogans Creek and the St. Johns River, following its 2019 master plan.