The closed Trotter Manufacturing Company millwork plant on East 21st Street.
Additional industrial growth materialized along Evergreen Avenue’s streetcar line on the west side of Longbranch during the 1920s. In 1923, Florida Metal Products Inc. was founded by Lee B. Jones to manufacture metal cup and gutter products for the turpentine industry. This company is known as FLAMCO and is now located on the city’s westside. Established in 1937, Ferber Sheet Metal Works continues to operate out of FLAMCO’s original location. M.D. Trotter’s Trotter Manufacturing Company opened just west of Evergreen Avenue and East 21st Street in 1929. Trotter manufactured millwork for many decades. Millwork produced by Trotter still exists in iconic sites such as the Independent Life (Wells Fargo Center) and Gulf Life (Ameris Bank) towers in downtown.
The Longbranch Elementary School was completed in 1917.
Anchored by industry on all sides, Longbranch quickly filled in as a residential community dominated by modest frame houses and small masonry churches. To facilitate the growing population, Longbranch Elementary School (Public School 106) was built in 1917. After the streetcar line closed and automobile/truck travel became dominate, East 21st Street emerged as the neighborhood’s major thoroughfare, providing direct access from several northside neighborhoods to JAXPORT. During the 1960s, Longbranch became on of the city’s earliest neighborhoods to be negatively impacted by expressway construction with the conversion of two residential streets into the 20th Street and Haines Street expressways. Combined, they provided a limited-access route from the Gator Bowl to the then rapidly growing suburbs of Northwest Jacksonville. In 2001, the expressways were renamed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Parkway to honor the late civil rights leader.
Located at 3333 Franklin Street, the First Samuel Missionary Baptist Church building was completed in 1954.
Today, Longbranch survives as a working-class inner city neighborhood where industry and residential uses are located side-by-side. Despite the loss of building fabric with the recent expansion of an interchange with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Parkway, East 21st Street is still known as a corridor lined with hole-in-the-wall soul and seafood restaurants serving area residents and workers. For anyone in search of Jacksonville’s true traditional working class identity, Longbranch is a neighborhood worth visiting.
Inside East 21st Street’s Soul Food Express Restaurant.
JAXPORT’s headquarters near the intersection of Talleyrand Avenue and East 21st Street.
Article by Ennis Davis, AICP. Contact Ennis at edavis@moderncities.com