A Saturday in Riverside and Avondale

Where the Oaks Form a Canopy and the Porches Tell Stories

I walked into Riverside on a Saturday morning in November, entering the neighborhood from the Five Points intersection where Park Street meets Margaret Street and Lomax Street in a five-cornered collision that somehow works, anchored by the Sun-Ray Cinema - a restored 1927 movie palace with a marquee that still spells out titles in plastic letters, the way God and the 1950s intended. The theater was showing a matinee of something French, and the ticket taker was reading a novel in the booth, unbothered by the absence of a line. This set the tone.

Riverside and its neighbor Avondale - the boundary between them is porous and hotly debated, depending on whom you ask - form Jacksonville's great walkable neighborhood, a canopy of live oaks so dense that the streets feel like green hallways. The houses are a catalog of early twentieth-century ambition: Prairie-style bungalows, Mediterranean Revival mansions with tile roofs the color of terra cotta, Colonial Revivals with wraparound porches and ceiling fans turning slowly, as if stirring the humidity rather than dispersing it.

I walked south on Park Street to King Street, the main commercial stretch, where the locally owned shops have achieved the specific density that makes a street worth visiting - close enough together that you wander from one to the next without planning, far enough apart that each one has room to be itself. I stopped at Bold Bean Coffee Roasters, where the pour-over was bright and clean and arrived in a ceramic mug that had clearly been chosen by someone who cared about the weight of things in your hand. The barista was explaining single-origin Ethiopian processing methods to a man who had asked for "just a regular coffee," and both parties seemed satisfied with the interaction.

The neighborhood's crown is Memorial Park, a waterfront green space on the St. Johns River where a bronze sculpture - a winged figure called "Life" by Charles Adrian Pillars - stands on a column above the river, facing east. I sat on the seawall and watched the river move, brown and wide and tidal, carrying boats and birds and the reflected clouds south toward the ocean. The St. Johns is one of the few rivers in North America that flows north, a fact that delights me every time I think about it - a river that looks at convention and paddles the other direction.

I ended the morning at Biscottis on St. Johns Avenue in Avondale, a restaurant with a patio under a live oak so large that it functions as a second roof. The brunch menu featured a shrimp and grits that arrived in a cast iron skillet, the grits creamy and the shrimp sauteed with andouille and a tomato gravy that tasted like someone's grandmother had made it and that grandmother had opinions. I ate slowly, watching the Saturday morning foot traffic - families, dog walkers, a man carrying a painting under each arm - and felt the particular pleasure of being in a neighborhood that is not trying to be anywhere else. Riverside is Jacksonville being itself, quietly, under the oaks, and it is more than enough.