Daniels’s father, Andrew Preston Perkins, ran for City Council too. He was a member of the Boomerang Gang, which provided armed escorts for black City Council members. As a child, Kimberly Daniels spent time in her father’s bar in LaVilla, Perk and Loretta’s Soul Lounge, which featured drag shows, decades before Daniels performed exorcisms to cast out homosexual demons, and years before undercover cops bought crack cocaine and heroin at Perk’s.
Hansontown lies beneath Florida State College at Jacksonville’s Downtown Campus, figuratively and, in part, literally.
When Florida Junior College consolidated its downtown locations into the new Downtown Campus in the late 1970s, it eliminated the last of Hansontown, a century-old neighborhood built for freed slaves and former U.S. Colored Troops.
Some FSCJ leaders now espouse views on urbanism much like those the college abandoned by building Downtown Campus.
When Padrica was a little girl in the 1940s, the Cuban community in Jacksonville surrounded her and her family with love and a yet larger sense of family.
One night as she left the opera in Rome, a photographer snapped her picture, wrote, “in omaggio alla sua bellezza,” or “in homage of your beauty,” on the back of the photograph, and gave it to her.
The fire that consumed the great two-story house next door jumped sparks at Padrica’s house.
For half a century, Reginald Bridges’s 544 square foot shotgun house has hummed with the magnetic density of Brooklyn’s long life. Most much larger houses have lived far less.
Reggie and Harold operated WATG Radio from the back yard and transmitted via cable across Spruce Street to Brooklyn Park. The station might not have transmitted far, but the whole neighborhood listened.
Now we’re looking together at a grainy photograph of a little boy in a suit standing on a Brooklyn sidewalk half a century ago. If you could photograph time, you’d have this very photograph.
The Whetstones seem too worn out to fight for the Whetstonian’s preservation.
Dorothy Whetstone does most of the talking these days. She speaks fondly of how they first met at the Jefferson Street Pool just up the street 59 years ago.