Spencer Fletcher grew up a crop-duster pilot’s son in LaBelle, a small farming town between Fort Myers and Lake Okeechobee, and became a pilot himself flying big P-8s out of Naval Air Station Jacksonville.
He’s now 33, newly retired from the Navy, and already embarked on a new mission. He’s trying to save a collection of tiny bungalows, about 100 years old, in a part of Jacksonville cut off by interstate highways from the gentrification going on in the nearby neighborhoods of Riverside and Brooklyn .
They’re in the historically Black neighborhood of West Lewisville, just north of Edison Avenue, which parallels I-10 a block away: 24 bungalows, each with a distance of just a few feet between them.
Each is just over 800 square feet with two bedrooms and a bathroom, and a fireplace, chimney and front porch. Arranged in three rows, there were originally 28, built in the first half of the 1920s, but four have been lost to fire.
The development was called Oneida Bungalow Court and took its inspiration from the bungalow court craze that started in Southern California, where the little houses shared a common space between them, usually a place for pedestrians and sometimes automobiles.