Today, diners struggle to find a restaurant along the river in Downtown Jacksonville that is not inside of a hotel. However, riverfront dining was a part of Downtown’s identity for more than a century.
Here are seven downtown riverfront dining experiences that no longer exist:
1. Ocean Street Market
Location: The foot of Ocean Street
Prior to World War II, the foot of Ocean Street was Jacksonville’s answer to the kind of interactive riverfront tourists seek when visiting cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Philadelphia. Located along the Northbank, it was home to a large open-air seafood market. Because seafood spoils quickly, commercial fish markets like the one on Ocean Street were historically concentrated in waterfront communities.
After the Great Fire of 1901, a number of businesses clustered around the commercial seafood market along the Ocean Street riverfront. Soon, most of Ocean Street south of Bay Street was lined with produce stands, meat and seafood vendors, dry goods merchants and restaurants.
For decades, it was an authentic destination where residents and visitors alike could experience local cuisine and culture. At its height, the working waterfront included an ice manufacturing plant, a crab meat processing factory, and railroad tracks serving nearby wharves and riverfront industries. Known for the unmistakable stench of fish, the Ocean Street market declined after World War II due to aging infrastructure and the dispersal of the city’s population…