JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) - It was a small gift, almost 50 years ago, one that led to something so much bigger - something that, once gone, could never have been brought back.
In 1967, Jacksonville investor Winthrop Bancroft offered the state 5 acres in what was then Seminole Beach, between Mayport Naval Station to the north and Atlantic Beach to the south. His land was lush, with high dunes overlooking its 480 feet of oceanfront.
He asked for just two conditions - that his 5 acres be used as a park and that it be named for Kathryn Abbey Hanna, who had died earlier that year.
While she had no direct ties to Jacksonville, she was an advocate of preserving wild places, a professor and historian who had written two books on Florida, among other subjects. She, like Bancroft, had been chair of the state’s Board of Parks and Historical Places.
The state readily accepted the land, though it was deemed too small to be a Florida park.
Jacksonville, which in the next year grew massively as the city and county consolidated into one, took it from there.
The city began getting federal and state funds and putting in matching money toward buying more property near Bancroft’s land. Plans were big, ambitious.
After all, if there was ever time for a newly minted Bold New City of the South to get a big chunk of oceanfront land, this was it.
There wasn’t much in Seminole Beach in the late 1960s. A few houses, a set of tourist cottages and a section of Seminole Road that led to the back entrance of the Navy base. Its chief attraction was a strip of sand and dunes where surfers and revelers drove cars on the beach, while acre after acre of woods just inland were there for exploration.
Dick Rosborough, a surfboard shaper, grew up in Atlantic Beach and was among those who headed north for waves and fun. “When it was at its peak, you could build fires on the beach. In the summertime there would be a car with coolers and music, and you walk another 10 feet and there’s another car, with chicks. It was a party. It was pretty Wild, Wild West.”
Not everyone was happy about the city takeover of the land: A developer complained to the city commission of Atlantic Beach that little oceanfront land was left to be built upon, “and we need no more invasion of public ownership.” Some real-estate people warned that the new park may become “a haven for undesirables.”
The city also had to deal with the Navy, for whom the park would mean the closing of its back gate, a route that about one in 10 sailors took.
But the city plowed ahead with its plans, and within a couple of years had accumulated 450 acres - 90 times the size of Bancroft’s original gift. That included 1½ miles of almost virgin oceanfront.
Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park was on its way to becoming reality.
Jake Godbold, who went on to be mayor of Jacksonville, was on the City Council in those post-consolidation days. He says he wasn’t a big part of the push for Hanna, but he remembers the excitement in the city government for the project. And why not?
“Who in the world has a park on the beach, with that much land?” he says.
The place is a jewel, says Gerald Dake, a land developer whose firm was hired by the city to design Hanna Park.
“No other city’s got something that big, that nice,” he says. “Not on the Florida coast, not on the East Coast. It’s marvelous. It’s very unusual to have that rural a natural area in an urban setting. It’s kind of like Central Park in New York.”
Site preparation at Hanna didn’t begin until 1971, after the city had spent about $3 million on getting the property. With few facilities, the park still had a freewheeling atmosphere, with crowds of cars on the beach and reports of fights and boozing.
“There are absolutely no restrictions as to drinking, camping or using the beach at any time,” said a police captain, who estimated that at least 60 percent of young people he saw there were drinking beer.
By the summer of 1974, the toll entrance (it cost a quarter to get in) was opened. That was credited with making for smaller and less unruly crowds, and more families. Driving on the beach was later eliminated as well.
Mayor Hans Tanzler, a big proponent of the beach park, held a seafood cookout there that year, praising those behind the effort. Yet he noted that it had faced some criticism. All told, the city had about $5 million invested there, and that was a chunk of money then.
But he looked at it this way: “It took a heck of a lot of courage to spend all that money.”
With the development of the city-owned property, Rosborough, the surfer, lost the wild west atmosphere up there in Seminole Beach. But he figures he - and everyone else in the area - gained an undeveloped beach that’s going to stay that way. A fair exchange.
“Look at that,” he says. “That’s prime land. They did it right. That was badass.”
Rattlesnakes. Red bugs. Mosquitoes. Spiders. Ticks. Florida heat, its hellish humidity.
That’s some of what faced Dake, the planner, and his partners, architect Bobby Woolverton and landscape architect Joe Zuber, as they hacked their way through the palmetto thickets at Hanna more than 40 years ago, dreaming of what this might become.
“We walked and studied it, every square inch. We must have walked it for six weeks,” Dake says.
He’s 80 now, and was in his 30s then. “We were young, we were full of piss and vinegar. And this was just a great challenge. We knew we were doing something special . we spent way too much time on it, we didn’t make any money on the damn thing, but we were proud of it.”
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, numerous proposals were floated for Hanna Park, including a golf course, a tram line, a fishing pier and an elevated pedestrian promenade.
Eventually, though, the park’s backers decided to leave the land as close to wild as possible.
“We were totally designed with nature,” Dake said. “That was our whole push, to keep it as natural as we could but to get all the necessary improvements in to make it usable for the public.”
Designers wanted to take advantage of the beach and of the lakes just inland, created by coquina mining operations. And they needed to put in certain things: access roads, parking lots, restrooms, beach accesses, a couple of concession areas and a campground with about 300 spaces.
But its default setting became nature: The woods were left pretty much as they were found, the dunes were left to stand up to storms. Most of the park was and still is a green refuge from the bustle just outside its gates.
The camping, a short walk to the beach, proved popular. Perhaps too popular: Years after opening, there was a stink about people who’d moved into the privately run campground and stayed . and stayed.
Among them were two women, who said they were once opera singers in New York, who had lived at the campground for 20 months. They’d been there so long they had planted small gardens, provided day care, held art classes and church services.
Time limits were soon in place for campers.
The park added some amenities over the years, but it’s stayed true to its back-to-nature philosophy, which hasn’t always pleased everyone.
The Times-Union in 1978 quoted some teenagers from Ohio, camping there through July, who had long since tired of the beach and the trees and all that nature.
“Our parents like a place like this because they don’t like doing things,” they said. “But we’d rather have amusements.”
Gordon Sprague was in his late 20s when he came to Jacksonville to its parks department, working his way up to division chief. He arrived just in time to jump in on the city’s big beach-park project, becoming one of the prime movers behind it.
And he was there in December 1969 when George B. Hartzog, director of the National Park Service, toured what would become Hanna and came away impressed.
“This certainly enhances your ’bold city’ image,” Hartzog told the locals.
Sprague, who’s now 78 and dividing his time between Vermont and the Pensacola area, said the park’s backers knew they had something special. He’s happy with what came of it.
“You only have one chance to develop undeveloped property,” Sprague says. “It’s never undeveloped again.We took our time and I think we got it right.”
Hanna Park has had more than 305,000 visitors so far this year, the city parks department says, people drawn by its fishing, its hiking trails and the best mountain-biking trails in the area. On many days, it has the best surfing as well.
Bancroft, who donated the initial parcel, got to see the park grow: He died in 1988, at the age of 95.
If the city hadn’t bought the land around that first 5 acres, it would have all turned out far differently, says Dake, the planner.
“You would see all kind of high-rises there, true as the world,” Dake says. “Or it’d have been a bunch of houses up there, single-family homes.”
Don’t get him wrong. He likes high-rises, golf courses, nice houses. After all, he designed high-end developments over his career, including Queen’s Harbour Yacht & Country Club, which grew up around the home he built there in the 1970s.
But Hanna Park?
“You forget how special it is,” Dake said one recent day, touring his park for the first time in years. “It’s a pretty neat place.”
He wandered once again through its dunes and paths, telling stories about how it all came to be. Then he smiled. “Pretty smart guys that designed this place, huh?”
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Information from: The (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union, https://www.jacksonville.com
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