Historic But Not Designated: The Jacksonville Neighborhoods With No Legal Protection

TL;DR: Which Jacksonville properties get legal historic protection has more to do with the history of local preservation organizing than with the buildings themselves. Neighborhoods including Arlington, Durkeeville, Eastside, Lackawanna, Mandarin, Mixontown, Murray Hill, New Town, Panama Park, San Marco, and Tallulah are historically significant and carry no local or national designation. A few, like Ortega and part of Durkeeville, have National Register status without local designation, which is a different and weaker form of protection.

The short answers

Which Jacksonville neighborhoods are historic but not designated at all?
Arlington, Durkeeville, Eastside, Lackawanna, Mandarin, Mixontown, Murray Hill, New Town, Panama Park, San Marco, and Tallulah, among others. This list isn’t exhaustive.

Why don’t they have protection if they’re historically significant?
Local support and organizing determined which neighborhoods got designated, not a ranking of architectural or historical merit. Some neighborhoods also lost too much original building fabric to form a cohesive district.

What’s the difference between “no designation” and “National Register only”?
No designation means no historic protection at all. National Register status is a federal honor that doesn’t regulate private property changes, though it can trigger demolition review. Local designation is what requires a Certificate of Appropriateness.

Are any of these neighborhoods pursuing designation now?
Yes. Durkeeville is actively pursuing historical designation and completed a city-funded revitalization study.

Does National Register status ever apply to just part of an undesignated neighborhood?
Yes. Part of Durkeeville, the Durkee Gardens Historic District, is on the National Register even though the wider Durkeeville neighborhood carries no designation.

How many historic districts does Jacksonville actually have?
Three locally designated districts: Springfield, Riverside/Avondale, and St. Johns Quarter. You may also see “seven historic districts” referenced, which typically counts National Register districts rather than locally designated ones. Different question, different number.

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We’ve now written about this gap three separate times in this series: Ortega, which has National Register status but no local designation, Murray Hill, which has neither, and St. Johns Quarter, where we had to correct our own pillar article on how many local districts even exist.

That’s enough repetition to earn its own page. Here’s the full picture in one place.

The rule to internalize

Whether a Jacksonville property is legally protected has more to do with the history of local preservation organizing than with the historic significance of the buildings themselves.

That’s not a euphemism. Some genuinely important neighborhoods never got designated because there wasn’t local political support for the process, or because enough of the original architecture had already been demolished that a cohesive district couldn’t be formed. Designation is a civic outcome, not an architectural grade.

Keep that in mind, because it explains why some of the names below will surprise you.

The neighborhoods with no designation at all

Historically significant, and carrying no local or national designation:

Arlington, Durkeeville, Eastside, Lackawanna, Mandarin, Mixontown, Murray Hill, New Town, Panama Park, San Marco, and Tallulah.

This list isn’t exhaustive, and it will surprise people on both ends. San Marco has a zoning overlay with real design controls, including the river-view protection rule, but it isn’t a historic district, so there’s no COA requirement tied to history there. Murray Hill has an active preservation association founded in 1932 and still has nothing.

Two of these have real stories worth knowing.

Durkeeville

Durkeeville grew from the North Jacksonville Street Railway, Town and Improvement Company, founded in 1902, a Black-owned streetcar system nicknamed the “Colored Man’s Railroad” that connected Northwest Jacksonville to downtown. Through the end of segregation, it was home to a thriving Black middle and working class, doctors, lawyers, educators, and business owners, many of its brick homes designed and built by African-American contractors James Edwards Hutchins and Sanford Augustus Brookings.

It’s the neighborhood behind JP Small Park, formerly Durkee Field, where Hank Aaron and Negro League legends played, and it borders Edward Waters University, Florida’s oldest HBCU.

Durkeeville itself carries no legal historic designation. But two sites within it are individually on the National Register: the AKA House, a Jeffersonian-style mansion, and Durkee Gardens, the oldest public housing community in Florida. So you can have National Register status sitting inside a neighborhood with no designation of its own, which is exactly the kind of nuance that trips people up.

The community is actively pursuing historical designation, and a revitalization study was funded with $250,000 from the city.

Eastside and Mixontown

Both sit close to downtown and both carry deep, underrepresented history.

The Eastside was platted in 1869 as Oakland and drew freedmen after the Civil War, many of them Gullah Geechee, descendants of enslaved people from the lower Atlantic coast’s rice, indigo, and Sea Island cotton plantations. Early housing was single and double shotgun houses reflecting African building traditions.

Mixontown sits along McCoys Creek and has been positioned for redevelopment tied to Urban Core revitalization, including creek restoration and a planned linear trail. That kind of investment pressure is exactly the scenario where a lack of designation matters most: developers can acquire and alter property with none of the review that would apply in Riverside or Springfield.

Both are federally recognized Opportunity Zones, which adds investment incentive on top of the redevelopment pressure, with no local historic protection acting as a counterweight.

The “seven historic districts” confusion

While researching this, we ran into a second version of the counting problem we already had to fix once.

Some sources reference “the seven historic districts of Jacksonville.” That’s a different count than the three locally designated districts covered in the Duval ordinance guide, because it’s typically counting National Register districts, which is a broader and legally weaker category than local designation.

So you may see three, four, or seven depending on what’s being counted, local designation, a Riverside/Avondale split, or National Register listings. They’re not competing facts. They’re answers to different questions. If a number matters to your specific situation, ask which category it refers to before you rely on it.

What actually changes with no designation

To make this concrete, here’s what an owner in an undesignated historic neighborhood does and doesn’t face, using the same comparison from the Murray Hill post:

• No Certificate of Appropriateness for windows, siding, roofing, fences, or additions
• No demolition review the way there is in a locally designated district or a National Register district
• No design standards on new infill construction
• No access to the historic rehabilitation tax exemption, the ten-year, 100 percent ad valorem exemption available to locally designated properties

The upside is lower renovation friction. The downside is zero protection against demolition or incompatible new construction, at exactly the moment redevelopment pressure is highest in neighborhoods like Eastside and Mixontown.

Quick win

If you own property, or are buying, in any of these neighborhoods, don’t assume the architecture tells you the legal status.

Check two things on the JaxGIS Land Development map: the “Local Historic Districts” layer and the “Local Landmarks” layer. A neighborhood with zero designation can still contain an individually designated landmark, and roughly 100 exist citywide. That single property carries COA requirements even though its neighbors don’t.

If you’re part of a community weighing whether to pursue designation, the Durkeeville effort is a live example to watch. It shows both the cost, a funded study and years of organizing, and the reason people take it on anyway.

Designation status changes as communities organize for it. Confirm current status for any specific parcel with the City of Jacksonville Historic Preservation Section.