Jacksonville Landmarks: The 20 Locals Actually Go To

Highlights

• Most "Jacksonville landmarks" lists are written by people who have never been here, so they all name the same five tourist stops
• The landmarks locals actually point out are stranger: a giant orange dinosaur, a red water tower with three letters on it, a bandstand in Springfield
• Three of the most recognizable ones have closed since 2023
• One of the most talked-about is a 151-foot sculpture that was never built
• Every landmark below is a design in our 20-sticker Jacksonville pack

We went looking for a list of Jacksonville landmarks and found seven articles that all named the zoo, Fort Caroline, and Friendship Fountain. Fine places. Not what anybody points at from the passenger seat. This is the other list.

Search "Jacksonville landmarks" and page one gives you TripAdvisor, Yelp, a hotel chain's travel blog, and, I am not kidding, a junk removal company. They name the zoo. They name Treaty Oak. Not one of them mentions the orange dinosaur that 900,000 people drive past on Beach Boulevard.

So here's the local version. Twenty of them. A few are gone, and one never existed at all, which I'll get to.

What are the most recognizable landmarks in Jacksonville?

The landmarks locals point out most are Rex the Beach Boulevard dinosaur, the UTW water tower, the Jacksonville Beach Pier, the Spiritualized Life sculpture in Memorial Park, the San Marco lions, and the Jacobs Jewelers clock on Laura Street. Tourist lists usually name the zoo and Fort Caroline instead.

The ones still standing

Rex, Beach Boulevard. A giant orange T-Rex, roughly the size of a house, parked on a commercial strip with no explanation offered to anyone. He is the first thing every visitor asks about. We wrote his full history separately because he earned it.

The UTW water tower, Eastside. A red 50,000 gallon tank on a roof at 700 E. Union St. with UTW painted across it. The building under it went up in 1913, when owner C.B. Gay called it the largest and finest warehouse in Florida. It sat empty for decades. It reopened in March 2025 after a $72 million renovation into 228 apartments, and the developers kept the tower. The whole story is here.

Spiritualized Life, Memorial Park. A 32-foot bronze winged figure standing on a globe of writhing bodies, in an Olmsted Brothers park on the river in Riverside. Sculptor Charles Adrian Pillars made it as a memorial to Florida's World War I dead. It was dedicated on Christmas Day, 1924, and the base carries 1,220 names. Most people call it Winged Victory. The city calls it Life.

Jacksonville Beach Pier. Hurricane Matthew took a chunk of it in 2016 and Irma finished the job in 2017. It reopened July 5, 2022, rebuilt eight feet higher than before. Six years is a long time to not have your pier.

St. Johns River Lighthouse, Mayport. Guiding ships since 1858 and sitting on the grounds of Naval Station Mayport, which means you can admire it and mostly not visit it.

The San Marco lions. Three green lions in the fountain at the center of San Marco Square. If somebody says "meet me at the lions," this is the spot, and everyone in San Marco knows it without being told. They also aren't nearly as old as they look, which we get into here.

Klutho Park bandstand, Springfield. A white bandstand with a wide staircase in the park named for Henry John Klutho, the architect who rebuilt a large share of the city after the 1901 fire. Springfield around it has been going through a comeback for a while now.

The Wells Fargo Building. The downtown tower with the flared base that looks like it's standing on a wedge. You know it from the skyline whether or not you know the name.

The ones that are gone

This is the part the tourist lists get wrong, and it's the reason we made the pack.

Sun-Ray Cinema, Five Points. The building opened in 1927 as the Riverside Theatre, designed by Roy Benjamin, and was the first theater in Florida wired for talking pictures. Sun-Ray ran it from 2011 and showed its last movie on July 6, 2024 after the new owners declined to renew the lease. It reopened in May 2025 as a music venue called FIVE. The marquee is still there. Sun-Ray is not.

San Marco Theatre. A 500-seat art deco single screen, also a Roy Benjamin building, opened June 5, 1938 with Edward G. Robinson in A Slight Case of Murder. Tickets were thirty cents. USA Today once named it one of the ten best classic cinemas in the country. It closed permanently on January 1, 2023. The last film it ever showed was Love Actually.

The Jacobs Jewelers clock, Laura Street. A Seth Thomas street clock from 1901, one of 100 the company built for cities around the country and one of 12 still standing. It went up three months after the Great Fire. The owners gifted it to the city in the mid 1990s. The store itself closed on January 31, 2023 after decades in business. The clock stayed. We wrote up the whole story here.

Three landmarks, three closures inside two years. Nobody planned that. It just happened, and it's the kind of thing you only notice if you live here.

The one that was never built

Lerp.

In July 2021 the city picked a Perkins & Will design for Riverfront Plaza, the old Jacksonville Landing site. The centerpiece was a 151-foot stainless steel sculpture by the artist JEFRË, meant to read "Jax" and meant to evoke the St. Johns River.

Nobody read it as Jax. People read Lerp. People read Derp. People read Lox. A change.org petition to stop it cleared 12,000 signatures. A sock company in Orlando put it on socks. A guy got it tattooed on his leg.

It has never been built. The city's own project page still lists it under Phase 2 of Riverfront Plaza, anticipated to start in early 2026 and wrap up in 2027. As of early 2024 the Jax Daily Record reported there was no word on whether it would happen at all.

So we made a sticker of a statue that does not exist, in a city that could not agree on how to pronounce it. That felt right.

The rest of the twenty

The other eight are less "landmark" and more "you know exactly what this is or you don't live here."

• St. Johns River Taxi, the little boat that crosses between the Northbank and Southbank
• Murray Hill Theatre, the marquee on Edgewood
• The Jax Humor flag, a person riding an alligator into a sunrise
• Publix Key Lime Pie
• The Publix free cookie, the bakery counter transaction that raised half this city
• The Publix hurricane cake, iced with the storm cone and something rude
• The Publix Jags pub sub
• The Toledo Publix scale, the green one, and we're not explaining it

If the last five made sense to you without explanation, congratulations, you're from here.

Go stand in front of one

Pick the nearest one on this list and go look at it this week. Most of them take ten minutes and cost nothing. The lighthouse is the only one you can't really get to.

Then, if you want the whole set on your laptop, we put all twenty into a Jacksonville sticker pack. Twenty 3-inch waterproof vinyl stickers, $15. Rex, the pier, the lions, the clock, and yes, Lerp. Bought one at a time these run $6 each, so the pack costs less than three of them. More of the same art lives in our landmarks collection. Shopping for somebody else? Our Jacksonville souvenirs guide sorts the whole catalog by price.