Murray Hill Laws: No Historic District, No COA, and No Protection Either

TL;DR: Murray Hill is not a designated historic district, locally or nationally, and it has no zoning overlay. So exterior work requires no Certificate of Appropriateness, and there’s no design review on new construction. The flip side is real: no demolition review, no infill standards, and no access to the historic rehabilitation tax exemption that designated properties get. Standard Jacksonville zoning is the whole rulebook here.

The short answers

Do I need a COA to renovate in Murray Hill?
No. Murray Hill has no local historic designation, so there’s no Certificate of Appropriateness requirement.

Is Murray Hill on the National Register?
No. Unlike Ortega, it doesn’t carry a National Register district listing either.

Does Murray Hill have a zoning overlay?
No. Standard Chapter 656 zoning applies.

Can someone tear down a historic bungalow next door?
Under current rules, there’s no local demolition review protecting undesignated property in Murray Hill the way there is in designated districts or National Register districts.

Can I get the historic rehab tax exemption?
Not through neighborhood designation. That exemption applies to properties in locally designated historic districts, which Murray Hill isn’t.

So what rules do apply?
The regular Jacksonville Ordinance Code. Chapter 656 zoning, Chapter 518 property maintenance, and the standard permit process.

Has designation ever been discussed?
Yes. The Murray Hill Preservation Association, founded in 1932, has taken up the historic designation question with the city.

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If you drive through Murray Hill you’ll see Craftsman bungalows, Tudor Revival cottages, Prairie School houses, and Art Deco details. There’s a preservation association that’s been running since 1932, one of the oldest continuously operating neighborhood associations in Florida.

Everything about it looks like a protected historic neighborhood.

It isn’t one. Not locally, not nationally, not even a zoning overlay. And that single fact drives every practical answer about property here.

For the county-wide picture, see the Duval ordinance guide.

The three-way comparison

This is the clearest way to understand where Murray Hill sits. Three neighborhoods, three completely different regulatory situations, all with similar-looking old houses.

	Riverside/Avondale	Old Ortega	Murray Hill
Local historic designation	Yes	No	No
National Register district	Yes	Yes	No
Zoning overlay	Yes	No	No
COA for windows, siding, roofing	Required	Not required	Not required
COA for fences, driveways	Required	Not required	Not required
Demolition review	Yes	Yes (JHPC)	No
Historic rehab tax exemption	Available	Not via district	Not available
Design standards on new infill	Yes	No	No

Murray Hill is the least regulated of the three by a wide margin. Whether that’s good news depends entirely on whether you’re the one renovating or the one living next door.

For the other two, see Riverside Avondale and Ortega.

What “no designation” actually gets you

The upside is straightforward and genuinely valuable if you’re renovating.

You can replace windows with whatever you want. Vinyl, aluminum, modern profiles, no review. In Riverside that same swap needs a Certificate of Appropriateness and can go to the Historic Preservation Commission.

You can re-side, re-roof, change your porch, add a fence, pour a driveway, build a shed, put on an addition. All of it runs through the normal permit process only. No design review, no waiting for a commission meeting, no six-week submission deadline.

For a neighborhood with a lot of 1920s to 1940s housing stock in need of work, that’s a meaningful reduction in friction and cost. A Riverside renovation and a Murray Hill renovation of identical scope are not the same project on paper.

What it costs you

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough.

No demolition review. In a locally designated district, demolishing a contributing structure goes before the Historic Preservation Commission. Even in Ortega, which only has National Register listing, demolition gets JHPC review. In Murray Hill, undesignated property doesn’t get that layer.

No standards on new construction. A designated district or an overlay sets design expectations for infill, so a new build has to relate to what’s around it. Murray Hill has neither, which means new development isn’t bound to guidelines that maintain the neighborhood’s character.

No historic tax exemption. This one is money. Jacksonville offers an ad valorem tax exemption for locally designated historic properties that undergo substantial rehabilitation, covering 100 percent of the city portion attributable to the improvements over a ten-year period. Property owners in Springfield and Riverside/Avondale can pursue that. Murray Hill owners can’t get it through neighborhood designation, because there isn’t one.

So the trade is real: fewer restrictions, no protections, no incentive money.

The designation question keeps coming up

This isn’t settled history. It’s a live conversation in the neighborhood.

The Murray Hill Preservation Association has brought the historic designation question to the community, including hosting city officials to discuss how designation would affect the neighborhood. Local historic designation is established and administered through the City of Jacksonville’s planning department, and designation for an area works differently than designation for a single structure.

If you own here, that’s worth paying attention to. Designation would change your renovation process considerably, in both directions. It would add COA requirements and also unlock the tax exemption and the protections.

Worth knowing separately: individually designated local landmarks exist throughout Jacksonville regardless of neighborhood status. If a specific Murray Hill property carries its own landmark designation, COA requirements apply to that property even though the neighborhood has none. Check the parcel, not just the neighborhood.

Why the housing stock looks the way it does

Some context that explains the architecture.

After the Great Fire of 1901, rebuilding pushed population growth north and west of the city. In December 1906, the Jacksonville Suburban Land Company conveyed the northern portion of Edgewood to the Murray Hill Land Company, led by Walter C. Brobston, who replatted it as Murray Hill Heights. By the end of 1907, more than half the lots had sold at $1,500 each.

It was marketed to workers, specifically the roughly 1,000 people employed at the Seaboard Air Line Railway’s locomotive shops near McDuff Avenue. That’s why the housing is modest-scaled and dense compared to Ortega’s waterfront estates, and it’s part of why the two neighborhoods ended up with different preservation trajectories.

The peak building period came in the 1940s, when about 1,700 homes went up. Murray Hill also holds the highest concentration of houses designed by Henrietta Cuttino Dozier, a significant early woman architect in the region.

Edgewood Avenue developed as the commercial spine, with Edgewood Village known as the First Block. Interstate 10, under construction from 1957 and open in the early 1960s, cut established neighborhoods off from one another and shifted growth to newer suburbs, which is a large part of why the corridor declined before its more recent revival.

Quick win

If you’re renovating in Murray Hill, confirm two things and then move fast, because you have fewer hoops than almost anywhere comparable.

1. Check whether your specific parcel is an individually designated local landmark on the JaxGIS Land Development map with the Local Landmarks layer enabled. Neighborhood status doesn’t cover you if the house itself is designated.
2. Confirm your base zoning district, since standard Chapter 656 rules are your whole rulebook here. Setbacks, height, accessory structures, and fence limits all come from the general code with no overlay modifying them.

Then you’re clear. No COA, no design review, no commission calendar.

If you care about the neighborhood’s long-term character, the other move is to engage with the Murray Hill Preservation Association on the designation question, because that decision gets made collectively and it’s genuinely consequential in both directions.

Designation status can change and is actively discussed in Murray Hill. Confirm current status for your parcel with the City of Jacksonville Historic Preservation Section before making decisions.