The San Marco Lions: Jacksonville's Newest Old Landmark

Highlights

• The three lions in San Marco Square went up in the 1990s, not the 1920s
• The original fountain on that spot had a compass theme and was torn out
• The square is named for the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and the lions are the nod to it
• Several travel sites date the fountain to 1920, which is wrong by about seventy years
• It sits in Balis Park, which got its own overhaul in 2013

Everybody assumes the lions are original. Roaring twenties, Italian revival, some long-dead sculptor. They are not. They are younger than most people reading this.

Stand in San Marco Square and it all lines up: Mediterranean facades, a 1938 theater, a fountain with three stone lions climbing over each other. Obviously the lions have been there the whole time.

They have been there since the 1990s.

What are the San Marco lions?

The San Marco lions are a fountain sculpture of three lions stacked on one another, in Balis Park at the center of San Marco Square in Jacksonville. The City of Jacksonville installed them during a 1990s renovation of the square, replacing an earlier compass-themed fountain. They reference the Piazza San Marco in Venice, which the neighborhood is named after.

The square came first

San Marco was laid out in the 1920s on the south side of the river, in what was then the separate city of South Jacksonville. Jacksonville annexed it in 1932.

The development sold every lot within three hours of going on sale, before much of anything had been built. Construction on the first buildings started in 1926.

The plan was Italian Renaissance revival, which is where the name came from. The commercial strip got called San Marco Square after the Piazza San Marco. Most of the houses that actually went up ignored the style completely, because the style was already going out of fashion, and San Marco ended up a mix of Mediterranean, Colonial, Victorian, and whatever else people felt like building.

There used to be a compass

The square had a fountain from early on. It was not lions. The original had a compass theme.

By the 1970s the square had fallen apart. Businesses closed, the commercial center stopped being a commercial center, and the compass fountain came out.

That's the part nobody mentions on the walking tours. There was a stretch of decades where San Marco Square was not somewhere you took visitors.

The lions showed up in the nineties

The city ran a large renovation of the square in the 1990s. Part of that work restored the fountain, and the three lions are what went in.

It worked. The square filled back up with shops and restaurants and became one of the most photographed spots in the city. In 2013 there was another round of work, reworking the streets and turning Balis Park in the middle into a bigger green space.

So the lions are not a relic of the original development. They are a piece of a comeback, installed to make a struggling square feel like its own name again. That's a better story than the one people assume.

About that 1920 date

Search for this fountain and you will find real estate sites and travel guides stating it was built in 1920.

That is wrong, and it is wrong in a specific way. The square dates to the 1920s. The fountain with the lions does not. One source we found puts the installation at 1997, though most just say the 1990s, and we haven't found a document that nails the exact year.

If you see 1920 attached to these lions, whoever wrote it collapsed the neighborhood's age into the sculpture's age.

Meet me at the lions

None of the above matters much to how people actually use it.

"Meet me at the lions" is a complete set of directions in this city. Nobody asks which lions. It's the default meeting point for the whole square, the backdrop for a large percentage of engagement photos taken on the Southbank, and the thing kids climb on while their parents wait for a table.

A landmark earns that by being used, not by being old. The lions got there in about thirty years, which is fast.

Go see it

Balis Park, San Marco Square, around 1999 San Marco Blvd. Free. Park once and you can walk to Theatre Jacksonville, which has been running since 1919 and is the longest running community theater in the state.

One thing worth knowing before you plan around it: the San Marco Theatre closed on January 1, 2023, so the marquee is still there but the movies are not.

We put the lions on a sticker and a tote bag. They're also one of the twenty designs in our Jacksonville sticker pack, $15 for the full set, alongside the San Marco Theatre marquee and eighteen other landmarks. The rest of them are covered in our guide to the landmarks locals actually point at.