Small gift leads to Jacksonville’s big Hanna Park
A 450-acre natural area began as a 5-acre parcel.
JACKSONVILLE — 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 ernment allocates money to schools based on how many students enroll, so more students means a revenue boost and an opportunity to make under-enrolled schools more efficient.
That race for new students has pitted district schools i n a batt l e wit h c har t er s f o r f a mi l i e s ’ h e a r t s a n d minds, and it has led to bad blood.
Last year, the school board blocked two charter school companies from opening new campuses, a move that led to court challenges and what critics called an illegal attempt to eliminate more competition.
Ralph Arza, leader of a char ter school advoc ac y group, called Palm Beach Count y “ground zero for anti-charter school action.”
This year’s jump in enrollment in district-run schools took school leaders by surprise. They had expected far 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 cit y 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 less growth in district schools and far more in charters.
As of October, the count y ’s d i s t r i c t - r u n s c hool s enrolled 166,326 K-12 students, while charter schools enrolled 20,863.
For the school district, the enrollment boost is producing early benefits: This year, the school board agreed to give teachers a 3 percent salary raise despite receiving only a 1 percent increase in per-student money from the state.
The size of the raise surprised many teachers, and schools Superintendent Robert Avossa said it had been made possible by the money generated by the influx of new students.
Despite a drop - off thi s year, not everyone is convinced that the era of big char ter school grow th i s over. Arza said that Donald Trump’s presidential victory is likely to usher in an emphasis on school choice, which may enhance interest in charter schools.
“You’re going to see more 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 mar- encouragement to empower parents to have a choice,” Arza said. “Charters grow because some mom or dad believes that a charter school can provide a better education for their child.”
He also said that, under Avossa, the school district h a s b e c o me l e s s h o s t i l e to charter school companies, raising the prospect of greater cooperation and — perhaps — more new charter campuses.
The inc reasing grow th raises a host of other problems, however. More students means a need to hire more teachers, and officials say it is increasingly hard to find and hire t alented teachers.
Furthermore, the student growth is not happening uniformly across the county. In many cases, the growth is in popular schools that are already crowded, straining resources at those schools.
In September, before the official attendance numbers were calculated, 29 of 165 t radi t i onal s c hools were velous. 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. deemed overcrowded under the state’s formula.
S o me o f t h e c r o wd e d schools that became even more c rowded t hi s ye a r include Forest Hill High and John I. Leonard High.
Voters’ decision in November to approve a one-cent sales tax increase is expected to open the door to a new construction boom, with five new schools planned during the next decade.
The five schools include a high school in central Palm Beach County, a high school and an elementary west of Royal Palm Beach and two other elementaries, one west of Boca Raton and another near Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter.
“The most immediate need is the high school,” Jason Link, the district’s expert on enrollment and demographics, said in an interview in October. “We’re just running out of space in the central area.”
Mayor Hans Ta n z l e r, 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 cit y 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 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 bad-ass.”
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 t ha n 4 0 ye a r s a go, dreaming of what this might become.
“We walked and studied it, every square inch. We must have walked it for six weeks,” Dake says.
Eventually, though, the park’s backers decided to leave the land as close to wild as possible.
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. 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.”