When the Bostwick Building was sold to Jacques Klempf last year it saved a historic building from ruin.
But, it put another piece of Downtown Jacksonville’s identity in jeopardy.
What would happen to the jaguar?
The mural painted on the plywood-covered windows had in 20 years become its own piece of city history.
On Thursday, the announcement came — the jaguar panels would stay Downtown.
The mural’s artist, Jim Draper, asked that they be donated to FreshMinistries’ J. Wayne and Delores Barr Weaver Center for Community Outreach, located at 616 A. Philip Randolph Blvd.
FreshMinistries is a Jacksonville nonprofit that seeks to eradicate poverty with programs to help people and communities develop economic independence.
The mural, ironically, will be reinstalled on a building that was funded in part through a grant from the Weavers, former owners of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
“We’re absolutely delighted,” FreshMinistries spokeswoman Theresa Johnson said. “Jim Draper has been a longtime friend of this organization and is a legendary Jacksonville artist.”
With the move, the jaguar will remain close to the stadium that inspired its creation. The building is so close to EverBank Field, it was used for tailgating parties before FreshMinistries bought it.
The mural could have easily met with a different fate.
Klempf purchased the Bostwick at a tax sale in July 2014. But earlier, he at had it under contract with the Bostwick family.
“They wanted those paintings,” Klempf said. “I could buy the building, but they wanted to keep the paintings of the jaguar.”
When Klempf ultimately came to possess both, he reached out to Draper to see what he wanted to do.
“I’d hate to see anything happen to them,” Klempf said. “I suppose I could have sold them, but it just didn’t seem right.”
Draper told Klempf he’d like to be in control of where the mural would go. “I didn’t own the physical plywood, but I owned the concept,” Draper said.
Around the same time Robert Lee, CEO of FreshMinistries, asked his 20-year friend, Draper, if he could help him fill wall at his center with artwork.
The exterior wall was large. Draper saw a fit for the jaguar.
Draper doesn’t yet know how he’ll repurpose on a solid wall what is essentially a mosaic for a series of windows.
“It’ll be almost like creating a separate, new piece of art. You can’t just slap it up there,” he said.
The mural was created in 1995 by Draper and fellow artist Anne Banas, just before the Jaguars played their inaugural season.
It took 28 days to complete, and the $3,000 they were paid was split between them.
A sum so little, it was “kind of crazy,” even 20 years ago, Draper said.
The art project was an initiative of the Downtown Council of the JAX Chamber.
The council worried that when fans drove across the Main Street Bridge, the first thing they would see at the corner of Ocean and Main streets was an old building boarded up with gray ragged plywood.
They asked Draper and Banas, both art teachers at the time at Florida State College at Jacksonville, if they could improve the look of the building with some student artwork.
Draper came up with a different idea. There were three parts to his concept.
The first would be a jaguar inside the building. It’s the part that became the mural, not of a full jaguar, but a jaguar mosaic that stretched across the Bostwick’s arched windows, as if you were seeing the jaguar through the windows.
The second would be the jaguar going outside the building and up the street to the stadium. The concept became jaguar footprints painted on the street between the Bostwick Building and EverBank Field.
Finally, the partners made 25 hand-painted Jaguar banners and sold them to Downtown businesses as part of the project’s fundraising effort.
The Bostwick Building’s jaguar was painted on marine-grade plywood with 15 layers of Benjamin Moore’s best exterior latex paint. Draper only expected it to last three years. Instead, it nearly outlasted the building.
One last panel has yet to be removed because it’s attached near a corner that’s unstable. The plywood became part of the Bostwick’s structural support.
“Some people say art is worthless,” Draper said. “But, sometimes it holds a building up.”
In 20 years, the jaguar mural has been beloved. People started calling the old Bostwick Building the jaguar building.
“It’s funny how art changes things,” Draper said. “This was still just a boarded up building, but the mural turned it into a landmark.”