by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
As downtown Jacksonville evolves over the next several years from an area that only seems to breathe from 9-5 during the week to a 24-hour neighborhood teeming with young professionals and retirees, many things downtown will change also.
Restaurants and shops will pop up on Bay Street from the stadium to LaVilla.
A pedestrian will become as common a sight on a Saturday evening as they are on Monday morning.
U-Hauls and furniture and appliance delivery trucks will arrive with goods that left downtown en masse decades ago.
However, even with almost 2,000 new residential units either under construction or in the serious planning stages, the City’s Fire & Rescue Department doesn’t plan to make any drastic changes or additions to its downtown-area service. According to Chief of Operations Lauren Mock, there’s no real need to dramatically overhaul the department’s Liberty Street station or any of the three other stations that handle downtown-area calls.
“Essentially, we won’t change that much,” said Mock. “We will have a number of stations in the area but not any one station to handle the area. We will continue to use multiple stations to provide the coverage necessary to keep downtown safe.”
Currently, there are eight residential developments in various stages of development: the Knight Building project on Adams Street will have 12 loft apartments and the Home Street loft project on the Southbank will also have a dozen luxury lofts.
The other six are major developments that promise to dramatically alter the Jacksonville skyline and population density. The three-phase Shipyards project calls for 172 condo flats, 388 units in three towers, 24 live-work spaces, 58 town homes and almost one million square feet of Class A office space.
Berkman Plaza, which is almost complete, has 206 rental units and 20 townhouses, while The Parks at Cathedral project will have 51 town homes. Two Vestcor projects promise over 200 more units. The 11 E. Forsyth development will have 126 loft apartments and the old Roosevelt Hotel is slated to become another 100 units.
Perhaps the most impressive of all is the Strand development on the Southbank between the SouthTrust building and the Radisson Hotel. Plans call for twin residential towers; a 32-story tower with 362 apartments and a nearly-matching 36-story with 346 units.
And, this may be just the tip of the iceberg. According to Jacksonville Economic Development Commission executive director Kirk Wendland, the consensus is the immediate downtown area is capable of one day having 10,000 residential units. That’s over eight times what’s already in the works.
Mock says even with all the growth, the fire department is confident it can handle the increased work load, and high rise units don’t represent an unknown challenge to the department. He also maintains that having thousands of people in the area around the clock won’t be much different from today’s situation where thousands of people flood the downtown area during the week and virtually abandon the area on the weekends.
“The downtown population rises dramatically during the day and drops severely on Friday afternoon. When all the high rise residential units are here, the drop off will not be as severe,” said Mock. “Currently, we have a fair number of high rises in use for residential right now. From a strategic and tactical standpoint, not much will change, just probably the call volumes.”
Although the department may add a few personnel to the existing stations, there are no plans to markedly increase the number of firefighters per shift or add to the existing stations physically. Mock said one of the main reasons the department isn’t worried about upgrading its facilities is because of the strict fire code requirements which the new buildings must meet. Between state-of-the-art sprinkler systems and building materials, the chances of a fire spreading rapidly are reduced greatly.
“That tends to give us a good heads up,” said Mock, referring to the code requirements for both residential and commercial developments. “We can confine the fire to an area and evacuate the building pretty easily. The sprinklers are our best defense.”
Tom Francis, the public information officer for the fire department, said if downtown ever reaches a population density of some other major cities, something dramatic will have to happen regarding fire protection and emergency response.
“We would model ourselves after the European fire department approach if that’s what we are faced with,” said Francis. “In Frankfurt, for instance, there are three to four million people in an area no larger than Springfield and downtown. They have a super station downtown that’s one giant building and houses everything. Whether or not that is what we do is still up for debate.”