by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Clearly, Dr. Wayne Wood is a man of vision and perspective.
He is an optometrist who has worked in the city since 1971.
He organizes and teaches at seminars attended by thousands of doctors.
He has compiled histories that celebrate the past without getting suffocated by it.
And it all pretty much worked out that way because he wanted to be his own boss.
As Wood was graduating from Emory University with a bachelor’s degree in English, he tried to decide what to do with the rest of his life.
“I wanted to be a writer and an artist,” he said, in his office on Riverside Avenue. “I realized that I really wasn’t all that great, and I would always be working for someone else.”
The choice that made sense was going to optometry school at the University of Houston, and then joining his uncle’s practice in Jacksonville.
“I realized I would never be rich or poor, but at least I would be my own boss and would have time for writing and art,” he said.
Wood has been on the lecture circuit for 25 years, helping improve the quality of education for optometrists. For the past 15 years, he has been in charge of Vision Expo, the largest conference for eye care professionals in the United States. He finds topics, sets up the courses, coordinates the speakers and lectures at the conferences in New York City and Las Vegas.
About 18,000 participants show up for the conferences, which provide continuing education credits.
“We also just did a conference on a cruise ship on the Danube River and had one earlier in the year in Italy,” said Wood. “It’s a real hard assignment.”
A look around the Riverside office is all it takes to figure out where Wood’s interest and empathy lie. In a glass-and-wood case in the office lobby is a display of artifacts: frames, lenses, eyeglass cases and “Rube Goldberg” testing equipment from the turn of the century.
On the walls down a hallway are old photographs of the city, some going back to the turn of the century.
“I’ve always been a visual person,” he said. “That got me into preserving the visual environment, and it’s how I got into historic preservation. And that relates to my profession.
“I love to teach. I enjoy giving lectures and writing books, both on optometry and historic preservation.”
Wood has written or co-authored or designed seven books, including one on optometry.
Two of his better-known volumes are “Jacksonville’s Architectural Heritage: Landmarks for the Future” and “The Great Fire of 1901,” written with the late Bill Foley, a long-time T-U columnist.
“The first was the most significant event in our history,” said Wood. “My partner, Bill Foley, said everything is either before the fire or after the fire.
“It truly was a great disaster, and yet it propelled Jacksonville into the modern era by destroying the old city and allowing the new city to be constructed on its ashes. Jacksonville truly was one of the most modern cities in the world the decade after the fire.”
Among the many investors, builders and architects who traveled south to help rebuild the city was Henry Klutho. He brought new theories of architecture that were not being widely done except in the Midwest around Chicago by Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers.
The result, Wood said, is, “Jacksonville has more buildings of the Prairie style of architecture than any other city outside the Midwest.”
Long after the fire, another destructive force wiped away some of the city’s more impressive structures and altered forever long strips of scenic neighborhoods.
“This street you’re on now, Riverside Avenue, and this section from here to about where Blue Cross is was once known as the most beautiful street in America,” Wood said. “There were 50 or so of these big mansions along here. All but two of them are gone.”
The change came with consolidation, Wood said, as the city rezoned Riverside in hopes of attracting new businesses that would buy the older homes.
“They did buy them,” he said. “But they also tore them down and turned them into commercial property. If any of those buildings were left, they’d be some of the city’s most vaunted landmarks.”
Other parts of the city were also visited by the bulldozer.
“I’d like to be charitable,” said Wood. “We have saved a number of incredibly significant buildings. But we have lost wantonly another group of buildings that should have been saved, particularly in the downtown area.
“Going back to the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of great old buildings in Riverside and Springfield were torn down, some of them mansions.”
Styles change; preferences ride a roller coaster. That which is fashionable today may be on history’s ash pile tomorrow. And vice versa. But once a building’s gone, there’s no getting it back.
“It’s hard to hold the lens up over time to see what’s going to be important and what’s not,” Wood said, “A good example is the City Hall that Klutho designed in 1902 or 1903. It was torn down in the 1960s because it was thought to be old-fashioned and passe.
“They, in turn, built the Haydon Burns Library downtown. Many people now think it’s dated and passe.
“It may be hard for us to judge those perspectives. If we had the original city hall that Klutho built in 1902, that would be one of our most prestigious and valued landmarks.”
When Wood was chairman of the Historic Landmarks Commission, the group set out to write a “pamphlet” about the city’s architectural legacy. The result was “Jacksonville’s Architectural Heritage,” all 422 pages of it.
“We were surprised how many buildings turned out to be significant,” he said. “When you look at all the buildings in Jacksonville compiled in this book, you realize we have an incredible architectural history.”
Wood and some friends became concerned in the 1970s about the loss of so many “wonderful old houses.” They advertised a meeting to see if others were concerned, too.
“It was in an auditorium that seated 75 people, and 150 showed up,” Wood said. “So we knew we were onto something.
“From that meager outgrowth we organized Riverside Avondale Preservation, now one of the largest neighborhood preservation organizations in the country.
“The neat thing about that was we were totally isolated. We saw what was happening in our front yard, and we set about an organization to solve that. We didn’t realize the exact phenomenon was happening in virtually every town in the country. We were part of a movement and didn’t know it.”
The Jacksonville Historical Society has become more active than ever, talking to anyone who will listen to preserve the city’s heritage.
“Those who have lived here a long time perhaps have a greater memory of those buildings,” said Wood. “Therefore, they miss them more.
“But there are many people moving to Jacksonville, and they have no sense of what’s been here before. Many of them are struck by what riches we have. Yet many of them, since they don’t know what was here before, have little appreciation for that.
“That’s part of the dilemma of all of Florida. So many people who are here now are new and have no depth of appreciation for the value of those buildings we have.”
With an eye toward the judgment of the future, Wood also suggested that perhaps the buildings going up today should borrow a little less from the past. Two examples, he said, are the new main Library and county courthouse.
Both, he said, “are built in a sort of classical style, trying to give the appearance of a new historic building, with the new courthouse being loosely modeled after Monticello. I’m a bit appalled by that. Here we have these tremendous resources to build a building in 2003, and yet we’re going back to architectural styles — admittedly modern versions of them — from long ago.
“You cannot build a historic building. You can restore it or repair it. How much better, it seems to me, to build the best modern building we can that reflects the cutting edge design theories of our own time.”
Especially when the government puts up a building on behalf of the people, Wood said, “There’s an obligation to leave behind the best we have. Perhaps not something as grand and revolutionary as the Sydney [Australia] Opera House, but something that reflects the age. We’re building buildings now that are mimicking buildings that are historic.
“Looking back at the courthouse and the library 50 years from now, they’ll wonder what we were thinking.”
The idea that any public building would be designed with an anticipated life span also seems shortsighted, Wood suggested.
“Look at our City Hall, built as the St. James Building,” he said. “Klutho designed and built it as a department store with a very European sort of aesthetic. It was built to last. It was going to be here for generations, for centuries.
“In Europe, they think nothing of a building that was built five, six, 700 years ago, because they were built with that in mind. You build a building, and you build it well.”
The yearning to hold onto objects from the past is not the same as wanting to return to the past. Some of the instinct, Wood said, comes from disillusions with many things in modern life, “the sense that we’ve lost the character and quality of what our grandparents had.”
“I’m very much a modern person,” he said. “I love modern architecture as much as I do old. I love all the modern conveniences we have.
“But there are certain characteristics and values that we’re in danger of losing. And not just in the architectural environment. It’s in the natural environment and the modern aesthetic of living.
“I think we need to remember these things that were important. We need to have a sense of where we are, what the city of Jacksonville is really about. We should remember we are caretakers of that heritage. And we need to be good stewards so that generations from now will be able to come and look and say, ‘This was something that had value in this place.’ ”