by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The City has a blueprint in hand for turning around the Brooklyn neighborhood and now is looking for private help to take those plans from the drawing board to reality.
The City previously hired Pittsburgh design firm Urban Design Associates to redesign the struggling neighborhood squeezed between LaVilla and Riverside. Now the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission is working with the City’s Planning and Development Department on a Request for Proposals calling for private firms to submit a plan to put that design to use.
JEDC Executive Director Jeanne Miller said she hoped to present the RFP at next month’s Downtown Development Authority meeting. The JEDC will take input from the DDA and from neighborhood stakeholders before issuing the final draft.
“We hope to attract the best and the brightest to bid on the implementation plan,” said Miller. “Just like with UDA in the design stage, we want to bring in a third-party expert in redeveloping neighborhoods.”
Whoever wins the bidding process will draw up a plan for the City to implement UDA’s vision for Brooklyn, which aims to connect the neighborhood’s blighted northern section with the commercial development along the St. Johns River’s north bank.
The Brooklyn neighborhood once thrived but interstate construction cleaved the area following World War II. Residents and households melted away after I-95 —and I-10, to a much lesser extent — split the area into pieces. UDA’s plan stitches Brooklyn back together using parks, ponds and canals.
A draft of the City’s RFP for the implementation plan calls for a firm that can “present a realizable vision of a vibrant mixed use district that would include housing, retail and commercial.”
UDA’s plan envisions mixed-income residential development in North Brooklyn, parking and commercial development in the south, while Riverside Avenue would target office and residential development.
UDA planned its redesign to include some easy first steps. Those initial changes would provide momentum to the area’s overhaul.
The City’s downtown master plan envisions the area as a walkable neighborhood with walkways and small parks connecting Brooklyn to the water and to the rest of downtown.
Reconnecting the area to the river was viewed as a priority by UDA principal Don Carter, who noted that pedestrians can currently walk from one end of Brooklyn to the other without seeing the water.
Other priority items include cleaning up the area’s blighted buildings, abandoned cars and clearing out the large numbers of stray dogs that run loose in the neighborhood.