With all the current controversy and conversation concerning Hemming Plaza, it might be overlooked that the 1.54-acre park at the front door of City Hall is some of Downtown’s most historic space.
It’s also the location for three pieces of sculpture that represent some of the city’s history and heritage.
The land was donated by city founder Isaiah Hart around 1857. It was originally known as “City Park” and later as “St. James Park.”
In 1899, a year after Civil War veteran Charles Hemming donated the Confederate soldier statue that stands on the column in the fountain near the Skyway station, the space was dedicated as “Hemming Park.”
The bronze soldier, facing south as all such statues do, is Jacksonville’s oldest and tallest statue and one of the few pieces of the city that survived the Great Fire of 1901.
More than 60 years later, local construction labor unions erected a memorial to President John F. Kennedy after he was assassinated.
The monument features a plaque with a relief sculpture image of Kennedy that commemorates his visit to the park on Oct. 18, 1960.
The senator from Massachusetts was running for the nation’s highest office and made a speech in the park that was, according to historical accounts, attended by “a screaming, jubilant mob.”
Hemming Park isn’t the only place the Kennedy monument has been displayed in Duval County.
When the park was redesigned in 1978 to create “Hemming Plaza,” the slab of marble and the attached plaque was removed and stored for several years in a City warehouse.
There it remained until about seven years later, when Richard Bowers, who worked in the City’s Housing and Urban Development Department, discovered it, locked away and gathering dust.
Bowers had the monument cleaned and placed at Hogan Creek Tower, a public housing project on Broad Street. Residents embraced having the memorial to the slain president in their midst and planted roses around the monument.
Years later, realizing that Broad Street was a long way from the site of the event that inspired the memorial, Bower began a campaign to return the monument to its original location.
Shortly after former Mayor John Peyton took office, the monument was moved back to its original home, near the southeast corner of the plaza.
One of the local dignitaries who met Kennedy in 1960 when he arrived at Imeson Airport was the late U.S. Rep. Charles E. Bennett, who is memorialized in statuary in Hemming Plaza a few feet northwest of the Kennedy monument.
Bennett was elected to Congress in 1948 by the voters of North Florida and subsequently re-elected 21 times. When he left Washington in 1993, Bennett had secured his place in history as Florida’s longest-serving member of Congress.
The bronze depicts Bennett standing with two canes, a reference to the polio he contracted while serving in the U.S. Army in World War II.
The statue sits on a granite base inscribed with “In God We Trust.”
That’s because in 1954, “Charlie,” as he preferred to be called, sponsored the bill that put those four words on every U.S. coin and piece of currency.
Bennett grew up in Jacksonville and graduated in 1934 from the University of Florida law school. He practiced in Jacksonville until he was elected to the state Legislature in 1941.
Bennett served for a year before resigning to join the Army. He was discharged in 1947 after being awarded the Bronze and Silver Stars.
While in Congress, Bennett sponsored legislation that created the Fort Caroline National Memorial in Arlington and the Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve.
He proposed a code of ethics that was adopted in 1958 as the first such code for government service and he was a champion of historic preservation, education and military issues.
Bennett also helped secure funding for the statue of Andrew Jackson that’s in the Laura Street roundabout at the Landing.
The statue of Bennett in Hemming Plaza was dedicated April 23, 2004, seven months after he died.
It faces northeast, “so Charlie can be forever looking toward his beloved Fort Caroline and Washington, D.C.,” said Emily Lisska, executive director of the Jacksonville Historical Society.
356-2466