Wayne Wood

In the 1960s, calls to potential diners at Morrison’s Cafeteria spilled into the historic downtown park daily:

“No waiting on the main floor! No waiting on the main floor!”

Jacksonville historian and artist Wayne Wood has many memories of the city’s oldest and most historic park, but this one is especially fond because he was a boy on summer visits to his grandparents’ home in Riverside.

“He was an African American gentleman with a little, white mustache,” Wood said of the voice he remembers beckoning hungry park visitors. “I looked him up, Charlie McRoy was his name.”

Wood is among many longtime Jacksonville residents and visitors who remember McRoy as a staple in what is now called James Weldon Johnson Park. In the 1960s, Morrison’s was one of many eating establishments, national department stores and local retailers situated at or near the historic public space, then called Hemming Park. Wood’s ties to the park continued when he brought his young family there and were formalized later as he took on a leadership role in its revitalization. And though he might retire from his stewardship eventually, he will always recognize the importance of this public space.

“I realized that the park was the heart of the city as Mayor Jake Godbold once told me,” Wood said. “He said, ‘You know [James Weldon Johnson Park] is the heart of the city and downtown is the heart of Jacksonville. If you don’t have a healthy heart, you can’t have a great city.’”

A Proper Renaming

Throughout the years, this 1.5-acre public space has seen several names. The name Hemming Park came in 1899, when a confederate monument was donated to the city by Charles C. Hemming. In his role as historian, Wood has researched and written about the Hemming Park name and its origin.

“For some time this monument was in the park, extolling the virtues of white supremacy and that movement,” Wood said. “I grieved over the fact that this monument to an ill begotten cause was there when members of the African American community walked by on their way to City Hall. That always just seemed bad to me.”

In 2020, the city renamed the downtown park for one of its most accomplished native sons, James Weldon Johnson. A poet, educator, civil rights leader, lawyer and diplomat, Johnson is most known for the Black national anthem “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” which he composed with his brother, John Rosamond Johnson. He was also the first African American to pass the Florida bar, a prominent artist in the Harlem Renaissance Movement and principal of the Stanton High School. In 2023, the city removed the Hemming monument and hired nationally renowned African American urban planner and designer, Walter Hood, to redesign James Weldon Johnson Park.

“We are so lucky to have the nationally renowned park-design experts, Hood Design Studio, to help us create the world-class downtown oasis that we have long sought,” Wood said. “The redesign of the park will be a major contributor to the renaissance in the heart of our city. The park will once again become the crown jewel of our downtown.”

Connections Take Root

When Wood moved to Jacksonville in 1971, he worked downtown as an optometrist. He often spent lunch time shopping at nearby stores and enjoyed the convenience and vitality of the

downtown area. But by 1977, the park was redesigned and featured what Wood described as too much concrete and too few trees. The construction of a fence around the park only served to further alter its once inviting atmosphere.

“Even after that, there were special events in the park and I remember taking my kids there,” Wood said. “But it was basically a place you didn’t go. It was a place to walk through on your way to City Hall.”

These difficult days continued for the park, which in the 1980s wasn’t so uncommon for areas in the heart of downtowns across the country.

While the park had changed and continued to, Wood’s civic involvement and arts advocacy in Jacksonville grew. He founded Riverside Avondale Preservation Association, began working to save downtown’s historic architecture, much of which is located near the park, and became a member of the mayor’s Cultural and Conservation Commission (later renamed the Historic Landmarks Commission while he was the group’s chair). He also later went on to found the Riverside Arts Market.

Back at the park around 2012, people had begun to live there. Literally. The park still had not returned to its former glory in any sense of the word, whether the heydays of the late 1800s when the St. James and other luxurious hotels along the park attracted socialites from across the nation and Europe or when Wood grew up visiting the park with his grandparents.

So it 2013, the city opened bids for a nonprofit group to manage the park in a way similar to the success of the nonprofit running Memorial Park in Riverside.

Wood calls his work to revive the park “getting involved in reverse” because the nonprofit status originally for a downtown arts project later known as OneSpark was then used to form Friends of Hemming Park.

“It’s not that we didn’t have anything to do,” Wood said of the group of business leaders who took on the park’s revitalization. “But it had to be done. You looked around and nobody else was going to do it.”

Permanent Stewardship

Today the park that has rooted Wood and so many other residents and visitors still sits in the heart of downtown and Wood still visits, though now as a board member of the nonprofit group running it since 2014. The group, called Friends of James Weldon Johnson Park, began when this important public space wasn’t yet named for one of the most accomplished people from Jacksonville. Wood, like many in the city, considers the name very fitting because Johnson “is a great person to celebrate in our city.”

And so the yesteryear calls of “No waiting on the main floor!” have been replaced by today’s live music, the chatter of park visitors and excitement of cultural festivals and events.

The heartbeat is alive and thriving in Jacksonville’s most historic public space, James Weldon Johnson Park.