Jacksonville’s Turning Point with Ennis Davis

[00:00:01] Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike Mike's on Mic, a conversation about politics, government, and Jacksonville. With 50-year opinion leaders Mike Hightower, Mike Tolbert, and award-winning broadcaster and longtime political observer, Mike Miller. Welcome to another episode of Mike's on Mic. I'm Mike Miller, along with Mike Hightower here in studio. Mike Tolbert is back at the ranch, and we're delighted to have you with us.

[00:00:26] Of course, we want to remind everyone that the views expressed on Mike's on Mic are those of the three Mikes and our guests, and certainly not many of you. But we thank you for joining us anyhow. Well, JEA is not the only thing going on in the city of Jacksonville, so today we're going to turn our attention elsewhere. Downtown Jacksonville feels like it's at a turning point, with more apartments and office buildings and all under construction, new riverfront parks, big ideas for transit, and historic buildings that are still sitting empty.

[00:00:56] Well, while there's a strong, positive vibe about downtown these days, there also remain some big questions about whether we're getting it right. Today we want to talk about that and ask about what is real, what might be hype, and what might be at risk. Our guest is someone who's been documenting this for years, and not just these projects, but the context behind the projects. Our guest is joining us is Ennis Davis.

[00:01:20] Ennis is a certified planner, a public historian, author, and one of the most consistent voices explaining how Jacksonville has changed, grown, and where we're going. Ennis has spent more than 20 years in planning, architecture, and development. Ennis, he works across preservation, mobility, and equitable development. Plus, he is a sixth-generation Floridian Jacksonville native. Ennis, it's good to see you again. It's been a number of years, but it's good to see you. Haven't changed much. Yeah, good to see you. Well, I got some gray in the chin a little bit now.

[00:01:50] I hear you. I don't have much of anything on my chin anymore. Color is not our issue out here. It's getting here. Mike Tolbert's going to get us going. Mike? Ennis, let's start with the big picture. On paper, downtown sounds like it's booming. A newspaper headline recently read, From Renderings to Reality. Then a downtown vision report said that while residential growth is reaching 10,000, which has been a goal since the 1990s,

[00:02:17] office vacancy rates are high, and we're still building new high-rise office buildings. Are we actually building the right kind of downtown now? And is residential alone enough to make something happen or something else needed? That's a good question. I would say downtown is on the path forward right now. There's a lot more going on than just residential.

[00:02:41] I would almost argue a lot of terms and a lot of sayings towards downtown over the last 20 years have been buzzwords more than anything else. So we had to get past that. One big buzzword I'll say is when people say if we reach this magical pinnacle of having 10,000 residents, vibrancy is achieved. Vibrancy has nothing to do with 10,000 residents when the downtown area is technically four square miles. 10,000 to four square miles is the density of Orange Park.

[00:03:11] And you don't see people walking around Orange Park, right? It's a little more nuanced than that, but I will say there is a lot that is going on right now. And residential is certainly a help, but more hotels, more businesses. All that's important. Historic preservation is important. There's a lot of stuff going on in the Villa with that and especially in the North Bank. So I would say it's turned a corner, but times have changed. Now we see a decline in the amount of companies that employ office workers.

[00:03:41] So there's going to be a transition here that city leaders as well as the downtown investment authority is going to have to get a hold on and find new types of uses for existing buildings as our economy starts to change. If you were in charge, though, would you do it differently? And if so, how would you do it differently? Oh, man, if I was in charge, yeah, I'd do it. Certainly I'd do it differently. It would I would focus more on density. So I tend to say the three C's is how you create synergy.

[00:04:09] So that's clustering, complementing uses within a compact setting. And that's a planning term I've made up and I'll just throw it out there to you. But I will say this. No matter what type of use, when you complement a complementary use within a compact setting, synergy tends to happen. So if you roll down the street and you saw a Ford, you're probably going to see another car dealership near it. If you see a McDonald's, it's probably a Burger King or a Wendy's near it. If you go to the mall, Dillard's actually wants, back in the day it would have been Sears,

[00:04:39] but Dillard's actually wants the JCPenney's and the Nordstrom's and other department stores there because they create synergy and a critical mass, which creates spinoff. And so I would say if I had to do something differently, I will focus on the unique assets that Jacksonville has, the downtown Jacksonville has. It's Florida's first major urban center. We have architecture that you can't compete with.

[00:05:02] I almost like to say we're almost like a rust belt city in terms of history that happens to be in the Sun Belt with a river, a beach and economy. I tell my people up north, slavery is over. Come on back down south. We have jobs and economy here. So Jacksonville's got a lot going for it. And that's probably what I would focus more on, its assets. And then clustering that, those assets and building upon them in a dense fashion that will create synergy for more market-rated economic development. Anna, welcome. Appreciate it.

[00:05:29] We recently celebrated the 125th anniversary of the Great Fire in 1901. Only Talbert and I were there at that point. But buildings built after the fire were considered some of Jacksonville's most historic structures. The Lower Street Trio may be chief among them. Where does the Trio stand right now? And why has this project been so hard to get across the finish line? And is it going to get across the finish line? I believe it will get across the finish line.

[00:05:58] I don't think the buildings are the reason why they haven't been renovated. When you're doing development, it's a very complex structure in how you pull finances and partnerships together. And so I think that's been the largest struggle with the Trio over the last decade or so. I know there's a new ownership group in place now. I think it's going to move forward. It'll just take some time. And unfortunately, you can't count. From a development perspective, as the old team has come out, a new team has come in,

[00:06:27] and you really can't count what the old team did anymore. It's got to start over. It's got to start over. And then once they've worked those numbers out, it's going to take a few years in terms of just reconstruction and permit and things like that to get it underway. Okay. Follow-up question. Picking up on something of historic value. Is Jacksonville, in your opinion, is Jacksonville undervaluing historic preservation compared to new construction? And why is downtown historic preservation so important from your perspective? All right. So you threw a little lobball at me here. Okay.

[00:06:57] So on the front end, are we undervaluing our historic preservation, our story? Probably. But I would say there's been a change in recent years. We actually have an incentive program now that encourages adaptive reuse. And if you look at what's been adaptively reused over the last five years of what's coming online, that's significantly more than anything that's taken place in the last 20 years. We're not starting off from scratch. We've made some mistakes in the past. We can't get those mistakes back.

[00:07:26] But there are some tools that are coming forward in the future. And Ambassador Hotel is a great example of that. It's set vacant for probably 20, 30 years. And now it's going to have the Marriott tribute portfolio hotel in it. So I'm a Bomb Boy member. I certainly want to check it out when it's done. I got a lot of points. But it's that uniqueness is what's going to pull people in. We can put stick frame apartment buildings all over the place. But every city's got that. But they don't have this unique history that Jacksonville has.

[00:07:55] And the Great Fire is a reason for that. I think overall we may undervalue it. There's more we can squeeze out of our history from a cultural heritage and cultural tourism perspective. I think you've seen Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans. They've all done a great job of that. Our history is very similar to Savannah and Charleston's, except we're a large city with a better economy. We just hadn't maximized our potential yet.

[00:08:20] So they can show you what you can do once you start to maximize telling your story and finding ways to create economic opportunity around that. I like your positive attitude. Even Miami, too, with Art Deco. It wasn't the same historical era. But nevertheless, it was a very important part of the history of Miami going back to the 30s, 40s, and 50s. And they've done a very good job, I think, in preserving it. So I'm the president for the Florida Trust for Story Preservation.

[00:08:46] And our conference actually starts next week, back tomorrow, actually, for the state. And what we tend to see is every place has a unique story. Even the smallest rural place, the farm has a story that people, there's some segment of the population that's interested in that. And so the key is understanding that and taking advantage of it. And far too long in Jacksonville, that hasn't been the case. So we spend our wills a number of years. Just a few blocks away from the trio, as we were referring to, is, of course, La Villa.

[00:09:16] Different story there. La Villa used to be one of the most culturally significant neighborhoods in the South. It still is. But even today, it still seems to be trying to find its identity. And I'm wondering, for people who don't know, what was La Villa like during its peak period? Because I know you studied that. And how much of that do we see today? And are we doing the right thing in the way we're trying to redevelop? So La Villa's identity has never left. I think most of the population here isn't well ingrained on black history here in Jacksonville,

[00:09:45] and especially Gullah Geechee history. Let me know just Gullah Geechee community in Jacksonville. And for those of you who don't know what Gullah Geechee is, it's basically— I had to look it up. I'm a Gullah Geechee senator. So I'll give you a real quick one down. It's the descendants of Central and Western Africans who ended up through the transatlantic slave trade on the southeast coast, say Wilmington, North Carolina, down throughout St. Augustine, Florida, about 30 miles inland.

[00:10:10] Because the area was largely isolated during the 19th century and during the early 20th century, as people have ingrained an African culture and mixed with the culture of this area for a certain type of Creole culture. So most people don't know that history, but they know they like shrimp and grits, or they like garlic crabs, or they like going out to Mayport and getting Mayport shrimp.

[00:10:37] All these things are tied into Gullah Geechee history and heritage here. And there are a number of people who go to, say, to New Orleans, for example, and you're going to eat that jambalaya, all that stuff, crawfish and all that, not realizing— Don't forget the beignets. The beignets. Not realizing that's food that's linked to New Orleans' culinary history. That's right. We have that here, and La Villa is the epicenter of that.

[00:11:03] And I also don't think that people realize that if we never consolidated, if there was still segregation going on, technically La Villa would be the downtown of Black Jacksonville. And what we refer to as Northwest Jacksonville is the rest of the city. So really, the population there, it grew. It built out. It was a very dense, mixed-use place. If you were Christian and white, you were probably over in La Villa.

[00:11:31] So you've got a Greek—there's a Greek history there. There's a Jewish history there. African-American, of course, Gullah Geechee, Cuban, even Chinese history, near the Red Light District that was there. So very diverse cultural community that created the first documented live performance of the blues. That was in La Villa. There wasn't no New Orleans. There wasn't no Chicago. And calling it the Harlem of the South, for example, the Great Migration largely grew out of La Villa's train station.

[00:12:00] And for those people who don't know what the Great Migration is, an act of resistance here in Jacksonville for the Black population was to go north to economic opportunity when they were being paid less wages here. A lot of that took place at the train station, the Pullman porters that worked there. And so now when we even say La Villa's Harlem of the South, I normally stop people. That's incorrect. Harlem's La Villa of the North because we didn't know what was going on in the Southern culture

[00:12:28] that was happening down here back in the late 19th century, early 20th century. They saw that when we went north and took our talents with us. But it's not for Harlem or Bronzeville in Chicago to tell that story. That's our story, and we need to tell it. And La Villa's where that took place. So I would say I would compare La Villa at its height to what people tend to think that, say, New Orleans is today and what that history is. That would have been La Villa's height. Let's move on to something that will impact La Villa.

[00:12:57] It'll also impact downtown and other neighborhoods. The Emerald Trail has been touted as a deal changer. Do you think it's one of those projects that transforms everything it touches? So I don't believe in this concept of a one-trick pony or sugar daddy coming in and raining dollars upon the city and everything changes. The Emerald Trail, in the grand scheme of things, I'm saying this as a groundwork Jacksonville board member.

[00:13:25] The Emerald Trail at the end of the day is a piece of infrastructure. It's a wide sidewalk by itself. But it can be a tool, amongst many others, that can improve the quality of life of our communities and create economic opportunity within a number of historically disenfranchised communities. From that angle, any time we put investment in the community that's lacked investment, there's a need for that.

[00:13:51] I think the key question we need to be having is not around the concrete that's going to the ground. It's more or less around the policies we have currently and public policies in place to make sure that redevelopment does not happen at the expense of the communities that are already there, but instead uplifts those communities and creates an opportunity for generational prosperity and generational wealth that's passed down to the kids, to grandkids, and the great-grandkids moving forward.

[00:14:22] And, Dennis, I want to – a favorite thing of Mr. Talbert. I want to change lanes a little bit here. Talk a little bit about transportation. There's a lot of controversy around the NAVI, the JTH driverless vehicle system that was launched in 2025 as a part of the ultimate urban circular. What was the original vision of it? Has it changed?

[00:14:47] Do you see the community and political winds shifting around it, against it, pushing it? I see Michael is laughing, yeah. Only because he was at JTA for 400 years. He was at JTA and I'm a transportation planner. Which is how I, by the way, first met. And it's because he and I would go after each other. Oh, yeah. No JTA, bus rapid transit plan, RT light. Yeah, we had some issues with that. We were able to, through Metro Jacksonville back in the day,

[00:15:16] citizens were able to change what that was. And so when it comes to NAVI, I think that's kind of the same conversation we're having here. And I say that as someone who's probably the biggest transit advocate and fan here. I think in some ways it's always been like this disconnect between how JTAs envision things and what the average transit user envisions. So when it comes to transit, strip away the technology.

[00:15:40] I'm not, as a public citizen, I'm not asking for our agencies to compete against R&D out on the west coast of Silicon Valley. We just want to make sure Grandma has a bus shelter at the bus stop and the amenities and the bench to sit down. Or we just want to make sure our transit is efficient, reliable, and gets us to various destinations on time. So when I talk about NAVI, I'm thinking from that perspective.

[00:16:09] So the basic issue with mass transit is it needs to serve people in a reliable fashion that is effective and gets them from point A to point B on time. Don't care whether it's a bus, don't care whether it's rail, don't care whether it's an autonomous vehicle. So now when it comes to NAVI, I think going back 10 years now, there's a Skyway modernization program. It's kind of interesting because all the stuff we're doing now, it seems like it's regurgitated.

[00:16:39] We were doing it 10, 15 years ago and 20 years before that. No kidding. So I know I'm getting open now. And I would say the average transit user, you could replace the Skyway cars and as long and extended it out to where they needed to go or complement it with some other type of transit service that then connects people outside of downtown to where they want to go. And I think you'll find a lot of support behind that. Now, I think when you dive into driverless technology and all this again,

[00:17:08] it's starting to, we're going to an area that quite frankly may not be serving the everyday transit user. But yet, like the Skyway originally back in the 1980s, it's pretty expensive. So if you followed us at the Jackson over the years, I'm not saying anything I hadn't said the last 10 years. I could have told you 10 years ago where we're going to end up today and where we're going to end up tomorrow.

[00:17:34] It's not anything that we can necessarily overcome locally. There's a lot of things in that emerging technology world that we can't control. No surprise it's expensive. No surprise no one wants. It's not a large amount of people want to ride in a Ford Gargoyvan. But hopefully through this process, through the PD and you get this going on now, maybe we have an opportunity to kind of shift back to the basics. So that's my hope.

[00:18:02] As a veteran of JT and all of this that Ennis has experienced with me and without me, to me the essential question is this. Are we ever going to get choice riders to use mass transit in this market? And that was what I was always asking the question when I was working there, saying how do we get from those people who are what I call transit dependent, meaning they have no other form of transportation but the bus.

[00:18:31] Or the trolley, if you recall. Or of course the Skyway. But those people were saying, I'm not going to take my car. Why should I take my car and pay $4.50 a gallon for gasoline? Instead, I'm going to use mass transit. We haven't seen that. We didn't see it when we came close to $5 a gallon for gasoline back in 2022. And we're not seeing it today. The ridership on JTA apparently has still not gone up in the same manner that one would think with the cost of gasoline.

[00:19:01] Normally ridership and gasoline prices go up at about the same level. So before you can spend a lot of money on Navi or go into the U2C project or all the rest of it, the question is who are you trying to target? See, I'm going to back up and go further than that. All right. Because transit doesn't sit, doesn't rotate on the island by itself. It's not on the island by itself. So who cares what you invest in if your public policies and your land use policies aren't complementary to that transit, that type of service, right?

[00:19:30] As we used to call transit-oriented development, TOD. The whole urban course, TOD, is from streetcar lines that ran between the 19th century up to 1936. Until we start to make sure we invest in supportive land use, you're always going to have to struggle, no matter if it's commuter rail, streetcar, Navi, or a bus. And that is a discussion for some reason we've struggled with locally for a number of years. And even when it comes to the Skyway, I would always tell people, I'm not worried about getting to the beach right now.

[00:20:00] We've got a 2.5-mile system. How do we make that 2.5-mile system the best 2.5 miles it can be? And then if we get to that point, people are begged for expansion. But there's still, we're still, and you asked me, what would I change about downtown? This would be another one. Yeah. I would make sure that our public, significant public investments are coordinated with our transit investments in the downtown area.

[00:20:23] So there is a unified vision for downtown that all our public investments, no matter what agency or what entity is coming from, we're all swimming in the same direction. And that's something that we've always struggled with historically too. So you wonder why nobody's riding it? We want to pass parking lots. We don't have density in certain areas. In the areas that we do have density in where choice riders would want to go, it's not connected to it. It's not at the hospitals. It's not at the colleges.

[00:20:53] It's not at these areas. So in essence, it's not only riderless. It doesn't go to where the people want to go. Well, that answers Mike's question. If you want to attract choice riders, you need to go where choice riders want to go. And right now, that's not the case. And we also, and this is nothing, I guess JTA also needs to be tied into the rest of the city as well. But, you know, this just isn't a JTA issue. This is just a city of Jacksonville period issue. This also includes Duval County public schools.

[00:21:22] These neighborhoods where you can get the density at, we're not zoned properly or we're closing schools. We're doing things that limit development opportunities, limit the reason people want to be there. And we're dispersing those choice riders out. And then we wonder why these vehicles are rolling around empty. One of the things I used to ask all the time when I was in, I'm sorry, guys, I don't mean to dominate this, but you're on my topic. So I can't help myself. Hey, I'm a transportation guy. So we can go. Yeah. But I used to always ask the question, which is, I guess, why I was external affairs director.

[00:21:52] I said, why is it that JTA is always invited for the dessert and coffee, but we're never there for the appetizers? We're never invited to the table before the discussions begin about land use, about permits, about where we're going to go with expansion. We're only brought in after everything is settled. Then they come to JTA and say, now, how are you going to service us? And we said, where were you three years ago when you started talking about these plans?

[00:22:22] The district was one of the examples that I had used after I left where we were never brought in. JTA was never brought in for that discussion as it was going through the planning stages. And I think that's one of the issues that the city has is that transportation or mass transportation is not foremost in mind. I think communication and having a seat at the table just doesn't extend to JTA. That's generally everything that goes wrong.

[00:22:49] So when you want to know why a neighborhood is displaced or suffers from gentrification, it is because the residents of that neighborhood never had a seat at a decision-making table for its future. Exactly right. And I never asked this when it came to La Villa, but how do you deal, have we dealt with development in La Villa? If you don't have a seat at a decision-making table, you bring a folding chair. That's right. And Montgomery showed you how to use that folding chair a few years ago. For those areas that are seeing investment, Eastside's a good example of this.

[00:23:18] They saw what happened to Brooklyn. It's gone. They saw what happened to La Villa in the 1990s. You can either get involved and start to plan for your future or sit back and let somebody else plan for you. And so I think with JTA and other, not just JTA, people with downtown vision and planning efforts, there does need to be a community vision where everyone is at the table. And a unified vision comes forward from that. And now all our investments are flowing to make that vision happen.

[00:23:46] And that's something we've, Jacksonville's definitely struggled with. And if I was there during the days of Mayors Tansler and Godbold, we were plotting and planning to get federal money for the Skyway. And I've been there since then with all the controversy and disappointment. With Navi, is Jacksonville experimenting and gambling again or are we committing to something without enough accountability? Yeah, it's certainly an experiment because we're doing something that has not been done before.

[00:24:15] And so that's one of the challenges in risk when it comes to transit investment. There are things that we know have worked for a century that has got common parts and things you can find that can operate at a certain level that's more effective for tax dollars. And then we're also now in the experiment with something that we don't know. So, yeah, that's certainly a challenge.

[00:24:39] I think when you look at the Skyway, if it would have been a streetcar or a people move back in the 1980s, we might be looking at a different story here when it comes to trying to replace parts from a manufacturer that doesn't exist anymore. But Navi is certainly you're getting back into that area again just because you're experimenting with something that hasn't been done before. Okay. Let me change the lane. I can borrow everybody else's term, okay? I'm sure you've seen this, and this is pretty current here. But according to an opinion piece by A.G.

[00:25:08] Gankarski and Jack's Today, Councilman Rory Diamond is suggesting Jacksonville needs to redo its city council districts to make the current districts race neutral. If he succeeds, that might sweep away all the four districts that are currently, and this has gone back to consolidation, currently held predominantly by African-American elected officials. It's not the case with Jimmy Peluso, which is in one of those districts. But nevertheless, historically, that's been the case.

[00:25:37] As a local historian and urban planner and a person of color yourself, what are your thoughts about Diamond's proposal? I would say just be careful what you wish for. I'm a planner, so we look at demographics. We look at immigration and out-migration. Check it out. No matter how you draw lines up, there is a certain segment of population that's continuing to move to St. John's County, Clay County, Nassau County, and Bayer County. And there's another certain segment of the population that's moving in.

[00:26:05] So I don't want to say anything about race. Demographics are demographics. That'll play out long run. Ultimately, regardless of how council districts shift, I'm actually excited about Jacksonville's future being in a more diverse place in general and being able to experience different cultures. Because to me, that makes us unique amongst Northeast Florida. And there's dollars and opportunities that flow with people there, too. Thank you. I want to go back.

[00:26:31] You mentioned it earlier on about the, and I apologize, Gullard-Geechee heritage. You have written a book about that. You did say something about wearing your hat as an author. Tell us, if you don't mind even repeating, about your book, about this heritage. Obviously, it means a lot to you. And as an author, we want to hear about it. Sure. It means a lot to me. But I think as a planner, it also means a lot to Jacksonville, even for those who don't know it. Yeah.

[00:26:58] If you look at Savannah and Charleston, much of why people go there is for Gullard-Geechee cultural heritage elements. The Gullard-Geechee cultural heritage corridor commission did an economic analysis study a few years ago that showed it as a $34 billion annual economic spend in tourism. People from across the country and across the globe come into this region, this Gullard-Geechee cultural heritage corridor,

[00:27:23] to spend money at the cultural heritage sites, the restaurants, the boutique shops. And Jacksonville happens to be the largest city within the corridor and has the largest concentration of Gullard-Geechee descendants in the country. Really? Yes. There's an obvious economic opportunity, especially when we're talking about ways to revitalize long-distressed urban core communities.

[00:27:49] Maybe I'm not – I don't go to Harvard and become a doctor, but, you know, there's mustard-based barbecue sauce that grandmas pass down and great-grandmas pass down. There's people who would pay their firstborn child for a taste of that stuff. And they come to this area seeking these types of foods. We are known for our garlic crabs, and I didn't even know that until I had a family reunion here. And the old-timers in my family, they came in from across the country. It was like, hey, man, where are the crabs? I'm like, red lobster down the street.

[00:28:20] And they end up, they end up by this garlic crab spot. And I go to the downtown hotel. I got 100 relatives popping crabs, a seafood boil right in the middle of the hotel lobby. And all I can see is the girl behind the registration desk. And I'm like, hey, I know we all black. We didn't worry about you. Come on. I'm sorry, but I will tell you this. It's going to smell in the morning.

[00:28:44] But I say that to say it's important because that's Jacksonville's heritage in history. La Villa was an example of that. And so sometimes because we don't understand our own past and our own assets, sometimes we ruin those assets. So this book, it comes from a lot of research over the years, but it's also positioned to allow for people to learn in a different type of way. So it's really an urban planning book, too.

[00:29:13] Learning how certain neighborhoods were created, Gullah Geechee culture, what type of occupations that bought people here, and how that is spanned off into certain types of architectural forms that we have here or certain types of foods. And it actually ends with a chapter on here are destinations, museums, parks, restaurants, different places you can go and start to realize, oh, this music I'm listening to, that's tied back into Jacksonville. Here's in history.

[00:29:41] And that's a contribution we have given to society. And I hope that as this continues to happen, this will create opportunities for a multitude of people in Jacksonville to take advantage of their own story, the city story. And that is the element that is largely missing when it comes to downtown talk or revitalization in different neighborhoods or creating job opportunities.

[00:30:09] We have our own skills and we have our own history that is unique that people care about and they're coming here. And we're not taking advantage of that. So the name of the book is? Jacksonville's Gullah Geechee Heritage. Good. I have to make, I want to do this. When you were talking about it earlier, you talked about shrimp and grits. Yes. Okay. So you're saying that is one of those issues? One pot meal. I'll tell you exactly how that happens, right?

[00:30:33] So if you go back to slavery, you're enslaved, you're typically, we're likely given a ration from the enslaver. So your ration may have been grits. But you got 20, 30 people you need to feed. So what is the easy way to, in this area, to find food? You don't need money to go down in these creeks or the water to find foods.

[00:30:56] So you start to have these different meals that you take a hodgepodge of ingredients and it nourishes people against all odds. You don't need money to survive. And so shrimp and grits is an example of that. Where I'm going with this is the first time I had shrimp grits is a friend of mine. It had to be about 20 years ago. And she served it and it became a big thing. You go into restaurants now. I now try them everywhere. And every restaurant has a different recipe.

[00:31:26] And it's, so what started out way back now has become top drawer in restaurants. Now imagine if you take that dish and now you cook it with a story of why it's tied to this area. Then what happens is people in San Francisco or people in Chicago or people in New York, when they come down to Florida, they want shrimp grits from here because this is authentic. You go to Memphis because you want barbecue.

[00:31:56] Their barbecue ain't got nothing compared to ours. But they promoted that story. Kansas City the same way. Yeah, Kansas City, whatever. Our barbecue crushes theirs. But people go there because they've told that cultural heritage story of how that came to be there. And so we have an opportunity here at our foods as well. Okay, I have to ask. Is there a Gulchigichi restaurant that you can get good shrimp and grits? Well, yeah. I would definitely check out like Celestia's Coastal Cuisine up on like it's Dunn Avenue in a U.S.

[00:32:25] One kind of heading out towards Callahan. That's a great spot for shrimp and grits, seafood bowls, and a lot of the dishes. Art Jenrette used to do that real well. Yeah, he did. Yeah. Art was very good. Yeah, I was sad when you closed the restaurant down there in San Marco. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. I'm going to check it out. I'm a shrimp and grits on the store. I guess it is. And I am too. And this has been a master class. It really has been of Jacksonville history as well as current events. And I want to thank you on behalf of Mike.

[00:32:53] And Mike, we thank you very much for coming in and doing the show with us. Absolutely. No problem. No problem. Anytime. All right. It's good to have you. Be careful what you wish for. We'll have you back. I'll come back. I'll come back. Thank you all very much for joining us. And of course, we want to thank our donors, our very generous donors who help us keep the lights on and the cameras rolling. And please catch Mike's on Mike on your favorite podcast platform. And we'll see you all again next time. Bye-bye.

[00:33:16] Mike's on Mike with Mike Tolbert, Mike Hightower, and Mike Miller can be found on your favorite podcasting platform, Facebook, and YouTube. Visit the website at Mike's on Mike dot com. Join us next time for more conversation with Mike's on Mike. Mike.