by Tim Gilmore

The first floor of this house that once held the offices of Klutho’s movie studios resonates with the silence of 1,400 violins hanging from ceilings, hanging in rows along the walls, of cellos, of a century-old Stroviol—a violin attached to a metal resonator and horn, invented by Johannes Matthias Augustus Stroh in 1899—of indigenous South American stringed instruments, of Chinese lutes and fiddles like the yuequin, sometimes called the moon lute, and the erhu, the two-stringed bowed spike fiddle, of banjos, American flutes, bongos, a saxophone, electric guitars, harps and Victrolas.

Miguel Melenchon has lived in this old house for 15 years, but he’s run his Jacksonville violin shop—making, selling, renting and buying violins and other instruments—for almost three decades. He’d planned to move to Atlanta before the 1996 Olympics, but says Atlanta was too crazy and didn’t have a beach. Only recently has he moved his business from a Beach Boulevard strip mall to his home in Springfield. He lives on the second floor.

In 1978, Miguel was traveling through Italy from his home in Gerona, Spain, by the French border, with his brother Rafaelo and some friends. Telling the story now, he laughs that they all wore their hair long. As they ambled through Cremona, among arches, terra cotta roof tiles, the 700-year-old brick bell tower, a stranger stopped his bicycle, excited to see them.

The stranger called them over. They were wary, but he seemed friendly. “You don’t remember,” he said, “but last year, you gave me a ride in Spain.” Miguel had forgotten, but the friends followed the stranger and his Old World hospitality to his house. His roommate was a violin maker. Miguel, who had a four-year degree in mechanical engineering, loved the careful elegance of the craft and the intricacies of acoustics in old wood. Almost right away, he decided he wanted to make violins. Surprising and strange, Miguel says, “but that’s life.”

Though he gleefully shares pictures of the open-air studio stages that once stood out back, he’s much more absorbed in the woods of violins he holds gently and lovingly, each with their own architecture, their own unknowable histories, inscrutable biographies.

He shows me how 17th century violins almost inevitably have newer necks, since when the Classical period followed the Baroque in about 1750, violins needed longer and thinner necks to increase tension, amplifying ground tone and heightening pitch. His oldest violin was made by Antonio Mariana in Pesaro in 1664. Laughing, he says, “People think Classical music is old. Classical is the new music that replaced the Baroque.”

In a living room with thick red curtains and carmine-colored walls, a silver chandelier hangs resolutely, surrounded by thickly textured oil paintings of conquistadors and horses, expansive mirrors in ormolu frames. Miguel points out one painting where neither rider nor steed has eyes. “The eyes and the hands,” he says, “are the hardest to paint.”

The house, built in 1911 for someone named Nannie Hall, predated architect Henry John Klutho’s film studios. Klutho came to Jax from New York in 1901, having read how the Great Fire had reduced the town to ruins, soon quoting the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” By World War I, the best buildings of the city’s new skyline were Klutho’s creations.

The “land of the blind,” however, would not recognize its king. Klutho would live on into his 90s, to 1964, decades after his adopted hometown turned its back on his art, lamenting that the movie studios “all left for Los Angeles, because people there had more vision.”

By 1916, more than 30 film studios operated in Jacksonville. Film companies shot nearly 300 movies here. When Klutho opened his large filmmaking complex between Main and Laura Streets, from West Eighth to West Ninth, in March 1917, the venture seemed a sure bet. The complex would include two of his architectural masterpieces—the Klutho Apartments, to house actors, and his personal residence.

Within three months, however, Jacksonville elected a new mayor, John W. Martin, who’d campaigned on running the movie studios out of town. They were noisy and made their own rules and their morals were loose. Martin succeeded. Most of the moviemakers went west to a new place called Hollywood. Klutho, however, followed his initial sunk cost with more investment.

He turned Nannie Hall’s house into his studio offices, attached a new indoor studio building and built outdoor stages with retractable shades in back. Vernon Eldred, who built sets and props, lived upstairs with his wife Minnie. Five years later, Klutho’s studios folded and Klutho soon turned the house and other studio buildings into apartments.

In the 1970s, a church planned to demolish the Klutho house for a parking lot. The old architect had been dead for about a decade. Decades earlier, he’d moved the house around the corner from Main Street to West Ninth, the other side of his old studio offices, Nannie Hall’s old house. Mercer Lee Replogle, who made the Hall house home from the 1950s through the early 2000s, bought the Klutho house next door, saved it from demolition and let her cats live there.

An unfinished violin lies on a counter without strings, its f-holes strangely exposed. Gently, dexterously, Miguel points out the small cross at the back of the neck, his signature since 1990. “Doesn’t mean I go to church every day,” he laughs. The sides and back of the violin are made of maple, the top of bristlecone pine. “It’s very important,” Miguel says. “The pine vibrates faster than the maple.”

He motions for me to follow, then rushes through the shop to the back, where he points out two large chunks of bristlecone pine, the oldest pinewood, the longest living, slowest growing and most resilient. This particular wood, he says, is only 1,700 years old, while the oldest bristlecone pines, like the famous Methuselah in California’s Eastern Sierra, possibly the oldest living tree on earth, are close to 5,000.

In awe at this tree that relies on fire to release seeds from its cone and propagate, Miguel says, “Without fire, no new life.” Klutho could have said the same when the Great Fire brought him south.

A once bustling, Navy neighborhood has faded into the forest
by Tim Gilmore

Dewey Park was once a bustling community of Navy families just west beyond the runways of NAS Jacksonville. Down 120th Street, down what once was Norman Street, broom sedge stands tall and ragged from old brick-fronted culverts where driveways once rolled up to tract houses and where now dirt bike paths coarse through the woods. To the right languishes the abandoned wastewater treatment plant.

March 1, 1963, the front page of The Florida Times-Union said Dewey Park, “300-unit Navy housing project at Yukon,” would close in four months to the day. Enlisted families living here, said the Navy, “will have to find housing in the local area, since there is little other official housing available.”

Just 20 years old, Dewey Park was built in 1941 and ’42. A Navy spokesman said the houses were filled to capacity, but the Navy had “no plans for additional federal housing to accommodate the personnel who will be displaced.” Old brick cisterns drop straight down, doorless in the forest floor, ringed with Christmas ferns and greenbriers. A concrete block pumphouse waits in the woods, old iron pipes, valves, gears, vines dangling dead.

“A twist of the wrist and your clean, pure, soft, aerated water flows out of your faucet. No further thought is given to the when, where and how.” So reported The Jax Air News when Dewey Park’s new water treatment plant came online in 1958.

The new plant increased the base’s water supply by 1,500 gallons per minute. The Navy drilled 900 feet straight down into the Floridan Aquifer, from which the plant brought water at 2,000 gallons per minute up to an aerator, “at which oxygen is added to the water and hydrogen sulphide. In this way, the offensive smelling gas is driven off.”

Although the new plant increased water to Naval Air Station Jax, the Air News warns, “it does not necessarily mean that there is water to waste and personnel must still conserve on the use of water.” Around these old structures, the ground tilts up, portals dropping underground at regular intervals. Wooden structures encase bearings and pipes and wheels and valves higher up on raised concrete tableland.

On April 20, 1943, “Aviation Machinist Mate Lawrence Gran and Mrs. Gran” fled their burning house in brand-new Dewey Park. The younger brother of “Mrs. Gran,” however, Harry Bruce Bailey, didn’t make it out. Naval Air Station firetrucks put out the blaze and transported 13 year old Harry to the station dispensary where someone pronounced him Dead on Arrival.

On September 2, 1954, “Mrs. Charles Swift, wife of the leading chief” at the Naval post office, sat tying her six year old son Dolph’s shoes, while 11 year old Phillip looked in the mirror that topped his chest of drawers and combed his hair. The boys wore crew cuts and tucked-in short-sleeved button-up shirts. A school bus would soon pick them up from Dewey Park and bring them, this first day of the schoolyear, to Venetia Elementary School.

On December 3, 1959, a “goodwill caravan” of 16 girls, members of Brownie Troop 106 of Dewey Park, lined up with troop leaders June Sapp and Helen Porter. The girls stood by a red toy wagon, a Radio Flyer, ready to bring a “complete Thanksgiving dinner to a deserving neighborhood family.” The scouts had taken a pledge “to help other people every day.”

When a grease fire lit up her Dewey Park house in October 1960, “Mrs. Crawford Johnson, wife of Crawford Johnson,” fled “panic stricken” from the house, screaming “that her baby” was “still inside.” Squadron Petty Officer Donald Reynolds, who lived next door, and whom The Jax Air News called “the hero-sailor,” rushed into the house, found “the infant in a smoke-filled bedroom and carried him to safety.”

The opening pages to Tom Wolfe’s 1979 novel The Right Stuff speak of a nearby plane crash. When “the ring at the front door” sounds, each Navy wife knows, the man standing there would have “come to inform her that unfortunately something has happened out there, and her husband’s body now lies incinerated in the swamps, or the pines, or the palmetto grass, ‘burned beyond recognition.’”

Fourteen years before, in November 1969, aboard the Apollo 12 mission, Pete Conrad became the third human being to walk on the surface of the moon, he found the downed plane, out back of Dewey Park. “In the front seat was all that was left of his friend Bud Jennings. Bud Jennings, an amiable fellow, a promising young fighter pilot, was now a horrible roasted hulk—with no head. His head was completely gone, apparently torn off the spinal column like a pineapple off a stalk, except that it was nowhere to be found.”

“In the early 1950s,” writes Vice Admiral Robert F. Dunn, U.S. Navy (Retired), in a 2011 peer-reviewed article in The Navy War College Review, “the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were suffering near-catastrophic accident rates. In 1954 alone, the Navy/Marine Corps accident rate was almost 55 major mishaps per 100,000 flight hours, meaning that 776 aircraft and 535 aviators were lost.”

From a distance it looks like a natural structure, an earthen mound, or some Mayan ruin grown over by the earth. The rhythms in the blocks of the concrete walls appear beneath the barely broken green of climbing ferns. Closer still, an entryway appears, a way into this tall wide circle. Pines grow slender inside the circle, a floor of fallen oak leaves and ferns. This wall was sound baffling around the pumps that once stood beneath a water tower. In a 1960 aerial photo, no water tower stood in these walls, but a 1943 aerial showed just that: a water tower inside, its shadow to the west.

The raised platform of the storage tank beside the water tower, with its strange round wall, stood almost in the back yards of the houses of Dewey Park. It’s strange to think of how much life occurred out here. Perhaps the wheels of toy cars or the arm of a child’s doll yet wait out here in the undergrowth and shadows.