When they tore down the Jones College building more was lost than the last location of a college that had served Jacksonville for 99 years. Before it was Jones College it was The Edgewood Theater.
The Edgewood Theater was the first movie theater in Murray Hill, predating the Murray Hill Theater by 2 years. The Edgewood opened in 1947, the Saturday before Easter. California was the first film screened. It was a western, directed by John Farrow, starring Ray Milland, Barbara Stanwyck, and Barry Fitzgerald.
Two thousand people attended the venue’s inaugural festivities, but only half were lucky enough to get tickets that night. Mayor C. Frank Whitehead was present. The 75-member Robert E. Lee High School Band.provided music for the occasion and local radio station WJHP broadcast the event live from the lobby.
The Edgewood was described as a large, garden-style theater. According to Bill Foley, the late, beloved Jacksonville historian, the Edgewood claimed to be the first River City theater to provide push-back chairs which allowed audience members to continue to sit comfortably while others moved by them. The Edgewood was also the first suburban theater in Jacksonville to sell buttered popcorn. And the Edgewood was among the first in Jacksonville to have a soft drink dispenser. They sold three flavors, purple, green, and orange.
What a time to be a kid on a Saturday morning at the Edgewood Theater, enjoying a kiddy matinee for 14 cents! Imagine the stories that building could tell, the memories that were made there, the fun, the joy, and the excitement experienced there.
And we tore it down! We tore down our history to build, for all intents and purposes, closets for people who have so much stuff that they can’t fit it all in their homes.
The former location of Jones College and The Edgewood Theater is now an empty lot where preparations are underway to begin construction of another self storage facility.
There are approximately 168 public storage facilities in Jacksonville already. There are 12 located less than five miles from 1195 South Edgewood. None have a declared occupancy rate above 77%.
We build storage facilities that we don’t need to store stuff that we don’t need.
We tear down buildings that provide things, in this case, The Edgewood Theater provided entertainment, as did the various clubs that preceded the buildings final occupant, Jones College. Jones College provide higher education for nearly 100 years, its final 26 years within the former Edgewood Theater building.
That building is gone and will soon be replaced by a building full of closets for people to store stuff.
Stuff that matters so little that once it’s in storage its owners often forget all about it, and sometimes they forget to pay, an occurrence that happens so often there is a cable TV show about it called, Storage Wars. The series is based on the common practice of auctioning off the contents of storage units when the renter doesn’t pay. Storage Wars is now in its 12th season!
12 seasons of people buying stuff that other people paid to store in a self storage facility, or at least paid until they stopped paying. The new owners will sell that stuff to other people and if those people have no place to store that stuff they’ll get a self storage unit too.
I love the United States of America but it is things like this that make much of the rest of the world shake their heads in bewilderment over us.
Sure other countries have “bought”into consumerism and accumulation of things, but none do it to our level..
The United States is home to 90 percent of the world’s self-storage facilities, or roughly 54,000 of the 60,000 facilities in the world. Self storage annual industry revenue in the US is $38 billion, with nearly 5 billion in new construction last year alone.
Meanwhile, monetary charitable giving in the US declined for the second year in a row, likewise donations to the Salvation Army, Goodwill and similar thrift operations have also declined.
We have turned away from sharing and giving, to hoarding, hoarding so much we can’t store it all within our homes.
We hoard to such an extent we now hoard self storage facilities.
12 within 5 miles of the former Edgewood Theater, and number 13 is coming soon, to a former theater near you.