The Kartouche Building at 618 W. Forsyth Street in downtown Jacksonville, is one of a handful of buildings that survived the LaVilla demolition. That reprieve has now ended. The city has approved a demolition permit on the building and demolition is scheduled to begin Monday.
Depending on who you ask, the building is between 106 and 110 years old, city records are a little fuzzy on that. Hell, that’s a story in and of itself right there, that yarn aside, the Kartouche holds a lot of history within it’s slate blue bricks, and pine timbered walls.
The Eagle Laundry Company was this building’s original tenant of record, in 1913, back when it’s bricks were tan, not slate blue. At that time the area was home to a large Greek and Syrian community. The community was so large that the Greek and Syrian Club founded by A.K. Carazar in 1915 needed a larger space. They moved into what was then known as the Eagle Laundry Building in 1920. The club’s original location became the home of the Acropolis Club.
The Hart Furniture Co. took over the building in the 1930s.
In the 1940s and 1950s it was home to an assortment of insurance companies. There were intermittent periods that city directories list it as being vacant. In the mid 1970s the building became home to Grant Television & Appliances Inc. Grant was the last tenant until the “Nightclub Era began.
By the 1990s it was home to the Paradome, a Latin, Hip Hop club.
1994/95 The Milk Bar, named for the lounge in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, moved from the basement of the old Furchgott’s Department Store building, merging with Paradome, becoming The Milk Bar at Paradome. That was the first night I stepped inside the building as I had followed The Milk Bar there.
1999 the name was changed to 618 and later, DV8 and lastly, Kartouche, an urban hip-hop club. That’s where the building received its most recent fame outside of Jax. Super Bowl came to town in February 2005. Kartouche was the site of the Kings of the South Super Bowl party featuring Trick Daddy and Ludacris. There was also R. Kelly’s Chocolate Factory Party at Kartouche, with; Ja Rule, Fat Man Scoop and Cedric the Entertainer. The building has been vacant since.
In 2015 it became part of the Outings Project designed to bring art from the Cummer’s collection to the street. A large reproduction of the painting “Young Love” by William Adolphe Bouguereau was pasted to the side of the building.
By 2019 that pasting had faded and Art Republic commissioned Pixel Pancho to paint a mural, Vulgus Vult Decipi Ergo Decipiatur “The world wants to be fooled, so let it be fooled.” The mural still stands, but Monday the building will fall.
The building had been listed on the Jacksonville Historical Society’s list of the city’s most endangered buildings but had not been designated historic. The city issued a permit July 23 for Elev8, owned by Ben Pfotenhauer, to take down the building at a cost of $49,500. Pfotenhauer estimates the project will take a week. Plans are to recycle much of the building, salvaging bricks and old timbers. The site is the proposed location for a Daily’s gas station and convenience store.
