The Avondale Neighborhood Guide

What it actually feels like to live in Avondale

Avondale feels like a small town that someone tucked inside a city. Brick sidewalks under live oaks, joggers cutting through Memorial Park at sunrise, retrievers tied up outside Bold Bean while their owners chase a flat white, and a steady weekend parade of strollers and bikes moving between the Shoppes and the river. The houses sit close to the street with deep porches, so you actually meet your neighbors. Residents skew a mix of professionals who want a short downtown commute, empty-nesters who traded suburban square footage for character and walkability, and young families who put up with smaller closets to live in an A-rated elementary zone. Weekends look like brunch at Biscottis, the farmers market season at Riverside Arts Market a mile north, a 5K through the historic district, and dinner at Orsay or The Brick. It's the closest thing Jacksonville has to a true urban neighborhood with Old Florida bones.

How Avondale came to be

Avondale was platted in 1920 by a group of well-heeled Jacksonville investors who pitched it as 'Riverside's Residential Ideal' — a planned extension of the older Riverside neighborhood just to the east, designed for the city's growing professional class. An Ohio landscape architect laid out the gently curving streets and sixteen small parks, and developers wrote in deed restrictions to lock in the architectural character. The neighborhood filled in fast during the Florida land boom of the 1920s, then froze in time when the boom collapsed in 1926, leaving an unusually intact collection of Mediterranean Revival and Tudor homes. In 1989 the Avondale Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2010 the American Planning Association named the combined Riverside Avondale district one of the top 10 Great Neighborhoods in America. Today Riverside Avondale Preservation (RAP) actively reviews exterior changes inside the district to keep that 100-year-old fabric intact.

What you'll see on the streets

Housing stock is overwhelmingly pre-1940, with the heaviest concentration of Mediterranean Revival, Spanish Eclectic, Tudor Revival, Colonial Revival, and Craftsman bungalows you'll find in Northeast Florida. Most homes run 1,400 to 3,000 square feet, two stories with original hardwoods, plaster walls, and tile or barrel-clay roofs on the Spanish stock. Riverfront blocks along Richmond and St. Johns Avenue hold the larger estate homes — 4,000+ sf, gated drives, deep-water docks. Watch-outs are predictable for a century-old neighborhood: original cast-iron drain stacks, knob-and-tube wiring that wasn't replaced in earlier renovations, single-pane wood windows (RAP rules limit replacement options inside the historic overlay), and the occasional foundation settlement. Roof age and electrical panel age are the two line items I push hardest on during inspection. The upside: a well-maintained Avondale home in original style appreciates faster than its square footage would suggest in any other Jacksonville zip.

Where to eat and drink

Dining is the reason a lot of buyers fall in love with Avondale on the first showing. The Shoppes of Avondale on St. Johns Avenue is the spine — Biscottis for brunch, Restaurant Orsay for date night, and The Brick for live music and a long bar. A few blocks east in Five Points (still walkable for most of the district) the rotation expands: Hawkers for cheap Asian street food when you don't want to cook, The Bearded Pig for BBQ and a beer garden, Mossfire for Southwestern, and Hoptinger when you want a craft beer and a porch. Bold Bean Coffee Roasters anchors the morning routine, and Edgewood Bakery a little west of the district has been doing cinnamon rolls since 1947. Most of these are independent — chain restaurants don't survive long inside the historic district.