STATE

Jacksonville’s old City Hall Annex brought down (with video)

Tessa Duvall
tessa.duvall@jacksonville.com
The old City Hall building, more recently known as the City Hall Annex, is imploded Sunday morning in Jacksonville.  [Will Dickey/Florida Times-Union]

JACKSONVILLE — For a few moments Sunday morning, downtown Jacksonville was eerily quiet.

But that calm — just after 8 a.m. — came to an abrupt end with the blare of a warning horn and the sharp crack of the explosion that would reduce Jacksonville’s old City Hall Annex to a pile of rubble.

Having watched from nearby parking garages, apartments and offices, spectators whooped and cheered as the dust cloud enveloped where the building had stood not even 20 seconds earlier.

The 15-story, mid-century modern building at 220 E. Bay Street opened in 1960, a time when it was the fifth-tallest building in Jacksonville. It was City Hall until 1997, until the reopening of the St. James Building that is still home to City Council and the Mayor’s Office today. It was where the vote on the city’s consolidation took place, and the one where the deal to bring the Jaguars to Jacksonville was approved.

There was no designated public viewing area, but that didn’t stop the party for Justin Hearon and his friends. Hearon, who lives in Jacksonville Beach, scouted the downtown area for a good viewing spot on Friday, and even tried with no luck to get a room at the Hyatt right next to the implosion site.

After settling on a parking garage at the corner of Bay and Main Streets, Hearon and his three friends arrived at 6:45 a.m. for their morning tailgate, complete with camp chairs, beer and music turned up.

Hearon said it’s not the kind of sight a person gets to see often, and “I thought it’d be cool.”

Jordan Pence, who watched from the same garage as Hearon, said he remembers when his dad took him to see a building implode roughly 20 years ago.

“I was a little kid, and I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” Pence said of the experience.

He came equipped with a tripod and his nice camera to capture the action. As the dust cloud began to drift away and the outline of the Berkman came back into view, Pence watched the video he’d just captured.

“It’s crazy how two minutes ago there was a building there,” Pence said.

Tessa Duvall writes for the Florida Times-Union.