Totheir restaurant, Anna DeLoach's family picked a place with a future -- and a past. They went downtown, starting Happy Chefs three years ago on a street they hoped could join the "24-hour downtown" politicians talked about.
After theng, DeLoach's father told her about another business that served diners in the same neighborhood before the Great Depression.
It was her grandmother's restaurant.
"I just felt like it completed a circle," said DeLoach, who runs the restaurant bakery.
As waves of new investment reach beyond Jacksonville's suburbs into long-dormant urban neighborhoods, residents are finding the city's future bumping into their past in subtle, sometimes personal, ways.
New evidence of that will come this year from the U.S. Census Bureau.
For the first time in decades, the national head count held every 10 years will show that the growth reshaping Florida is resurrecting part of Jacksonville's aging inner city as well as nurturing perennial new suburbs. It's a dramatic, though incomplete, reversal for a part of town that suffered declining population for decades and led Northeast Florida in problems from welfare dependency to syphilis and severe mental illness.
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In the 1900s, the trolley was the way people travelled between downtown and new suburbs like Springfield and Riverside.
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The snapshot created by last year's census, reduced to columns of digits and tract numbers, will also capture a historic coincidence. At the start of a new century, it will quantify a Jacksonville where subjects from downtown rebuilding to suburban expansion and mass transit carry echoes of decisions that shaped the city's last century.
Even in a computerized new century, it will be summer before most of the census figures are available. The only data released so far deals with statewide population, which grew 23 percent -- to almost 16 million people -- in 10 years.
But the link between past and future seems clear enough to some people whose neighborhoods were abandoned in favor of new subdivisions years ago. And it is more poignant because the urban areas left farthest behind represented the heart of Jacksonville once, even areas that were stylish suburbs of the 1900s, 1920s, and later.
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Steamships and riverboats moved people up and down the St. Johns River in the 1900s. River taxis move people around downtown now.
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"It's ironic that what Jacksonville used to be is what Jacksonville is trying to become now," said David Swearingen.
For 20 years Swearingen, a locksmith who owns a pay-phone company, has tended his 1908-vintage home in Springfield and waited for the neighborhood to rebound from decay and crime that nearly swallowed it whole. Last year, builders started constructing historically accurate new homes there for the first time, asking $100,000 and up from buyers who want the convenience of living a few blocks outside downtown.
The census won't show those new homes; most weren't even started when the head count was performed last April. But it will show why they were built, and why about 750 condominiums, apartments and townhomes are under construction or planned immediately around downtown.
It will show that some of the homes held by absentee landlords and valued at less than half their suburban counterparts in 1990 have been snapped up and rehabbed by bargain-hunters -- some who bought houses for less than $20,000. It will show that the core city, areas from Riverside to Springfield and Brentwood whose population fell by almost 50 percent from 1970 to 1990, includes neighborhoods where growth has brought more affluent white-collar residents.
It will also show blank spots where the city bulldozed most of LaVilla, the historic but decayed downtown area where close to 1,000 people lived a decade ago. While the 24-hour downtown city leaders dreamed of then is still a dream, the past year of development plans has helped fuel hope.
"We love cities and downtowns," said DeLoach, whose family recently sold its restaurant, but kept the bakery.
Finding meaning in the census involves deciphering a numbing array of factoids on subjects from ancestry and multi-racialism to grandparents raising small children and the number of people with second mortgages. Most data comes from a 53-point survey sent last spring to a representative sampling of Americans, while basic information such as age and sex of residents comes from questionnaires sent, in theory, to everyone.
While demographers try to estimate growth in between the censuses, the results of the actual head-count often show the experts miscalculated. Florida's leading demographic office, for example, last year produced an estimate of the state's population that was 650,000 people fewer than the 2000 census findings. In some projections, Florida wasn't supposed to have 16 million people until sometime after 2005.
The gap between those estimates and census findings makes it hard to predict the detailed findings that will come out this summer. Northeast Florida's growth rate had been thought to mirror the entire state, for example, but the statewide growth estimate turned out to be about 30 percent less than the census results.
It's harder to get accurate estimates for smaller groups of people, like the 1.1 million population in Duval, Clay, Nassau and St. Johns counties. Demographers' work depends a lot on broad, overall patterns, and it's easier for a single city or county to deviate from those growth rates than an entire state.
The detailed census findings will become building blocks of political redistricting schemes; government schedules for changing bus or sewer or park services; and countless plans for launching, growing or cutting back businesses.
Some results are such foregone conclusions -- rocket-fast growth of neighborhoods between the Southside and the Beaches; emerging suburban markets from St. Augustine to Fernandina Beach -- that people aren't waiting for the obvious to be confirmed.
Last month, Ray Nasrallah moved his family owned American Import Lighting Co. to a spot on Beach Boulevard picked to capitalize on home-building in three counties.
"We think this location is going to be good for at least the next 20 years," said Nasrallah, who moved east of the still-unfinished Florida 9A. He hopes to snag more customers from subdivisions between Butler and Atlantic boulevards, an area where thousands of homes have been built in the last few years. By moving his shop close to the highway that loops around the city, he expects to gradually draw more customers from adjacent counties, from real estate hot spots like County Road 210 in St. Johns and Amelia Island in Nassau.
Keeping up with change is an imperative for Nasrallah's company, which moved from San Marco to a spot near the west end of Beach Boulevard in 1980, when that was a prime location.
It's not a new, or even modern, idea. In the 1900s his father and uncle, Syrian immigrants who came to Jacksonville during a growth boom,d their wholesale grocery in the suburb of their day, Springfield.
There will be a new hot market after this, too.
"The city has grown in a lot of ways," Nasrallah said. "They'ved a lot of vistas."
