Practical
Arriving, and the Size of This City
The names in this register are spread across a city that consolidated with an entire county in 1968. Two entries in the catalogue are twenty five miles apart and both are inside the city limits. Plan around that and nothing else here will surprise you.
The one fact that changes a visit
Because of the 1968 consolidation, the city and Duval County are the same jurisdiction, which makes this the largest city by area in the contiguous United States.
The practical consequence is not civic trivia. It is that "in Jacksonville" carries no information about distance. Mandarin and Baldwin are both in Jacksonville and are nowhere near each other. A reader who plans a day around three entries in this catalogue without looking at where they are will spend the day driving.
How to group the catalogue geographically
The register is filed by naming layer, not by geography, because the layer is what the publication is about. For anybody actually moving around, the useful grouping is different, so here it is once.
| Roughly where | Entries | What they have in common |
|---|---|---|
| The oldest center and the north bank | Jacksonville 1822, Cowford, Wacca Pilatka, Talleyrand | The original twenty blocks and the crossing they were surveyed beside |
| The near west, walkable together | Riverside, Murray Hill | Two plat districts with commercial streets, close enough to combine |
| The south bank | St. Nicholas, San Marco | Both reachable from the center over one bridge, and adjacent to each other |
| Far south and far west | Mandarin, Baldwin | Each a substantial drive from the center and from each other |
Four groups. The first three are each a coherent outing. The fourth is not an outing, it is two separate errands.
What this page will not do
It will not recommend anywhere to stay, eat or go, will not rank anything, and will not tell you how long to spend. Every district above is a residential or working part of a real city, and the entries about them are about their names.
Nor does this page discuss how to travel here beyond what follows. There is a fare lookup on this site, it lives on its own page, and that is the extent of it.
The fare lookup, and why it is not on this page
It used to be normal to put a search box on the practical page, and this site deliberately does not.
Every editorial page here, including this one, is written to be useful whether or not anybody ever buys anything. Putting a fare form next to a paragraph about distances would make the paragraph read like a lead-in to a purchase. So the form sits alone, one click away, with the commission disclosed beside it: the fare search.
Getting around, in two sentences
There is no rail transit and the bus network is not built for crossing a county this size quickly, so most visitors drive. That is a statement about the geography created in 1968, not a recommendation, and it is the last practical thing this publication has to say.