Layer five, plat
San Marco
was South Jacksonville
This is the most deliberate naming in the catalogue and the most commercial. It also shows the one mechanism by which a small name becomes a large one without anybody renaming anything.
What is recorded
- Language
- Italian, borrowed from Venice
- Year fixed
- 1925
- Fixed by
- Telfair Stockton, a developer, on about eighty acres
- There now
- A commercial square and the surrounding district on the south bank
In 1925 Telfair Stockton began developing about eighty acres on the south bank, and named it after the square in Venice. The square here was laid out by the end of 1926.
Two things made the timing work. A bridge across the river had opened in 1921, which put the south bank within reach of the center in a way it had not been. And the Florida land boom of the middle 1920s supplied the money and the appetite.
Then, in 1932, the separate municipality of South Jacksonville was annexed into the city, and the name San Marco spread outward from the eighty acres to cover much of the former town.
The mechanism worth taking away
A name given to a subdivision can end up naming a district many times larger than the subdivision, and the step that does it is usually annexation, not renaming.
Nobody decided that San Marco should mean what it means now. A developer named a plat, the plat became the recognizable center of the area, the surrounding municipality lost its own government, and the plat name filled the space the municipality's name vacated. That sequence explains a great many neighborhood boundaries that otherwise look arbitrary.
The same mechanism appears twice more in this catalogue: at Murray Hill, annexed in 1925, and at the largest scale of all in 1968, when one city name came to cover an entire county.
What the borrowing was for
Not scholarship. A Venetian name on a Florida subdivision in 1925 is marketing, and it belongs to a recognizable moment when American developers reached for Mediterranean names and forms to sell land.
This register says that plainly rather than dressing it up, and it also declines the opposite move of sneering at it. The name was chosen to make a place desirable, it worked, and a hundred years later it is simply what the district is called. Both halves are true.
The part that is thinner than it looks
The 1925 start, the eighty acres and the square laid out by the end of 1926 come from local historical writing rather than from a document this register has pulled. There is no federal historic district here to supply a nomination, which is exactly why the sourcing on this entry is weaker than on Riverside.
A reader who wants it firmer should go to the plat books for the subdivision and to the municipal record of the 1932 annexation. Checking a name says where both live.
What is not here
No shops, no restaurants, no businesses of any kind are named on this page or anywhere on this site. The square is recorded as a square. What trades on it is not this publication's subject and never will be.