INSPIRATION / OUTEAST, JACKSONVILLE
Suzanne Pickett
A future
with room
to stay.
Art, homes and the people who make a neighborhood worth caring about.
By Rob Urban
A neighborhood can attract investment and still lose something essential. The buildings improve, the attention arrives, and the people who kept the place alive discover that they can no longer afford to remain.
Suzanne Pickett’s work in Jacksonville asks a more demanding question: how can the Eastside gain opportunity while its longtime residents gain the ability to stay?
She brings an artist’s eye and a neighbor’s connection to that question. Jacksonville Today’s 2022 reporting describes her return to the neighborhood where she grew up, known locally as OutEast. Her interest in its future comes with a memory of its life.
The Historic Eastside Community Development Corporation’s work includes home restoration, cultural programs, support for local businesses, and pathways to ownership. Pickett has helped lead that effort while maintaining her own practice as a visual artist. Those roles belong together more naturally than they might first appear. Both involve looking closely at what is already present and asking people to see its value.
The map
already had
a history.
According to the organization’s community history, freedpeople platted the Eastside in 1869. Families built homes, businesses, and churches east of Hogan’s Creek. Florida Avenue, now A. Philip Randolph Boulevard, became a commercial center serving Black residents through the segregation era.
That history complicates the familiar language of a neighborhood being “discovered.” People had already made a place there. Their work created the streets, gathering spaces, and institutions that later visitors would find interesting.
The contemporary organizing effort began with the Eastside Community Coalition in 2013 and became the Historic Eastside Community Development Corporation in 2016. The National Park Service records the Eastside Historic District’s listing on July 3, 2023. These steps linked residents’ concerns with tools that could support preservation and investment.
In Jacksonville Today’s reporting during the designation process, Pickett spoke about the potential for shops, dining, and entertainment along the commercial corridor. The coverage also described restoration work and efforts to make capital available for housing on terms shaped by the community.
The term used in that work is “withintrification”: improving a neighborhood from within while trying to avoid displacing the people already there. The word is less familiar than gentrification, and considerably more hopeful. Its value lies in the decisions required to make it real. Who owns the property? Who can pay for repairs? Who has a say before a project is decided?
Repair is a form
of belonging.
The corporation’s housing and restoration work includes repairing older homes, creating affordable housing that respects the neighborhood’s architectural character, and helping older residents remain in homes their families have held for years. It also identifies the historic Oakley Street row houses as part of its work to turn restored structures into community assets.
A roof repair can appear modest beside a large development announcement. For the household beneath that roof, the scale is quite different. The ability to remain in place preserves routines, nearby relationships, and knowledge of a neighborhood that cannot simply be packed into a moving box.
A historic house has a physical condition and a household associated with it. Caring for both keeps the meaning of the place close to the people whose lives have given it that meaning.
LIFT JAX describes its role as supporting the vision of resident leaders, with the Historic Eastside CDC leading work in the neighborhood. Its broader approach connects housing, education, community wellbeing, and financial opportunity. The partnership gives the neighborhood access to relationships and resources while identifying residents as people whose direction matters.
That arrangement requires ongoing attention. A partnership is useful when the people closest to a place can influence what their partners do. Pickett’s connection to OutEast makes that part of the work particularly meaningful: she is speaking about a community she knows from within.
The same
address.
A better home.
In that 2022 Jacksonville Today report, Will Brown described the repairs to Bobby Graham’s home: work on his living room, kitchen and bedroom, along with a stabilized foundation. Graham had lived in the house since 1953 and planned to remain there.
It is a lovely answer to the question of what improvement can mean. The address stays familiar. The house becomes more comfortable. The person whose life has unfolded there gets to enjoy the change.
That is what I admire in the ambition Pickett brings to OutEast. There is room for investment, for new neighbors and new ideas, and for the people who have been here all along. Holding those possibilities together asks more of a project than a photograph of a finished building can show.
Art carries names
into public view.
Pickett’s artist statement describes an interest in relationships between people and the natural world, and in looking beyond surface appearances. Working across media, she explores connections between individual experience and community.
That perspective is visible in the role art plays within the Eastside effort. The organization’s preservation program describes a heritage trail using murals, markers, and public art to carry neighborhood history into the streets. Its subjects and landmarks include A. Philip Randolph, James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson, Eartha White, Zora Neale Hurston, churches, homes, and local businesses.
The trail gives a newcomer more than an attractive wall to photograph. It offers names and a sequence of people and places to learn. It also gives younger residents a way to encounter history while moving through their own neighborhood.
Public art has a particular advantage here: people can meet it without first deciding to attend an exhibition. The work becomes part of an ordinary route. A name that might have stayed in an archive can become something a child asks an adult about on the way home.
A place to
make something
new.
Preserving a neighborhood’s history also leaves room for its next artists.
The Historic Eastside Cultural Center, on A. Philip Randolph Boulevard, provides spaces for studio work, exhibitions, recording, and gathering. The corporation describes youth creative development, programming for older adults, and paid opportunities that involve local artists and historians. Its FUSE program connects creative work with entrepreneurship for teenagers and young adults.
Those activities make culture something residents can produce and participate in. A community benefits from having its history displayed, and it also needs somewhere for a young person to try a medium, learn a skill, or discover that making art is a possible part of a working life.
I like the way this gives a neighborhood permission to keep becoming itself. A child learning to record a song is making something the heritage trail could not have anticipated. Keeping a place’s history visible can make room for that kind of addition.
OutEast’s future will involve buildings, money, partnerships, and difficult decisions about change. Pickett’s contribution keeps an additional set of questions in view: whose memory is preserved, whose creativity is welcomed, and who gets to remain long enough to enjoy what the neighborhood becomes.
About Suzanne Pickett and OutEast
What is Suzanne Pickett’s connection to Jacksonville’s Eastside?
Suzanne Pickett grew up in the Eastside, also known as OutEast, and has helped lead the Historic Eastside Community Development Corporation while working as a visual artist.
When was the Eastside Historic District listed on the National Register?
The National Park Service records the Eastside Historic District in Jacksonville as listed on July 3, 2023.
What does the Historic Eastside Cultural Center offer?
The center offers spaces for studio work, exhibitions, recording and gathering, alongside creative programs for young people and older adults.
The connection recalls Peter Schreyer’s work with Hannibal Square’s photographic history. In both communities, cultural work helps residents’ experiences become part of the public record. The medium differs, but the question of whose story remains visible is shared.
Sources: Historic Eastside CDC’s community history and program pages; Suzanne Pickett’s artist statement; LIFT JAX; Will Brown’s reporting for Jacksonville Today in August 2022 and January 2023; and the National Park Service’s July 2023 register. Reflections on home, art and belonging are Rob Urban’s.
For more of Rob’s writing and approach to consulting, meet Rob.