Jacksonville Architecture

The day after the 1901 Fire, a young New York architect named Henry John Klutho read of Jacksonville's destruction in the New York Times and decided that this city presented irresistible architectural opportunities. He arrived here the next month and soon formed a partnership with the well established Atlanta architect J. W. Golucke. The first and only Golucke-Klutho commission was this Second Renaissance Revival style office building designed for the Dyal-Upchurch Company, a Georgia lumber and investment firm that also moved to Jacksonville immediately after the fire. The Dyal-Upchurch Building was the first high-rise structure erected in the burned-out Downtown area, but it is not a true skyscraper, because its brick outer walls are load-bearing. It was constructed on 426 wooden pilings driven into the riverbed, with six-inch cast-iron columns and twenty-inch I-beam girders supporting the interior. With 60 percent of the office space rented before the building was half-completed, a sixth story was added during construction. The first floor facade is faced with Indiana limestone, which also is used on the windows and quoins. The top of the building formerly had a limestone cornice and parapet, which was removed following a fire that gutted the upper stories in 1915. The rest of the facade is constructed of light granite-colored bricks (newspaper accounts claimed that over one-million bricks were used to build this structure). The main entrance features a handsome arch flanked by pilasters, and the lower facade on the Main Street side displays a series of rusticated arched windows. Soon after the building opened in May, 1902, the Atlantic National Bank was formed and for many years occupied much of the first story. The Dyal-Upchurch Building was restored in 1981 and was the first in Jacksonville to utilize National Register rehabilitation tax credits.