MUSEUM & CULTURE
Ritz Theatre and Museum
Duval County · North Florida & First Coast
A 426-seat theater and an eleven thousand square foot museum at 829 North Davis Street, in the LaVilla district of downtown Jacksonville.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Jefferson Powell designed the original Ritz in Art Deco and it opened in 1929. LaVilla in those years was called the Harlem of the South, and from about 1921 to 1971 it was the center of Black culture in Florida: Ashley Street and Davis Street carried the Ritz along with the Strand, the Frolic, the Globe and the Roosevelt theaters, Nick's Pool Parlor, the Boston Chop House and Manuel's Taproom, and the Ritz was a scheduled stop on the circuit Black entertainers toured. The district went down from the 1970s with the railroad cutbacks, the cutting through of Interstate 95 and the drug years of the 1980s. Mayor Ed Austin's River City Renaissance plan put four and a fifth million dollars into rebuilding the theater; ground was broken in 1998 and it reopened on September 30, 1999. Only the sign and the northwest corner of the 1929 building survive. It now stages music, dance, theater and film, and the museum beside it holds the history of LaVilla
Keep comparing