Neighborhood
Ortega has a few different sections with different characteristics. There is the riverfront, with multimillion dollar mansions. Ortega Point has old wood frame and Tudor homes surrounding Bettes Park. The historic district has modest wood frame homes dating back to the early 1900s. Ortega Terrace towards the southern interior of the peninsula has large, stone and brick houses with a mix of styles. There is an extensive park system and many of the local residents set up trusts to help maintain and landscape the parks.
Two schools serve Ortega: Ortega Elementary School and St. Mark's Episcopal Day School; many children also attend Stockton Elementary School in nearby Ortega Forest. Many of the neighborhood children walk or ride bikes to school and the neighborhood is characterized by a very strong family-oriented environment. Many of the neighborhood teenagers attend local or northern private schools or the International Baccalaureate at one of two "magnet" high schools nearby.
The street system is a grid pattern with themed street names. One end of the historic district has street names characterized by large Native American tribes. One section has the names of Ivy League schools. Another section has the names of all the styles of columns (i.e. Doric, Ionic, Corinthian).
The largest churches in the area are St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and United Methodist Church.
Residents are members of either the Florida Yacht Club or Timuquana Country Club. Since Ortega is bounded on all sides by water, it is common for residents to be active boaters or yachters or wealthy. Prominent New York businessman William Astor helped start the Florida Yacht Club and was an active member there (there is still a room in the present 1928 clubhouse named for him). Timuquana’s greens were designed by the country’s most prominent golf architect, Donald Ross and later upgraded and maintained by Robert Trent Jones.
Huckins Yachts are also constructed across the Ortega River from the neighborhood. Started over 80 years ago, the very first Huckins was sold to David M. Goodrich of B.F. Goodrich Rubber Company. He later purchased two more yachts. Many residents of the neighborhood own a Huckins Yacht, ranging in size from 35 feet to almost 100 feet. Huckins are also popular in yachting circles in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Newport, Rhode Island. Huckins also built many PT boats for the U.S. Navy in World War II.
Read more about this topic: Ortega, Jacksonville, Florida
Famous quotes containing the word neighborhood:
“Almost everybody in the neighborhood had “troubles,” frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had “complications.” To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years with “troubles,” but they almost always succumbed to “complications.””
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
“Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I do not like forced integration.... I do not like forced anything.... as a youngster I lived in a white neighborhood with a white neighbor next door. We would go to them, they would go to us. If they had anything, we had it. We lived just like one. We didn’t think about no integration.”
—Ruby Middleton Forsythe (b. 1905)