Here's the first thing we tell anyone who says they're looking in "Riverside-Avondale," as though it's one word:
They're two different neighborhoods.
Related, adjacent, often said in the same breath — and genuinely not the same place. Different street grids. Different decades. Different architecture. Different parking situations, which is going to matter to you more than you currently think it will.
Riverside came first and was built on a grid, mostly before the automobile. Avondale came after, platted in 1921 and laid out in curves by a developer who assumed everybody would have a car. That single difference explains about half of what you'll notice walking around, and all of what you'll notice trying to park.
Both sit west of downtown along the St. Johns River, under a live oak canopy that is the actual reason most people fall for this part of town. Both are full of houses that are a hundred years old and have opinions about it. Both are inside a local historic district, which is the thing that changes what you can do to your house and the thing most buyers don't find out about until they've already ordered windows.
Let's go through all of it.
New to the city entirely? Start with our guide to living in Jacksonville for how the whole metro fits together, then come back here.
Riverside: The Grid, and the Fire That Filled It
Riverside was platted in the late 1860s and first subdivided in 1878, but the thing that actually built it was a catastrophe.
The Great Fire of 1901 burned 146 blocks of Jacksonville and destroyed more than 2,300 buildings in about eight hours on May 3. Families who lost everything downtown moved west, and Riverside Avenue filled up with them. The city's population doubled in the decade that followed. Before 1901, four subdivisions had been platted in Riverside. Between 1901 and 1939, more than twenty were.
By about 1935 Riverside was essentially built out, and the building activity moved west into Avondale.
What that means for the housing stock: it's dense, it's on a grid, and it's overwhelmingly early-century.
The National Register nomination counts bungalows and Craftsman homes as nearly sixty percent of the district's buildings. After that: Colonial Revival in two distinct waves, a genuinely notable concentration of Prairie School houses, Mediterranean Revival mostly on apartment buildings, and scattered Tudor and Queen Anne.
That Prairie School collection is the unusual thing here, and it's worth understanding why. The nomination puts it plainly: Prairie School architecture "was seldom used anywhere in Florida at the turn of the century other than Jacksonville." You'll see it best along St. Johns and Riverside Avenues.
A correction, because you will hear this on a tour: not everything Prairie in Riverside is a Henry John Klutho building. Klutho is Jacksonville's famous post-fire architect and local tradition has handed him a great deal of Riverside that the records don't support — the National Register nomination says so directly, noting that "local tradition regarding the scope of work completed in Riverside by H.J. Klutho may be inflated." The showpiece Prairie house on Elizabeth Place is by W.D. Camp, not Klutho.
The firm that genuinely shaped both neighborhoods was Marsh & Saxelbye, which the National Register nomination describes as responsible for more homes in Riverside than any other architectural firm. If someone tells you your house is a Klutho, ask to see the paperwork before you pay for it.
Also local and worth knowing: coquina block — the same shell stone they built the fort out of in St. Augustine — shows up constantly in foundations and fireplaces across both districts, and in at least forty cases as an entire building.
Avondale: The Curves, and a Developer With a Plan
Avondale is a designed place, and you can feel it.
Telfair Stockton organized the Avondale Company in 1920, bought 220 acres, and recorded the plat in 1921. He hired landscape architect William Pitkin Jr., who laid out the curvilinear street plan and sixteen parks. The bulk of it went up between 1920 and 1930, paused for the Depression, and finished around 1936.
(You'll see "Avondale was platted in 1925" repeated all over the internet. It's wrong — 1925 is just a very common construction year for individual houses here.)
The architecture shifts accordingly. Where Riverside is a bungalow neighborhood, Avondale is a Colonial Revival neighborhood — 32% of contributing buildings, with bungalows second at 26%. Then Mediterranean at 11% and Tudor Revival at 10%, a concentration Riverside doesn't have. Harold Saxelbye's English training is generally credited for the Tudor showing.
Stockton also ran Avondale through deed restrictions rather than zoning: setbacks fixed at ten feet on wider lots, seven and a half on narrower ones, one house per lot, and no commercial use inside the subdivision at all. That last one is why the Shoppes of Avondale developed immediately outside the platted subdivision — the shops had to sit next to the neighborhood because they weren't allowed inside it.
The same instrument, as was common in American subdivisions of that era, also contained racial restrictions. The Supreme Court held such covenants judicially unenforceable in 1948, and the Fair Housing Act has prohibited housing discrimination since 1968. You may still see the original language in a chain of title — it appears in recorded documents across the country, and Florida has a statutory process for removing it. We include it because it's part of the documented record of how this neighborhood was built, and leaving it out would be telling the story wrong.
The Two Commercial Districts, Which Are Not Interchangeable
Five Points is Riverside's. It's the actual five-way intersection of Park, Margaret and Lomax — residential originally, converted to commercial during the 1920s land boom, with the historic core running along Park Street between Margaret and Post. It's denser, louder, later at night, and more eclectic.
The building at the corner has the best credential in the neighborhood. It opened in 1927 as the Riverside Theatre, designed by Roy Benjamin, and it was the first theatre in Florida equipped to show talking pictures — third in the country. It spent years as the Sun-Ray Cinema, which closed in 2024 when the building sold, and reopened as a live music venue. The marquee changes. The building keeps the record.
The Shoppes of Avondale is Avondale's, along St. Johns Avenue around Ingleside. Lower-key, more daytime, more sidewalk-lunch than late-night.
People pick a side. You will too, eventually, and where you land may quietly decide which neighborhood you buy in.
What Else Is Actually Here
The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, 829 Riverside Avenue, with formal gardens running down to the river. Three separate gardens by three notable hands — an English Garden begun by Ossian Cole Simonds, an Italian Garden by Ellen Biddle Shipman that's one of only a handful of her gardens still standing, and a garden the Olmsted firm had a hand in. Shipman's involvement was genuinely lost to history until 1998, when her Cummer blueprints turned up in her archive at Cornell — which is what made the Italian Garden's restoration possible.
The Cummer Oak is out back — a live oak with a 150-foot spread, and a gallery built on pilings specifically so its root system wasn't disturbed. (Estimates of its age vary wildly, including on the museum's own materials. You'll hear anywhere from 175 years to 400. It's old. Stand under it.)
⚠️ Note for 2026: the Cummer began charging for parking on September 1, 2026, with different rates on Saturdays. Check their site before you go — and check their current hours and free admission days there too, since those move around.
Memorial Park, 1620 Riverside Avenue, dedicated Christmas Day 1924 and designed by the Olmsted Brothers — Ninah Cummer personally made that connection and corresponded with the firm throughout. The bronze at its center is by Charles Adrian Pillars, who named it Spiritualized Life; everyone calls it Life. It commemorates Florida's World War I dead. At the 1924 dedication, a lead box holding 1,220 names was sealed into the ground in front of the sculpture — and stayed there until Hurricane Irma exposed it in 2018. The scrolls were recovered, conserved, and put on public display. Later research has brought the verified count to 1,760, and those names are now on a wall at the park.
The parks, and there are more than people expect — 26 across the district, covering 75-plus acres. Riverside Park is the second-oldest park in Jacksonville, set aside in the original plat and landscaped in 1894 with artificial lakes and a fence to keep the roaming cattle out. Boone Park was donated in 1924 by William Elijah Boone, a great-nephew of Daniel Boone, on the condition it stay public forever. Willowbranch Park got 1,700 azalea bushes from a single donor around 1924.
Riverside Baptist Church, 2650 Park Street — and this is the story we tell every client who'll stand still for it. It's the only church Addison Mizner is known to have designed, and he charged nothing for it, reportedly having promised his mother he'd design a church in her memory. Before he drew anything, he sat on a crate in the empty lot every day for a week watching how light crossed the site. The result puts blue clerestory light over the congregation and an amber glow on the altar. The walls were sprayed with milk and rubbed with umber to fake age, and the red floor tiles came out of a ruined 16th-century Spanish cathedral.
Riverside Arts Market, every Saturday 10 to 3, rain or shine, under the Fuller Warren Bridge at 715 Riverside Avenue. It's run by Riverside Avondale Preservation, not an outside operator. (Link is riversideartsmarket*.org** — the .com is a dead 2016 shell that still floats to the top of search results.)*
The Fuller Warren shared-use path has been open since April 2023 — 12 feet wide, nearly a mile, with two lookouts, connecting Riverside to San Marco on foot or by bike. If a guide describes it as coming soon, that guide is three years stale.
The Practical Reality
This is the part that costs money if you skip it.
The Certificate of Appropriateness is the big one
Most of Riverside and Avondale sits inside the Riverside-Avondale Historic District, which is a local designation — and local designation regulates. Any exterior work needs a Certificate of Appropriateness from the City before you start. Windows, siding, doors, roofs, paint, porches, fences, driveways, sheds, pools, solar panels, HVAC equipment, additions, demolition. Interior work that doesn't change the exterior generally doesn't need one.
The City publishes a matrix that routes the work. Roughly how it splits — confirm the current version, because thresholds do get revised:
Routed to staff review:
Repainting previously painted surfaces
Replacing a historic window that's genuinely beyond repair, in an approved material
A one-story addition under 25% of the footprint that isn't readily visible from the street
An accessory building, one story, under 576 square feet, in a traditional location
A driveway in concrete ribbons, pavers or gravel, no wider than ten feet
Routed to the Historic Preservation Commission:
Demolishing any contributing structure
Any new primary construction
Two-story additions, anything over 25% of footprint, anything readily street-visible
A two-story garage, or an accessory building over 576 square feet
Replacing a repairable historic window, or replacing anything with vinyl
Painting masonry that was never painted
Street-visible pools and patios, or hardscape over 25% of the front yard
The timing is the part that hurts people. The Commission meets monthly — generally the fourth Wednesday, and not in November or December. That cadence is the whole story: a staff-reviewed repair moves on staff's schedule, while anything routed to the Commission moves on a monthly calendar and has to be submitted well ahead of the meeting you're aiming for.
So a like-for-like repair is one kind of project. A garage, a second story, or anything you want to tear down is a different kind entirely — a multi-month sequence with a City fee attached, and the City's published schedule increases those fees when work began before the application. Get current timelines and fee amounts from the Historic Preservation Section before you build a renovation budget around them.
Two things buyers get wrong constantly:
National Register listing is not the same thing. It's honorary and regulates nothing. The City says so in exactly those words. The two designations don't share boundaries — the local Riverside-Avondale district is the larger one, and it contains the two smaller National Register districts, Riverside and Avondale.
The neighborhood name won't tell you. Ortega is largely National Register and not locally designated — no COA. Murray Hill is neither. The obligations follow the local district line, not the name of the neighborhood and not what the listing says.
Check the specific address before you write an offer, on the City's Land Development Map under the historic layer, or by calling the Historic Preservation Section directly. We do this on every historic-district showing. It has changed people's plans more than once.
There's also a historic preservation property tax exemption available in the local district for approved rehabilitation work — worth asking about, with one catch that matters: the work has to be approved before it starts. Details and eligibility come from the City, not from us.
→ More on Jacksonville historic districts and the COA process
Parking, explained properly
The City's own preservation guidelines say it better than we could. On Riverside:
Much of Riverside developed prior to mass production of the automobile. As a result, porte cocheres and garages are not an integral part of the original design of buildings located there. Garages were often added as an afterthought.
That's your answer. Riverside wasn't built for cars, so parking there is a skill. Avondale was — the guidelines describe it as one of Jacksonville's first neighborhoods where the automobile shaped the design, with driveways, garages, carports and porte cocheres as original features on most lots.
If a garage is non-negotiable for you, that alone may point you toward Avondale. Adding one in Riverside is possible — it's also a Commission item if it's two stories or over 576 square feet.
Worth knowing: FDOT resurfacing work along the SR 211 corridor has involved changes to on-street parking, and Riverside Avondale Preservation's transportation committee has been engaged on it. If you're looking near that stretch, ask about current status — street parking counts are exactly the kind of thing that changes between when a guide is written and when you read it.
Flooding — the honest version
This is riverfront, and some of it floods.
The most flood-prone spots aren't a mystery. Memorial Park and the Riverside Avenue riverfront are the signature location — there's a widely circulated photograph of water up to the base of the Life sculpture. Local reporting has repeatedly named the Riverside Avenue intersections near Ascension St. Vincent's, at Stockton, Copeland and King, and Osceola Street at St. Johns Avenue during heavy rain.
Named storms have put water into this neighborhood repeatedly over the past decade — Irma in 2017, Ian in 2022, Idalia in 2023, Helene in 2024. Irma was the severe one and the damage was genuinely bad. Memorial Park's riverfront balustrade was destroyed by Irma, took four years to replace, and was destroyed again by Idalia and damaged again by Helene.
But here's the part that matters for an actual buying decision: Ian, in 2022, barely touched it. Local reporting at the time described roads underwater at Osceola and St. Johns while noting it had been far worse before, that Memorial Park was fine, and that homes didn't appear to be affected. Same neighborhood, same category of storm, completely different outcome.
The conclusion isn't "don't buy here." It's that this varies enormously block to block and house to house, and most of what you need is knowable before you commit.
How to actually find out: FEMA's Flood Map Service Center is the official map source, and the City's Development Services office handles official determinations and elevation certificates. Third-party flood-score websites are not official, whatever they look like. Get a real insurance quote on the specific address early in your inspection period — not an online estimate, and not at the end of the period when you have no time to react.
We're REALTORS®, not insurance agents or floodplain managers. We won't tell you what zone a house is in or what it'll cost to cover. We will make sure you're asking the right people while you still have room to walk away.
Worth knowing: McCoys Creek restoration is well along, with the creek reconnected and flowing to the St. Johns as of late 2025 and further work underway. Hogans Creek design work is in progress. These are real projects, not promises, and they're aimed at exactly this problem.
Old houses, honestly
A hundred-year-old house is a wonderful thing and a specific set of homework. Hire an inspector who works on historic homes — this is not the place to use whoever the lender recommended.
Foundations. The National Register nomination describes framing resting on "low concrete block or brick piers, or continuous foundations of the same materials." Note both, and note low. Pier-and-beam is common here but it isn't universal, and it's often not a crawlspace you can get into comfortably. It's a per-house question.
Electrical. Knob-and-tube wiring was standard from roughly the 1880s into the 1930s and 40s, which is exactly this housing stock. Whether any remains active is an inspection question, and how your carrier treats it is a question for your insurance agent — we're not going to guess at underwriting.
Plumbing. Cast iron drain lines and galvanized supply lines are standard inspection items in pre-war Jacksonville houses. Get a camera scope on the sewer lateral. It's the single inspection add-on we'd argue hardest for in this neighborhood, because it tells you what's actually in the ground instead of what's typical. Be skeptical of anyone quoting you a failure rate or a remaining lifespan — most of the numbers in circulation trace back to companies that sell repipes.
Lead paint. Federal law requires sellers and landlords of housing built before 1978 to disclose known lead-based paint and hazards, provide the EPA pamphlet, and give buyers an opportunity to conduct their own inspection. Nearly all the housing stock here predates 1978. Note what the rule actually requires: disclosure of what's known, plus your right to inspect. It does not require the seller to test. Contractors doing renovation work on pre-1978 housing have their own certification requirements.
Asbestos-era materials are a possibility in housing this old — asbestos roof shingles appear in the historic record for this district specifically. Your inspector flags what's visible; anything beyond that is a specialist's call.
And renovation history. These houses have been worked on for a century by people of wildly varying skill. The report matters more here than it does almost anywhere else. Read the whole thing.
Look Here If
You want to walk to dinner and coffee instead of driving to it. You want mature trees and a house with a documented past. You'd rather have character and a smaller lot than square footage and a three-car garage. And you're genuinely willing to work inside a design review process rather than being surprised by one.
Lean Riverside if you want the grid, the density, a bungalow, and Five Points at the end of the block.
Lean Avondale if you want curved streets, a Colonial Revival or Tudor, a lot with room around it, and an original garage you don't have to petition anyone to build.
Neighboring Options Worth a Look
San Marco — across the river, similar era and tree cover, a different feel, and one of the shortest drives to downtown of any established neighborhood here.
Springfield — north of downtown, also a locally designated district, more Victorian, and more of the inventory somewhere in the middle of restoration.
Buying new instead of old? → Our new construction buyer guide covers how builder representation works in this metro, and why you register your agent on the first visit.
A Note on Riverside Avondale Preservation
RAP has been the neighborhood organization since 1974 and it's more useful to a new owner than most such groups are. They host the City's preservation guidelines and the district map — which is the practical reference you'll want the first time you face a COA. They run a free Historic Homeowner Workshop and a preservation video series. Their zoning and historic preservation committees work the Commission and Planning Commission agendas monthly, and their transportation committee is the group that filed the parking objection mentioned above.
They also run Riverside Arts Market, the spring Home Tour, a garden tour, and Luminaria in December.
They're at Buckland House on Herschel Street. If you buy here, join.
Renting in Riverside or Avondale
Renting for a year before you buy is a legitimately smart move in a historic neighborhood — it's how you learn whether you actually want a hundred-year-old house or just like looking at them. It's also how you learn which blocks flood.
We manage residential rentals across the Jacksonville metro through our property management division, and we work both sides of it.
→ See our property management services
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Riverside and Avondale the same neighborhood? No. They're adjacent and usually named together, but Riverside was platted in 1869 and built out on a grid largely before 1935, while Avondale was platted in 1921 on a curvilinear plan. Different architecture, different lot patterns, and very different parking.
Do I need a Certificate of Appropriateness to renovate here? If the property is inside the locally designated Riverside-Avondale Historic District, yes — for any exterior work. Interior work that doesn't change the exterior generally doesn't require one. National Register listing alone does not trigger it, and the two designations don't share boundaries, so verify the specific address with the City rather than going by neighborhood name.
Is Ortega part of the historic district? Most of Ortega is a National Register district but is not locally designated, which means no COA requirement. Murray Hill is neither. This is exactly why the address matters more than the neighborhood name.
How long does a COA take? Administrative approvals generally run a week or two. Anything requiring the Historic Preservation Commission takes a month minimum and should be submitted about six weeks ahead — the Commission meets monthly and skips November and December. Fees double if work started before you applied.
Does Riverside flood? Parts of it do, particularly along the Riverside Avenue riverfront near Memorial Park and at several named intersections. It varies dramatically block to block. Check the specific address against FEMA's flood maps, get an elevation certificate if one applies, and get a real insurance quote early in your inspection period.
What kind of houses are in Riverside and Avondale? Riverside is dominated by bungalow and Craftsman homes — close to sixty percent of the district — with a notable Prairie School collection and substantial Colonial Revival. Avondale skews Colonial Revival first, bungalow second, with meaningful Mediterranean and Tudor Revival. Both are largely 1900–1936.
Can I add a garage? Possibly, and it depends on size and visibility. One-story accessory buildings under 576 square feet in a traditional location are typically an administrative approval. Two stories, or anything larger, goes to the Commission. Ask the City about your specific lot before you budget the project.
Let's Go Look at Some Old Houses
We'll tell you which ones we'd walk away from. That conversation tends to be the one clients remember.
Tell us what matters — the garage, the walk to coffee, the flood tolerance, the appetite for a project — and we'll give you straight information on every block that fits it, including the ones we don't have a listing on.
#ForeverFamilyForeverHome
Still mapping the city? → Read our full guide to living in Jacksonville
The Courtney Team | Coldwell Banker Vanguard Realty | Licensed Real Estate Professionals in the State of Florida. Information in this guide is general and educational in nature and is not a representation about any specific property. Descriptions of historic designation and Certificate of Appropriateness requirements, property tax exemptions, flood zones and flood history, insurance underwriting, and federal lead-based paint requirements are general explanations that change over time and vary by address — all of them must be independently verified for the specific property and the current year. Nothing here is tax, legal, or insurance advice; please consult a licensed tax professional, attorney, or insurance agent, the City of Jacksonville Historic Preservation Section, the Duval County Property Appraiser, and FEMA or City of Jacksonville Development Services as appropriate. Equal Housing Opportunity.
