Live in Riverside

Riverside was plantation and farmland until 1868, when Edward M. Cheney bought the southern 500 acres of Dell's Bluff for $10,000 in gold as agent for the Boston financier John Murray Forbes, who had it platted and named. Jacksonville annexed it in 1887 and ran a streetcar out to it. The Great Fire of 1901 made it: the rich built mansions along Riverside Avenue, "The Row", while the builders who came to rebuild downtown filled the streets behind with bungalows, Prairie houses and, from the 1910s, duplexes and small apartment buildings. The City's design guidelines call it a laboratory for aspiring architects; almost six in ten of its 2,120 contributing buildings are bungalows. Offices later replaced The Row, and in 1974 residents formed Riverside Avondale Preservation to stop the rest going the same way.

The City has no line called Riverside, so this guide takes the National Register's Riverside Historic District as the City maps it, Jacksonville's first, listed in 1985: 855 acres from Five Points and Memorial Park south-west to Seminole Road and north to the CSX railroad. The 2020 census counted 8,633 residents, almost exactly the 8,646 of 2010, and only one in ten was under 18. Most of Riverside is rented. Owners lived in 39% of the 4,876 occupied homes; 2,951 were rented. A buyer looking at a single house is usually choosing a street of neighbors who rent.

Every resident lives under the City's design review. The City made Riverside and Avondale one local historic district in 1997; 8,357 of these residents are in it and the other 276 in the small St Johns Quarter district. In either, exterior and site work, from windows and siding to a fence, a driveway or a shed, needs a certificate of appropriateness first. Staff approve many in a week or two; the Historic Preservation Commission takes at least a month and charges $315 for an alteration, $495 for an addition and $610 for a demolition. Interior work that leaves the exterior alone needs none.

No price index follows the district's line. Zillow's typical value in August 2026 was $319,300 in ZIP code 32204, which holds 4,633 of the residents and about as many people again outside the line, and $255,208 in 32205, which runs well beyond Riverside. Every address pays the city's same four levies, 17.7412 mills for 2025. A homestead at the 32204 figure owes about $4,936 a year on the base exemption amounts; a landlord, about $5,665. At Duval County's $335,000 median the homestead bill is about $5,215. Save Our Homes caps a homestead's assessed value at 3% a year and resets on a sale, so the seller's bill understates yours. No map of community development districts exists, so read the non-ad valorem lines on that bill. The arithmetic is on the Jacksonville page.

FEMA's map and the river disagree. The effective map of 2018 puts 2.0% of the district in its 1% annual chance zone and no resident on a block inside it; the preliminary maps of May 2025 change nothing here. But on 11 September 2017 Hurricane Irma, on top of a nor'easter, pushed the St. Johns to an all-time record, and the National Weather Service counted about 350 water rescues in Duval, especially in Riverside, San Marco and downtown. The surge tore away Memorial Park's balustrade, and just outside the line about four feet of river filled the Cummer Museum's gardens. The reference point is in JaxReady's evacuation zone C, with 3,635 residents in zones A to C. A homeowners policy does not cover rising water. The First Coast Flyer Orange Line runs on Park Street every 20 minutes on weekdays.