Live in Frenchtown

Frenchtown takes its name from the French settlers who came to the Marquis de Lafayette's Leon County township, which Tallahassee Magazine dates to 1825. The neighborhood itself is the one freed people built after the Civil War, on low ground northwest of the Capitol that Wikipedia's article calls relatively undesirable and therefore available. Lincoln Academy opened in 1869, built by the Freedmen's Bureau; its last building, from 1906, stood where the City's Lincoln Center keeps a museum to it. Tallahassee Magazine calls Frenchtown the state's oldest primarily Black community and names the Red Bird Cafe on Macomb Street, where Ray Charles and Cannonball Adderley played.

What came after is on the City's own record. Lincoln High closed as the county's schools integrated, in 1970 by the City's count and 1969 by Wikipedia's. In the early 1990s houses on Copeland, Carolina and Georgia Streets came down, and their residents moved out, for the regional stormwater pond that is now Carter-Howell-Strong Park. The Frenchtown Neighborhood First Plan, which residents presented to the City's Community Redevelopment Agency in July 2020, counted 837 single-family houses and found 42.4% of them claiming a homestead exemption, against owner occupancy of 17% across every kind of home. Its authors describe family houses replaced by student housing.

The line on this page is an association's, not the City's. The guide is the Frenchtown Neighborhood Association's area as Tallahassee-Leon County GIS maps it, less the corner it shares with Levy Park, clipped to the City limits: 411 acres from West Tennessee Street north to Gibbs Drive, between North Woodward Avenue and North Adams Street. Inside this line the census found 3,983 residents in 1,994 housing units, but 727 of them were on a single block of four housing units inside the City's 100-foot buffer around Florida State, 0.3 km from the reference point: probably student housing, which no source read names. Census tract 6, which holds most of the rest, is 43.6% college and graduate students on the American Community Survey, plus or minus 484 undergraduates; no source gives the neighborhood's own share.

Flooding here is rain running downhill. The plan describes the Frenchtown watershed as a bowl draining to the Carter-Howell-Strong pond, and says the City's 2006 Watershed Master Plan accepted that without land to store the water some flooding would continue. On FEMA's map 7.07% of the area is in zone AE, and 498 residents in 2020 lived on blocks inside it; the reference point is zone X on a panel effective in 2009. A block is not an address. The City's Class 5 rating in FEMA's Community Rating System is worth 25% off flood insurance in the high-risk zone.

The bills are the City's, and the same across it. A house here pays 19.2060 mills for 2025 to the City, the County and the School Board among others: $1,920.60 a year on each $100,000 of taxable value. Homestead takes $25,000 off every levy and a second $25,000 off all but the school levies, and Save Our Homes holds a homestead's assessment to 3% a year until it sells, so the seller's bill understates yours. Stormwater ($11.00 a month) and garbage ($28.19) come on the City utility bill with power, water and gas, beside a fire services fee whose amount this site could not read, under a lawsuit filed on 17 November 2025. The redevelopment area that holds 3,177 residents adds no rate. The Moss bus stops on Brevard Street about once an hour at midday.