Worth saving: Young ex-Navy pilot trying to save two dozen 1920s bungalows in Jacksonville

Spencer Fletcher grew up a crop-duster pilot's son in LaBelle, a small farming town between Fort Myers and Lake Okeechobee, and became a pilot himself flying big P-8s out of Naval Air Station Jacksonville.

He's now 33, newly retired from the Navy, and already embarked on a new mission. He's trying to save a collection of tiny bungalows, about 100 years old, in a part of Jacksonville cut off by interstate highways from the gentrification going on in the nearby neighborhoods of Riverside and Brooklyn .

They're in the historically Black neighborhood of West Lewisville, just north of Edison Avenue, which parallels I-10 a block away: 24 bungalows, each with a distance of just a few feet between them.

Each is just over 800 square feet with two bedrooms and a bathroom, and a fireplace, chimney and front porch. Arranged in three rows, there were originally 28, built in the first half of the 1920s, but four have been lost to fire.

The development was called Oneida Bungalow Court and took its inspiration from the bungalow court craze that started in Southern California, where the little houses shared a common space between them, usually a place for pedestrians and sometimes automobiles.

He wants the center lane between the bungalows to be a walking promenade, lined with streetlights and trees, with cars and trucks limited to nearby parking areas on the edge of the development.

There's also a vintage gas station on Edison that's part of the 2-acre property. Fletcher envisions it being a restaurant or commercial space, both things that are needed in the neighborhood.

For now though, it's the office for his business, Oasis Paint Co., which he started about seven years ago while still flying for the Navy. It has five employees and does painting and wood restoration in the considerably more booming neighborhoods of Riverside and Avondale.

The office is a cozy spot lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves holding bound collections of old magazines and a book selection leaning toward history and biography.

Fletcher traces his family back to old Jacksonville, though they moved south eventually. He has a keen interest and a fondness for old houses and things from the past, though he's not quite sure where that comes from. It's just always been there.

'What this neighborhood needs'

That's why he stepped in to buy the Oneida Bungalow Court property, for which he paid $1.55 million, rather than see it torn down for warehouse and industrial use or apartments.

"What the future holds, I don’t know. But culturally and historically these properties are very significant," he said.

Fletcher has a nearby supporter in Tucker Moseley of J.B. Nase Co., a distributor of a variety of fasteners that's based on Edison Avenue.

"He's a good young man, he really is. I’m impressed by him," said Moseley, 76. “He’s just what this neighborhood needs, somebody like that. I can’t say enough about him.”

Still, there's a lot of work ahead of Fletcher.

“Oh yes," Moseley said. "But it doesn't seem to scare him one bit.”

Renovating the bungalows

Fletcher wants to restore the bungalows, one by one, with hopes of creating a new neighborhood of modestly priced rental homes.

He's made progress on one bungalow, now painted a cheery bright yellow. Modern flooring is being installed and there are new-old vintage porcelain kitchen cabinets that he saved from the landfill when he saw an apartment building in Riverside being renovated.

Each house — many of which still have renters — is going to need central heat and air and a lot of other work put into them. The bungalows are in rough shape, some worse than others.

The 10 decades since they were built have been tough on them. Fletcher, though, says they have good bones and still-solid original tin roofs.

There are easier ways to make money, he acknowledges. "It’s just me, and I’m not infinitely wealthy," he said.

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He's hoping to one day to get landmark status for the project and is seeking grant and loan opportunities as well.

“I will eventually finish them if I do it by myself, but it’s going to be a multi-year, more than a multi-year, maybe a decade process,” he said.

The bungalow court craze

Wayne Wood, a Riverside resident and author of "Jacksonville's Architectural Heritage ," briefly mentioned the bungalow court in his book. He also wrote about another court, Dancy Terrace in Springfield, which is also being renovated, although it's much further along.

They have a good bit of historical significance, Wood said.

“It is cool," he said. "Bungalow courts were a California phenomenon that spread all over California, and within two years it had spread to Jacksonville. It's a great idea, a great way to use space.”

Fletcher agrees and says the neighborhood of West Lewisville, where a city incinerator once spread its ashes over the streets and houses and yards, deserves something good to happen to it.

“When you come across here, across the railroad tracks, so to speak, there’s an enormous amount of history and an enormous amount of cultural substance over here that’s getting demolished, and it’s going to be gone pretty soon," he said.

"I’m not any kind of savior of any particular community or anything like that, but I recognize that this architectural style, being a bungalow court, this sort of mixed use, it was sort of an unusual development even then. And I think it’s something that should be saved.”

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Worth saving: Young ex-Navy pilot trying to save two dozen 1920s bungalows in Jacksonville