The Jacksonville USO building is known as the oldest continuously operating USO in the world. Now, the city is moving forward with demolishing its former home on Tallman Street.<\/p>\n
Condemning that building is condemning memories, and I think that\u2019s hard for them to see and watch that go,” said Alysa Dailey, USO Center Operations Specialist. <\/p>\n
The building opened in 1942 and closed in 2021 after a Navy site study found severe foundation failures. The Marine Corps later declared the property excess.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is not operational. We can’t have people within that facility. It does sit in on two major sinkholes. It was a very hard decision for us to leave such a historical building, but with that, we brought everything that we possibly could detach from the building, historically, with us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The city later purchased the property for just over $40,000. A historical marker is planned for the site as the city plans for future waterfront redevelopment.<\/p>\n
\u201cCouncil\u2019s concept was to make the land more accessible to the public, and connect it and take advantage of the water,” Deputy City Manager Ron Massey said. <\/p>\n
The USO now operates on Camp Lejeune, where officials say they\u2019ve seen a major increase in service members coming through the doors.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw about twelve hundred people a year out on Tallman Street. Moving our location from October 2023 to now, we see roughly 40,000 people a year,” Dailey added.<\/p>\n
City officials say demolition could start in six weeks to two months.<\/p>\n
Council has not yet adopted a final redevelopment plan for the property, with the first step focused on removing the deteriorating building and preparing the site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Jacksonville USO building is known as the oldest continuously operating USO in the world. Now, the city…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,118,117],"class_list":["post-367880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}