Hurley and I skirt the outside of an informal dinner held at the top of the building, looking out circumambulating windows at the tallest blue buildings reflecting the sky above the earthen colors of the century-old towers beneath them, the shorter tower the JEA abandoned for this building in the 1980s, and the bridges that radiate downtown across the St. Johns River.
The top floor hasn’t rotated in more than 40 years. The Embers was a place to “see and be seen” and let its diners see the panorama of the entire city each hour-and-a-half rotation. They ate veal cutlets, beef roulade, lobster tail, and rainbow trout.
Graphic designer Stephanie Robertson Feria remembers her parents taking her to The Embers for her sixteenth birthday. In her 2013 book Lost Restaurants of Jacksonville, Dorothy Fletcher quotes Feria, “My dad ordered alcoholic drinks for the adults and a Shirley Temple for me.” When her supposed Shirley Temple knocked her back in her seat, her dad told her, “Enjoy!” and the waitress winked.
photo by Hurley Winkler
Hurley spots the “Danger Fall Hazard” sign” that seems to levitate outside the windows and above the surrounding streets. It also seems to indicate that falling people will keep their decapitated heads close to their falling bodies and find their fingers lengthening out of proportion to their hands. The sign makes Hurley want to climb the nearby metal ladder on the other side of the glass.
The tall man who won’t tell us his name, but helped get us up here, worked in the building before the JEA purchased it. He remembers it as the Charter Oil Company Building.
In fact, the Charter Company was Fortune 500’s 61st biggest corporation right before it filed for bankruptcy in early 1984. Charter made its money on oil when oil prices skyrocketed in the 1970s, and its subsidiaries ranged from banking to convenience stores to magazine publications like Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal.
Photo by Hurley Winkler
Our anonymous tall new friend remembers urban legends that echoed through the building when Charter owned it.
Urban legends circulated that the 17th floor, where Charter had its executive offices beneath the great gear house, contained a panic room where gold was hidden in the walls in lieu of more liquid assets.
After all, Charter founder Raymond Knight Mason used the whole former Embers Restaurant as his office. He looked out on the city from every angle. When Charter declared bankruptcy, The New York Times referred to Mason as “a swashbuckling Florida legend” with “a penchant for deal-making” who “hobnobbed” with the likes of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and former President Gerald Ford at his estate, Epping Forest, the former San Jose Boulevard home of multimillionaire Alfred DuPont and his philanthropist wife Jesse Ball DuPont. Mason and his wife began spending three months of each year at the 16th-century 40-bedroom Ballynahinch Castle in Ireland, formerly owned by Jacksonville businessman Edward Ball, Jesse Ball DuPont’s brother, who’d sold Mason Epping Forest.
Our anonymous shorter new friend jokes that he’s been with JEA for a while and he’s checked all the walls for hidden gold. Besides, we shouldn’t say publically that gold could be hidden in the upper-story walls of the tower.
Hurley grabbed a sweet tea for the sweet security guard who let us past her and up. When Hurley hands it to her, the security guard calls her an angel. Everyone calls Hurley an angel. The security guard had asked for our I.D.s and my driver’s license photo makes me look like an ax murderer.
But people can be friendly when you least expect it. Our tall new friend was four days away from retirement. His shorter friend said no one had ever walked in off the street and asked to go see The Embers before. They never told us their names. They said we shouldn’t say there had once been rumors of gold up in panic-room walls.
So I won’t.
Article by Tim Gilmore originally published at Jax Psycho Geo
Next Page: Additional Images of the Universal Marion Complex