In Jacksonville business parlance, great spaces are not so much discovered as they are unearthed. Think Riverside, San Marco, and all of their well-positioned vacant lots that now sit in prime high-dollar territory. Surrounding homes are often re-habbed and retro-fitted, and they fetch high prices. Those high priced homeowners are going to need someplace to buy the radicchio and goat cheese. Enter Regency Centers Corporation, and the “urban infill.”  
 

The Jacksonville-based developer will build The Shoppes of Riverside, anchored by the popular Fresh Market food store, and about 20,000 feet of attached small store space along the heart of the neighborhood, Riverside Avenue. In San Marco, Regency Centers Corporation is doing a similar thing, with

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By: Alan Aptheker

Originally a farm on the banks of the St. Johns River, the area now known as San Marco was first called Oklahoma. Harrison Reed, a life long Oklahoman, was elected Florida’s governor in 1868.  Reed’s sister, Margaret Reed Mitchell and her husband, railroad tycoon Alexander Mitchell, still in love with their native Oklahoma, built their Florida winter home, Villa Alexandria, in Oklahoma Style on 140 riverfront acres, and (oddly) named their new digs and surrounding area, “Oklahoma.” But in 1921, with the construction of the Acosta bridge, which connects San Marco to Downtown, industrialist Telfair Stockton bought 80 acres of land north of the Mitchell estate and the new “San Marco” subdivision name took hold.  The name is based on

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