If you walk a dog in Avondale, you already know the trick: type "Boone Park Playground" into your GPS, not just "Boone Park." Get it wrong and you end up on the far side of Herschel Street from where you meant to go, staring at open field and shade trees instead of the swing set you were aiming for. Locals learn this the hard way, usually once, usually with a toddler already unbuckled from the car seat.
That small navigation habit points to something most people who walk this loop every week have never stopped to think through. Boone Park isn't one park with a street running past it. It's two parks, split down the middle by Herschel Street, and for most of the last century one half has quietly done all the work while the other sat there being pretty. That finally changed, and it changes what the walk actually looks like this year.
A park built in two unequal halves
The city bought most of what became Boone Park back in 1926, purchasing the land from William Elijah Boone and four other owners, according to Jacksonville's parks department history of the site. The first tennis courts went in sometime before 1946, and when the tennis clubhouse opened in 1950, the park became the site of the city's major public tennis tournaments for decades. That history landed almost entirely on one side of Herschel Street. The south section got the courts, the clubhouse, the tournament crowds, and eventually the playground that most people picture when they hear "Boone Park." The north section got the oak canopy and not much else.
That asymmetry is why the GPS trick exists in the first place. If you only ever needed the swings, the tennis courts, or the shadiest picnic spot, the south side had it and the north side was just the long way around.
The north side finally got its own reason to exist
That changed in 2025, when the park added a second playground on the north end, giving that section its own dedicated play structure for the first time instead of leaving it as overflow field space. For a park nearly 30 acres across two sections, that's not a cosmetic update. It's the first time in the park's history that both halves have a genuine destination instead of one half having the destination and the other having the walk to get there.
Practically, that means the old habit of automatically routing everyone to the south side no longer makes sense. Families with younger kids who want less crowding, or anyone who parks nearer the north end and doesn't want to cross Herschel Street with a stroller, now have a real second option rather than a consolation prize.
The dog park that isn't one
Here's where the internet gets Boone Park wrong, and it's worth clearing up if you walk a dog here regularly. Search for dog parks near Avondale and Boone Park shows up on more than one list, sometimes described as having a fenced, off-leash area. It doesn't. Ask a regular, or check the park's own Q&A on review sites, and the answer is consistent: dogs are welcome, but on leash, across the whole property. There's no enclosed run.
That's a useful correction if you've been avoiding the park because you thought your dog needed a fenced space, or if you've been letting a dog off leash because a directory told you it was fine. Neither assumption holds up. The park is genuinely dog-friendly in the sense that matters most for a daily walk: shaded paths, water access, and enough space to avoid other walkers if you want to. It's just not a dog park in the technical sense, no matter what the aggregator sites say.
A new stop on the St. Johns Avenue leg
If your loop extends past the park itself onto St. Johns Avenue, there's a new storefront worth building into the route. FlipSide recently opened in Avondale with a motto that fits the theme of this whole walk almost too well: "Treat Your Feet." The locally owned shop focuses on flip-flops, sunglasses, and the kind of everyday gear that gets used on exactly this sort of walk, and you can see what they carry at flipside-jax.com.
FlipSide sits within the broader Shoppes of Avondale commercial strip, which developed adjacent to Avondale's deed-restricted residential streets rather than inside them, historically clustering near the intersection of St. Johns and Ingleside Avenues to serve the neighborhood without disrupting it. That's why the commercial stretch still feels like a short detour rather than a separate destination. You're not leaving the neighborhood to shop. You're just extending the walk by a block or two.
The anchors that haven't moved
The rest of the loop's regular stops are still exactly where you left them. Southern Grounds & Co. is one of the fixtures Riverside Avondale Preservation, the neighborhood's preservation nonprofit, tracks in its ongoing business district listing. Biscottis and Whit's Frozen Custard round out the stretch as neighborhood staples in their own right, and Josephine still draws a brunch line most weekend mornings for its Southern menu.
None of that changed this year. What changed is that the walk connecting all of it now has a genuine second half worth using, a new shoe-and-sunglasses shop that gives St. Johns Avenue one more reason to detour, and a cleared-up answer to whether you can actually let the dog off leash there. Small shifts, but they're the kind that only show up if you're paying attention to the same three blocks week after week.
If you want to stretch the loop further
A few ways regulars extend the route once they've covered Boone Park and the St. Johns Avenue strip:
- Willow Branch Rose Garden Park, a quieter stretch a short walk from Boone Park, sits next to the Willowbranch public library if you want to turn the walk into an errand.
- The Riverside Arts Market is close enough to fold into a longer weekend walk if you're heading toward the river anyway.
- The north end's new playground makes a natural turnaround point if you're doing a there-and-back loop rather than a full circuit.
The takeaway for anyone who's done this walk a hundred times
None of this requires you to change your route. It just means the assumptions baked into the old route, that the south side is the only side worth visiting, that the park doubles as a dog park, that St. Johns Avenue looks the same as it did last year, are each a little out of date. The loop is still the loop. It just has more to it than it did twelve months ago.
If you're thinking about what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, beyond the listing photos and the drive-by impression, that's the kind of detail worth knowing before you ever look at a for-sale sign. Michael Wright and Suzi Ford work in Avondale and across Northeast Florida, and they're glad to talk through what a neighborhood is really like to live in, not just what it looks like on paper. Contact Us anytime you want that kind of conversation.
