Drive down Corinthian Avenue on a Tuesday night now and the corner at Oxford looks different than it has in years. There's light coming through those tall old windows again, people at outdoor tables, a server carrying wine past the flatiron corner where the building bends with the street. For most of the last four years, that same window was dark.
The building is the Oxford and Corinthian Building, known to three generations of Ortega residents as the Village Store. It sat empty from the summer of 2022 until this past May. Now it's Oxford Place, a family-run Southern and New Orleans-inspired restaurant, and it's the best thing to happen to that corner in a decade. But treat it as the whole story of Ortega Village and you'd miss the more interesting part. A few doors down on that same short stretch of Corinthian Avenue, two other buildings are moving through a demolition-delay process the city approved last year. The travel agency inside one of them has been there for more than thirty years and isn't leaving quietly.
The building that came back
Oxford Place is owned by Hughes Brown and his father, Jerry Brown, who both live in Ortega and had been looking for a reason to buy the building for a while. Their company, Brown Family Restaurant Ortega LLC, closed on the property for $925,000 in May 2025, according to Duval County property records. The Browns aren't new to Jacksonville dining. They run Bold Birds Nashville Hot Chicken in Murray Hill, opened a second Bold Birds location in Lakewood in December 2025, and before that spent fifteen years running the fine-dining restaurant Watermark in Nashville.
The building itself has a real pedigree. It was designed in 1923 by the Jacksonville architecture firm Marsh and Saxelbye, built in 1924, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. Its most recent tenant, Simply Sara's, closed in July 2022 after twelve years in the space. The Browns combined two smaller storefronts, the old Simply Sara's footprint and a former hair salon called Fonda's Hairstyling, into one 2,900 square foot restaurant with roughly 120 seats between the indoor dining room, outdoor tables, and full bar. Adler Interior Design handled the renovation, working around the building's original tall windows and distinctive roofline rather than covering them up.
Hughes Brown told the Florida Times-Union what drove the decision to buy a vacant, century-old building instead of building something new somewhere easier:
"What really inspired us most is that we live in this neighborhood, and we wanted a family-friendly neighborhood dining option in Ortega. A place we felt we could go to once a week and have a good meal."
The Browns had originally hoped to open in late 2025 or early 2026. It took until May. Jerry Brown's explanation was simple: an old building means a lot of tearing out and starting over, and they decided if they were going to do it, they were going to do it right.
A National Register listing didn't save it. A neighbor did.
Here's the part worth sitting with. This building has carried National Register status since 1988. That designation didn't stop it from sitting vacant for four years. It didn't attract a buyer, generate foot traffic, or keep the lights on. What actually changed the building's fate wasn't its paperwork. It was two people who already lived three streets over and wanted somewhere in walking distance to eat dinner.
That distinction matters for understanding what's happening on the rest of the block, because the opposite dynamic has been playing out at three addresses just a short walk from Oxford Place's front door.
The rest of the block hasn't been so lucky
Corinthian Avenue between Oxford and Baltic is the historic core of Ortega Village, a walkable commercial strip that dates back to 1906, when the neighborhood was still served by an electric trolley line. A handful of small, decades-old businesses still operate there: Carter's Pharmacy, which has run its old-fashioned lunch counter (known simply as the Fountain) since 1955, plus The Village Salon, Ortega Village Antiques, and Lily's Chic Vintage.
Three other addresses on that same stretch tell a very different story.
- 2922 Corinthian Avenue, once home to a bank branch on a 0.66-acre lot, sold in May 2025 for $1.5 million to an LLC managed by two Ortega residents, Luke Leonaitis and Lilian Welty.
- 2928 and 2934 Corinthian Avenue are both owned by investor Brent Ross, through separate LLCs. He wants to clear both parcels for new development.
The catch is that 2928 is the small bungalow office that's housed the travel agency Trips in the Village for more than three decades. In May 2025, the Jacksonville Historic Preservation Commission approved demolition-delay applications for both of Ross's parcels. That approval doesn't demolish anything by itself. It starts a countdown, a built-in waiting period meant to give a building one more chance at a different outcome before a wrecking ball becomes legal. It's the same mechanism, structurally, that could have applied to the Oxford and Corinthian Building if no buyer had ever shown up.
The debate at that commission meeting split residents rather than pitting neighbors against an outside developer. Leonaitis, who'd just bought the former bank lot next door, spoke in favor of the demolition applications, telling the board he'd like to see the area rebuilt into something closer to "a beautiful English village" and arguing the block currently has no community gathering space left. Trips in the Village employee Carolyn Hawthorn spoke against the applications, defending the agency's three-decade run in the building it's fighting to keep.
The corner that almost became a car museum
A few blocks away, at Ortega Boulevard and Manitou, a different fight played out a little earlier. A proposal called the Ortega Carriage House sought rezoning to a Planned Unit Development that would have mixed office space and neighborhood retail with vehicle storage, the kind of setup residents worried would double as an event space drawing outside traffic to a quiet residential corner. A resident-led campaign, organized under the name Stop Carriage House and backed by a legal fund, pushed back hard enough that the project was tabled in December 2024 ahead of a community meeting called by District 7 City Councilman Jimmy Peluso.
The property owner's team eventually pivoted from development to sale. By mid-2025, the parcels at 4230 and 4218 Ortega Boulevard were under contract, with the buyer undisclosed at the time. Peter Hunt, an Ortega resident who helped organize the opposition to the Carriage House, was also watching the separate sale of the old bank lot at 2922 Corinthian Avenue that same spring. He told Resident News he was hopeful the new owners there would build something that fits the residential character of the block and preserves what's historic about it rather than working against both.
Meanwhile, the rest of the neighborhood keeps filling in
Not every change in Ortega this year has come with a fight attached. Chicken Salad Chick opened in June 2026 in the Ortega Park shopping center on Roosevelt Boulevard, giving the corridor another quick lunch option. In July 2026, CareSpot Urgent Care opened a new location on Beverly Avenue in partnership with Baptist Health, its 46th location overall and the first urgent care many residents will have within a short drive rather than a trip across the bridge.
None of these openings are dramatic on their own. Together they say something plainer: Ortega's daily-use amenities are filling in gaps that have existed for a while, even as the village center a mile away is negotiating with its own history over what gets to stay standing.
What's next on the calendar
Ortega's Fall Festival returns to Cortez Park again this year, the same circular park designed as part of the original 1909 street plan by architect Henry J. Klutho. It's a low-key, oak-shaded gathering that's been part of the neighborhood's rhythm since Old Ortega earned its Historic District designation in 2004. Worth remembering when you're there this year: the buildings framing that walk down Corinthian have never been guaranteed to stay put just because they're old. Some get saved by a neighbor buying in. Others get a clock instead.
If you've been watching what's changing around Ortega Village and want a read on what any of it might mean for your own plans, whether you're thinking about staying put, renovating, or eventually selling, Michael Wright and Team Executive Suzi Ford know this stretch of Jacksonville well and are happy to talk through it with you, no pressure attached. Contact Us.
