A splintered DJ booth deck is perched next to the pool at the once-happening Thunderbird Motor Hotel and Dinner Theatre along the Arlington Expressway.
The pool is green, filled with rainwater, fuzzy algae and floating junk.
A hole is filled with debris where the stage rose in the ballroom, and only the slab remains of that building.
Furniture remnants and at least one bathtub are discarded in stacks of trash.
Concrete is piled around the site awaiting crushing for recycling. Graffiti decorates some of the walls still standing.
There’s even a tire dump from trespassers, along with curtains and more from transients and squatters who made the remaining vacant hotel rooms their makeshift homes.
Most of the buildings are rubble, their remains removed, loaded in dumpsters or stacked in piles.
That’s what was left June 6. Less remains today.
“It’s been an eyesore for a long time. I can look back and say I’m the one who demolished this piece of history,” said Tony Zajni, owner of Jacksonville-based North Florida Waste Management & Demolition.
“I looked at it and said this was cool stuff when they had all of these people hanging out here,” he said.
Zajni is removing the remnants of what began as a venue in Arlington, just over the Mathews Bridge from Downtown, that saw dinner theater performers, weddings and rehearsal dinners, parties and other celebrations in a property with two pools and a signature bar.
Zajni expects the 59-year-old structures and the 18.7-acre site at 5865 Arlington Expressway to be cleared and sodded within three months.
Drivers along the expressway and service road cannot see the depth and expanse of the property, which records show comprised 277 units and 11 buildings.
The structures will all be down by mid-July, followed by concrete crushing and then leveling the site, according to Zajni.
“A lot of people come in and out and want to put money into this place,” he said June 12.
He said investors now see progress and potential.
People ask for the name of the owner so they can talk about development, such as shopping centers and apartments. Zajni passes along their information.
Visitors also stop by to reminisce and some ask for a souvenir.
“Can I get a piece of block out of the pool or the conference center?”
Zajni accommodates them if he can.
The demolition
The city issued demolition permits Feb. 2. Work began March 20, paused for 30 days and resumed at the end of April.
The permits were issued to Jacksonville Beach-based KLT Construction Inc., which subcontracted with North Florida Waste Management & Demolition.
The two permits comprise:
• $450,000 to demolish the two-story hotel. It was 41,248 square feet enclosed and 3,875 square feet unenclosed.
• $100,000 to demolish Buildings 1-10. Those two-story buildings totaled 93,914 square feet.
Zajni said his team of 18 people have pulled 2,500 tons of trash and concrete.
In starting their work, they found men camped in the rooms in the back of the property in four sturdier concrete-block structures.
He said some of the campers had jobs but no homes. They moved into the vacant and dilapidated hotel rooms and brought in furniture, such as sofas and beds, and closed off the units with curtains. They cooked on grills. They turned on water from an outside faucet to a well.
One dweller told him he had been there two years. “Can I stay another month?” he asked.
Zajni does not know where they moved.
The demolition crew also found and relocated wildlife, such as raccoons.
Zajni has installed security cameras to monitor the site.
‘Wonderfall’ to downfall
Since it was the Thunderbird, the property also served as a Ramada Inn Conference Center, among other uses.
It had been sold several times, including to Bethelite Inc., affiliated with Bethel Baptist Institutional Church. That sign still remains on the property along the expressway.
When it served as the Thunderbird, it catered to new Arlington neighborhoods popular with young executives working Downtown and around the area.
While dates differ from property records, Abandonedfl.com says the Thunderbird Motor Hotel opened in 1959.
It said a major renovation in 1969 “transformed the Thunderbird into an extravagant Polynesian and American Indian-themed hotel that became host to countless stars such as The Rolling Stones, Fats Domino, Ann Sothern, and the Sammy Spear Orchestra of The Jackie Gleason Show.”
Two media reports say Sothern was injured during a performance at the theater in 1973 or 1974. The New York Times reported in her 2001 obituary that “falling scenery broke her back and smashed the nerves in her legs. She finished the performance, held together with silver gaffer’s tape.”
The abandonedfl.com site quoted a postcard for the Thunderbird from the early 1970s: “300 Luxurious rooms, Gourmet Dining Room, 2 Lounges with Live Entertainment, Complete Convention Facilities, Only minutes from Downtown and the Gator Bowl. Location is close to everything and offers the ultimate in service.”
The site said the hotel featured conference space, two swimming pools along with Tiki bars, the Zodiac Room, the Kettle Pub, and the King’s Inn Lounge.
The site said that according to author and historian Tim Gilmore, the Thunderbird featured an 80-seat cocktail lounge centered on a bar called “The Wonderfall.”
Architect William K. Jackson of Jacksonville’s KBJ Architects called it “a circular lounge with seated areas arranged around a circular bar.”
The site said halos of beaded strings descended from three circles in a domed ceiling into a larger circle ringed with gin and bourbon and scotch. Tim Gilmore described it as “a flying saucer ascending from tractor beams.”
From the 1970s to the late 2010s, the property changed hands multiple times, it said.
“The hotel along with the rest of the neighborhood continued to decline into the 1990s as business shifted towards Southside. Shortly after its operation as a Quality Inn, the hotel became a Ramada Inn before its closure in 2002,” the site said.
Then, now and next
The property has been unused for more than a decade and seemed to fall apart by neglect.
The site is north along the Arlington Expressway, east of the former Town & Country Shopping Center that is being renovated into the College Park retail and apartment center.
It is 4 miles from Downtown over the Mathews Bridge, which opened in 1953 to launch rural Arlington as a new and trendy suburb.
The city and developers want to restore that vibe.
The property anchors the southern part of the city’s Renew Arlington Community Redevelopment Area boundary for targeted redevelopment.
It and the adjacent College Park, which is the former Town & Country Shopping Center, are in what the CRA’s zoning overlay calls the “catalyst character area.”
As of May 2022, the property owner, Yuval “Giovanni” Fishman, was working toward redevelopment of the site.
Lawyer Steve Diebenow, a land-use and government relations lawyer and partner with the Jacksonville-based Driver, McAfee, Hawthorne & Diebenow firm, said May 12, 2022, his firm was hired to resolve code compliance issues and to start the entitlement process for redevelopment.
He said then he expected the need for a land-use amendment and rezoning.
Diebenow said he believed Fishman intended to redevelop the property himself, but that depended on timing.
“The first part was getting everything taken care of from the past.”
He and the owner did not respond to questions about an update on plans.
Fishman, who owns the property through “Happy New Good Year 770 LLC; 770 Inn and Suites,” signed an authorization Feb. 2, 2022, for a contractor to demolish the property.
His listed telephone number is that of Miami Gardens Inn & Suites in Miami.
The site has been drawing city attention.
The February 2023 permits specified that the structures will be demolished using an excavator and material will be hauled away using roll-off trucks for disposal at a licensed recycling or landfill facility.
The permits, including another to disconnect sewer and water, show the Municipal Code Compliance Division code is “unsafe/condemn.”
In November 2019, a fire destroyed an empty storage building.
In March 2020, as the pandemic began, the city said new property ownership led to re-issued condemnation signs on the closed property warning that it faces demolition.
The city Municipal Code Compliance Division ordered the condemnation of the property.
Ownership worked on settlement agreements with the city that gave it a year to demolish or rehab the structures.
Property records show 770 Inn and Suites LLC of Miami bought the property in 2017 and quitclaimed the property to Happy New Good Year 770 LLC on Oct. 25, 2019. Happy New Good Year 770’s address in Wilmington, Delaware, is that of CSC North America. CSC is a document recording service.
KLT Construction Inc. President Kevin Hensley, who retired in 2014 from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, said he remembers the Thunderbird.
“I came on in the ‘80s and it was hopping back then,” he said.
He said his son is on the JSO SWAT team. He said the team trained at the property when it was vacant over the past several years.
“Now it’s just an eyesore and it needed be gone. It was a mess,” Hensley said.
For KLT Construction, the project is “business as usual.”
“It’s another big job under our belt. I’m just glad we can help.”
District 1 City Council member Joyce Morgan, whose term ends June 30 as she becomes Duval County Property Appraiser, doesn’t know what happens next with the site.
“Because it is in the CRA we will be able to watch it much more closely,” she said.
She credited code enforcement for forcing the demolition.
Morgan said that in training for 5K races and marathons, she would pass by the property. She called the dilapidated scene “eerie.”
“The roofs were collapsing to the point where it was dangerous,” Morgan said.
“We know that up in that area, because it is so vast, people who were homeless found shelter, but it was dangerous shelter. Code enforcement was the reason we saw this demolition.”
Morgan said that was overdue.
“It needed to be cleaned up. It was time,” she said.
“I am really, really happy that we are finally going to the next step.”