Prime F. Osborn III Convention Center is a 265,000-square-foot (24,600m2)convention center located in downtownJacksonville, Florida. Opened in 1986, it was built incorporating Jacksonville Terminal Complex / Union Station as well as several thousand square feet of newly built structure.
Located in the Jacksonville neighborhood of LaVilla, the Prime Osborn contains two exhibition halls totaling 78,500 square feet (7,290m2), several ballrooms and meetings rooms. The City of Jacksonville is looking to replace the Prime Osborn within the next decade, with a larger 500,000+ square foot convention center in downtown Jacksonville. The JTA Skyway's LaVilla station is located across the street.
The company was incorporated in 1894 by Henry Flagler, who owned the Florida East Coast Railway. Its first Union Depot opened on February 4, 1895, and was completed on January 15, 1897. It came to be known as the Flagler Depot. Ownership was split between five railroad companies, Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, Florida East Coast Railway, and Seaboard Air Line Railroad each with 25% ownership, Southern Railway and Georgia Southern and Florida Railway each with 12.5% ownership.
When the second Union Station opened in 1919 (on the site of the original one), it was the largest railroad station in the South. At its peak, the terminal handled as many as 142 trains and 20,000 passengers a day.[2] Some of the passenger trains handled in Jacksonville were 18 to 22 railcars long. Within the terminal, there was a restaurant, snack bars, news stands, a barber shop, florist, a drug store, and gift shops.[3] The Jacksonville terminal had 32 tracks. 29 of those tracks were passenger tracks with platforms. Of those, 1-15 were stub or "head" tracks, which ended at the bumper posts. (Some of these massive decorative concrete posts still stand within the Convention Center Concourse).
Brightline is a inter-city passenger rail system between Miami and West Palm Beach with an under-construction extension to Orlando. Jacksonville is a likely expansion point for the near future, as the FEC Railway already owns the tracks running there.[5]
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Jacksonville_Terminal, and is written by contributors.
Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.