Drive north on Main Street and you will pass 7316, a squat brick building that has fed Northside families since 1956, longer than almost any other restaurant in Jacksonville has stayed in one place. Most people who live nearby have eaten there a dozen times without knowing it holds that record. A grassroots group called Northside Pride spent the last year building something the neighborhood never had before: a printed map of its own history, shaped like a bingo card.
The card has fifteen stops on it. A handful of them are inside a five-minute drive of streets people have lived on for years without ever pulling over.
Who Built the Map and Where It Circulates
Northside Pride is a 501c3 run by Dana Michelle Maule, a Northside native raised near Dunn Avenue in Biscayne Estates who now owns a home in the neighborhood herself. Northside Pride created a bingo card and companion map covering fifteen historic and cultural sites, designed with experiential graphic designer Hahau Yisrael. Visit Jacksonville now circulates the card.
For context on the city's visitor economy, Jacksonville drew 8.2 million visitors who spent $4.1 billion across the city in 2025, according to the Jacksonville Daily Record.
What's Actually on the Card
Several of these sites are described in a News4Jax report on Historic Durkeeville:
- JP Small Stadium, where Hank Aaron broke the color line in the minor leagues years before he broke records in the majors.
- Mount Ararat Baptist Church, now recognized as the first landmark on the local Civil Rights Trail. Little Richard, the man widely credited as the father of rock and roll, sang there.
- Emmett Reed Park, a working neighborhood park that also anchors Northside Pride's own walking tours.
- Mount Herman Cemetery, where Civil War-era troops are buried.
- Edward Waters University, the oldest HBCU in Florida, bordering the Durkeeville area the tours run through.
In a News4Jax report, Maule sums up the stakes: "JP Small Stadium is where Hank Aaron broke the color lines in the minor leagues." It's the kind of fact that changes how you see a ballfield you've walked past for years without a second look.
The Tours That Already Happened This Year
The map isn't the only thing Northside Pride built. In February, riders gathered at Emmett Reed Gymnasium for a bike tour that cruised through Historic Durkeeville and onto the Emerald Trail S-Line, the multi-use path connecting several Northside neighborhoods. Separate from the bike series, Maule also runs Black Jax Urban Tours, walking hikes through the same Durkeeville streets that put stories behind brick homes most visitors would otherwise just drive past.
A Jacksonville Free Press report on Northside Pride's first year says the organization tallied more than 230 visitors on walking tours through Historic Durkeeville centered at Emmett Reed Park, a number that reflects local turnout more than tourist traffic. That's the audience these tours were built for from the start: people who already live here and never had a reason to stop and look closely at their own streets.
The tours also caught attention outside Jacksonville. In February, a Jacksonville Free Press report described Black travel influencer Eileen Ivette's three-day Northside visit for a national audience, with stops that give a real sense of the range on offer: an eco-tour at the Therapeutic Nursery and Gardens, an urban food forest tucked into the neighborhood; Chef Love's food truck at Trout River Food Park; and RnB Mostly, an after-dark music event in the Phoenix Arts District.
Where to Actually Spend an Afternoon
If you're looking for a version of the loop that fits an ordinary Saturday, the pieces are already there. Start at Emmett Reed Park, walk or bike a stretch of the Emerald Trail S-Line, and swing past Myrtle Avenue, where Maule herself walks and bikes and where a Jacksonville Free Press report describes Northside Pride's first-year mural at Families of Slain Children Inc. If you're hungry, Trout River Food Park is worth checking for Chef Love's truck, and the Therapeutic Nursery and Gardens is close enough to fold into the same afternoon if you want the urban food forest angle rather than just the history stops.
End the day at Joseph's Pizza on North Main Street. It's easy to treat a 1956 restaurant as background noise when you've lived nearby your whole life, but it's also the same room where a Jacksonville Free Press report says Northside Pride held its first-anniversary celebration this year, honoring the donors, media partners, and volunteers who helped the organization get this far. Recognized names on that list include LISC Jacksonville, St. Johns Riverkeeper, and local journalists Lynn Jones, Amanda DeVoe, and Jasmine Monroe. That a scrappy neighborhood nonprofit chose the oldest pizzeria in the city as its own milestone location says something about how deliberately this group is building its own sense of place.
Why This Is Worth Knowing Now
The bingo card presents Northside history and culture, giving readers a chance to learn what happened on the field at JP Small Stadium or make the connection between Mount Ararat Baptist Church and a Civil Rights Trail marker. It's a way to look again at places a few blocks from home.
If you've lived on the Northside for years and none of these fifteen stops sound familiar, that's less a gap in your knowledge than a gap the map itself was built to close. Pick a Saturday, start at Emmett Reed Park, and see how many squares you can fill before dinner at Joseph's.
Terri Drummond and the team at Plenti Realty spend as much time learning the streets we work in as we do the transactions on them. If you're curious what a home on one of these blocks is actually worth in today's market, reach out any time for a free home valuation.
