Ragtime Tavern (207 Atlantic Boulevard) in Atlantic Beach is a passable restaurant, but what I like about it is their sunken aquarium room that makes you feel like you're underwater. Especially after a few of their Pacific Blue cocktails.
Sometimes they don't have the room open; if it isn't, excuse yourselves and come back another time. It's really all about the aquarium room. I don't even remember what I ate here now, and I guess I didn't think it worth taking a picture of at the time.
Look for Crying Child Island in the intracoastal waterway between Jacksonville and the Atlantic Ocean, and you may ask yourself, as I have, what the heck that's supposed to mean. Some internet chatter has ascribed the island's odd name to an old story, as given in a vague explanation by Atlantic Beach city manager Jim Hanson:
"The ominously creepy name comes from a sound, similar to the wailing of a child, that apparently was made by a cougar on the island in the past."
Hmmmmmm. Color me skeptical.
Legends behind place names everywhere, not just Florida, are usually a little too specious fpr my tastes. What usually happens is that a place gets its name in one century, and then the source for its meaning is lost a few generations later, leaving people to just make up their own folklore that sounds good. Still, I hold out hope that somewhere, in some forgotten resource in a neglected part of a dusty library archive, we may yet know the story behind its name.
This charmingly garish house in Atlantic Beach caught my eye, and I paused to take a picture of it, albeit with my cheapo flip-phone whose lens was fogged up with condensation.
Curious, I just tried to find it on Google Maps Street View and had some difficulty doing so. Then I realized why: the Google Maps image is from 2011, and the house had not yet been decorated in its present manner.
Then I happened to notice a phone number and a website address on the bumper of a vehicle parked in the drive.
I visited the site and sure enough, it's for an artist - Mark A. Durham - who does all sorts of wacky wild colorful Outsider Art in the very same style as the home's exterior! Says here, "Mark Durham's company, MAD Studio, produces and sells his line of framed giclee and paper prints, gift products, and original art."
And since Mr. Durham provides his address and phone number on the site publicly, I'll go ahead and make this blog post (which I had been debating on previously, since I assume not everyone wants to have their home spotlighted on some weird blog, even if Google Maps did already put it all out there.) The moral of the story is, it pays to advertise and it pays to get people's attention by any means necessary, just as Mr. Durham has done with his eye-catching home/studio.
I enjoy all of his work displayed on the site - Pink Cow, Pimp Kitty, Witherspoon the Dog, and Mad Cat - but I do believe my favorite is Owl, shown here.
