Discovering the heart of Tallahassee

Just as we do today, the Apalachee and other tribes cherished the area. Listen to these words from writer Julie Hauserman in her essay, “Florida’s Last Waterfall — Cascades Park,” published in Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf: “Imagine it: a bubbling stream through deep green woods, and then a waterfall, cascading twenty to thirty feel through the wet air into a deep pool, perfect for swimming. It was right downtown. Locals called it the ‘Cascade’ … and it flowed near the hillside where the Capitol is now.”

In 1823, the governor of Florida assigned two men to search for a state capital between Pensacola and St. Augustine, and they chose this very location. But over time, and for reasons unknown, the city built a coal gasification plant atop the beautiful cascades. Tar and toxic byproducts were dumped into the free-running stream, and eventually, it was converted into the town dump.

For many decades, the Cascades languished as an EPA brownfield, fenced from public use. Although the area will never return to its original, native beauty, it has been restored as a beloved commons, and truly, the heart of the city.

Just north of Cascades Park is the white, three-story Bryant Building, the central office of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, where I was employed in the mid-1980s, again as a biologist.

How many times did I enter and leave that huge white building, never knowing that on that very site, a vibrant African-American community stood, until its people were forcibly relocated by land developers in the 1960s? Smokey Hollow was its name, and on a bit of the land where 600 residents once lived, a small park commemorates and evokes a sense of what has been lost.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Tallahassee civil rights demonstrations added momentum to the national struggle to end segregation and inequality. I didn’t live here then, but on the walking tour, I was able to imagine McCrory’s dime store at the corner of Pensacola and Monroe streets where courageous young Florida A&M University (FAMU) students and many others staged lunch counter sit-ins and a citywide bus boycott.

You can trace their footsteps at Stop 9, the Civil Rights Heritage Walk.

As you wend your way back to Cascades Park, do not fail to take the elevator to the top floor of the new capitol building. From spacious observation decks, you will find your best perspective of Tallahassee’s location in space and time, and you will appreciate that no city can exist without landscape and fresh water to support it.

On a very clear day, you can look south across the Cody Scarp and the verdant Apalachicola National Forest, all the way to St. Marks Lighthouse. To the west, you’ll see the hilltop of Mission San Luis. You’ll have to imagine the magnificent Red Hills to the north, and the western boundary of Tallahassee’s bioregion, the Aucilla River, to the north and west, but it is worth a try.

If you have time on your visit, dig deeper into some of my favorite venues and events. Attend one of the Tallahassee Bach Parley’s periodic concerts at St. John’s Episcopal Church. You couldn’t be more moved by sight and sounds were you in Paris, I promise. For a more down-home, but equally professional musical experience, catch a bit of a nightly performance, a beer, and a bowl of beans and rice at the Blue Tavern. Do you know of another mellow listening room with its own anthem (written and sometimes performed live by the city’s beloved Velma Frye)?

And do not miss Railroad Square, tucked between FAMU and Florida State University, and somehow saved from downtown redevelopment. Walk the loop of this art park, especially on a First Friday, and you’ll have a hard time choosing between the Mickee Faust playhouse, climbing gym, vintage shops, a coffeehouse in a caboose (one of several great hangouts), the galleries and studios of many artists, and Proof, Tallahassee’s largest brewery.