Fourteen Doric columns that once welcomed 20,000 rail passengers a day now front a convention hall. The Prime F. Osborn III Convention Center at 1000 Water Street in downtown Jacksonville is a 265,000-square-foot events complex built into the former Jacksonville Union Terminal, the Neoclassical Revival station that opened on 17 November 1919 as the largest railroad terminal in the American South. Architect Kenneth M. Murchison - who also designed Baltimore's Penn Station - gave the terminal a main waiting room with 75-foot vaulted ceilings and a 32-track yard. At its 1944 peak the complex handled nearly 40,000 trains and ten million passengers a year, employing more than 2,000 people as the city's second-largest employer, with a restaurant, barber shop, florist and drug store inside. Air travel and Amtrak consolidation drained the traffic; the last train left on 3 January 1974 and the building sat dark for a decade, joining the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. The rescue was led by Prime F. Osborn III, the former CSX chairman who assembled a public-private partnership in 1982 and put his own money into the restoration. The convention center that carries his name opened on 17 October 1986 - Osborn had died the year before - and launched with a four-month run of the Ramses II exhibition, the largest collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts then touring, shown in only four North American cities. The conversion kept the grand hall and even some of the massive decorative concrete bumper posts from the stub tracks, standing today inside the concourse; it remains the only former southern railroad station in the country converted into a working convention center. Owned by the City of Jacksonville and served by the LaVilla monorail station, the center hosts trade shows, banquets and consumer events, while plans for a University of Florida graduate campus around the site - and a possible return of passenger rail - keep its next act under discussion.

Type: Indoor Event Space

Address: 1000 Water Street, Jacksonville, FL, United States, 32204

Website: https://www.jaxevents.com

Opening Date: 17/11/1919

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