LAURA STREET

The largest urban fire in the Southeast levels downtown Jacksonville in a single afternoon. From the ashes rises an era of extraordinary ambition — and the finest architecture the city has ever known.

The first of the trio rises — a neoclassical jewel sheathed entirely in marble, its six grand columns a promise that Jacksonville would return more splendid than before. A century later, its skylit banking hall still takes the breath away.

Henry J. Klutho's daring tower becomes the first reinforced-concrete high-rise in the entire American South — so ahead of its time that lenders demanded proof the engineering was possible. Every office was leased before it was even finished, and its owner ordered the building doubled in width mid-construction.

Slender and proud, Klutho's Prairie School masterpiece opens as the tallest building in Florida — called the city's "purest statement of a skyscraper." Its roof once held a three-room penthouse cottage with its own garden, high above downtown.

After decades of silence, the trio begins its next chapter with the Becovic family of companies — residences in the towers, a new hotel, and the Marble Bank reborn as a premier dining and event destination in the heart of downtown.