Palafox Street: The Street That Five Empires Built
Near Pensacola, Florida
The street you may be driving or walking now, Palafox, was named after a Spanish general, José de Palafox y Melzi, who held Zaragoza against Napoleon with legendary tenacity in eighteen oh eight and eighteen oh nine. The street was already plotted on an eighteen twelve plan of Pensacola. It has been the city's main artery ever since.
The Pensacola Historic District around Palafox covers twenty-eight blocks and contains more than five hundred buildings from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Architectural styles layer on top of each other the way history layered here: French Creole cottages with tabby walls, Victorian commercial buildings with elaborate cornices, Spanish colonial influences in the deep gallery porches, and plain American vernacular structures built in the decades after annexation.
The Seville Tower, completed in nineteen ten, was the tallest building in Florida at the time of its construction, a fact that tells you something about how modest Florida's urban ambitions still were in the early twentieth century. Seville Square itself dates its first formal layout to seventeen sixty-four, when British engineer Elias Dunford established it as a public square, though the Spanish had already used the ground as a gathering place before that.
The American Planning Association named Palafox Street one of its ten Great Streets in America for twenty thirteen, citing the European influences, the eclectic mix of architectural traditions, and the pedestrian scale that comes from streets built for feet and horses before anyone imagined the automobile. The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-three.
What you see on these blocks is one of the most authentically layered downtown streetscapes in the American South, and most of the people who drive through have no idea how old the argument underneath the pavement really is.
