Walk the Northbank Riverwalk past 610 East Bay Street most weekday afternoons and you'll see the same thing: a jogger cutting through, a couple of retirees pointing at the Orleck's gun mounts, a stretch of mowed grass running east from the ship toward Hogans Creek that nobody gives a second look. That grass is the future site of Shipyards West Park, a 10-acre riverfront project the city has been talking about since 2023. Most people who live or work downtown assume the empty ground will fill in first, then the naval displays will follow.
That order is about to flip. Within the next few weeks, roughly 55 tons of decommissioned submarine, the sail, dive planes, and rudder of the former USS Jacksonville, will arrive on flatbed trucks from a Navy shipyard in Washington State. The park that's supposed to house it is still sitting in permit review at City Hall.
What's Actually on Its Way, and Where It Isn't Going Yet
The USS Jacksonville, nicknamed "The Bold One," was the only Navy vessel ever named for this city. Commissioned in May 1981, it served 40 years before decommissioning at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton in November 2021. Jacksonville resident and Navy veteran Stephen Jorgensen was there for that decommissioning, and it's what set the current project in motion.
Jorgensen now leads a nonprofit called Bring the Sail 2 Jax, which spent roughly four years working the Navy's approval process to bring home the sail, or conning tower, along with its wing-like dive planes and a rudder salvaged from a sister submarine of the same class. The Navy signed off this summer. Local logistics company Landstar System Inc. is handling the cross-country move at an estimated cost of $66,000, and the pieces, shipped in at least four separate truckloads, are headed not to the museum site itself but to Fincantieri Marine Repair's yard near the Hart Bridge, where welders trained to work with the submarine's specialized alloy will put it back together.
"It's the only one, and they're probably not gonna name another one, so it's kind of important."
That's Jorgensen's explanation for why he took this on. It also explains why the timeline moved as fast as it did once the Navy said yes.
The Welding Comes Before the Address
Here's the part that surprises people who assume a memorial like this gets built where it will eventually sit. The sail won't touch Shipyards West until it's fully reassembled somewhere else. City Council member Will Lahnen, a District 3 representative and former Navy submariner himself, has been blunt about the sequence: the pieces arrive, then get welded, painted, and sealed before anyone decides exactly where they'll stand. The current plan, modeled on the USS Bancroft Memorial outside Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia, calls for the sail to sit on a concrete base with its hatches sealed, no interior access, rather than a full hull replica.
Even the final placement is still open. Jorgensen has said he hopes to have it "either at the end of the pier next to the Orleck or on land at the front entrance of the Orleck" within a year of arrival, which tells you the exact spot hasn't been locked down even as the steel itself crosses the country. Lahnen's own connections helped move this along faster than a typical civic project might: he previously worked under Landstar CEO Frank Lonegro when both were at CSX, a relationship that helped smooth the logistics side once the Navy cleared the transfer.
Meanwhile, the Actual Park Is Still at the Permit Counter
The contrast becomes obvious once you look at what's happening a few hundred feet away. The city filed a permit application in the summer of 2026 for a two-story, 36,000-square-foot events pavilion at Shipyards West, designed by Claire Weisz Architects LLP with Massachusetts-based Agency Landscape + Planning and WXY Architecture + Urban Design also listed on the application. The job cost for that phase, covering the plaza, parking, pavilion, central lawn, gardens, and walkways across 23.58 acres, comes in at $57 million. As of early July, that permit was still under city review, with no groundbreaking date locked in.
Compare that to what's already open one block over. The roughly $7 million Riverfront Music Garden, built next to the Jacksonville Center for the Performing Arts, opened in May 2026 with a ground-mounted keyboard visitors can play by stepping on the keys and a walkway honoring musicians with Jacksonville ties, including Ray Charles, the Allman Brothers Band, Tim McGraw, Ma Rainey, 38 Special, and brothers James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. It went from announcement to ribbon cutting faster than its much larger neighbor has gone from design to permit approval.
Here's how the three projects along this same stretch actually line up as of this summer:
| Project | Status as of summer 2026 | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Riverfront Music Garden | Open since May 2026 | Nothing left to build |
| USS Jacksonville sail memorial | In transit from Bremerton | Reassembly at Fincantieri, placement still undecided |
| Shipyards West pavilion | Permit under city review | No groundbreaking date set |
Add in Asado Life, the Argentine live-fire restaurant planned for the Shipyards marina support building near the Four Seasons Hotel & Residences, which is on track for an August 2026 opening under Executive Chef Matthew Brown, and you get a corridor where private restaurants and donated Navy hardware are both moving faster than the public park meant to tie them together.
Why the Gangway Is Up This Week
There's one more piece of this that's easy to miss if you haven't tried to visit the Orleck lately. The ship closes every year in late August for maintenance, and this year's closure runs August 22 through August 31, meaning the gangway goes back down tomorrow. That closure isn't cosmetic. In May 2026, state lawmakers approved another $782,000 for the ship on top of $2.25 million already invested over the previous three years, funding that's going toward restoring the engine and radio rooms, a fresh paint job, and added air conditioning. Florida Historic Naval Ship Association president Dan Bean has said the goal is to make the Orleck one of the only museum warships anywhere with public access to its engine room, a detail that matters to the veterans who actually worked spaces like that.
Bean has also put a number on what the ship already means to the city, estimating its economic impact at four to five million dollars a year. That's not hypothetical. In June, the Orleck hosted a reception for Ship Repair USA 2026, an industry conference that drew marine executives from companies like Moran Towing and Fincantieri Marine Systems aboard the ship for an evening event. The Orleck isn't just a static exhibit waiting for company. It's already a working part of downtown's event calendar, even while the infrastructure around it catches up.
What This Actually Means If You Walk This Stretch Regularly
If you're downtown often enough to have an opinion about the Riverwalk, here's the practical takeaway. Don't expect a ribbon cutting at Shipyards West anytime soon. Do expect to see something you won't have seen before: flatbed trucks carrying pieces of a submarine through downtown streets sometime this fall, headed for a shipyard near the Hart Bridge rather than the park everyone assumed would come first. The sail's timeline runs on Navy logistics and a handful of local volunteers. The park's timeline runs on city permitting. Those two clocks don't run at the same speed, and this corner of the Northbank is where you can watch that gap play out in real time.
As a Jacksonville native who's watched this stretch of the river change shape over four decades, I find this kind of sequencing more interesting than the ribbon cuttings themselves. If you're curious how the rest of the Northbank corridor is likely to develop, or you just want to talk through what's changing in the neighborhoods around it, Stephen Williams and the Edgewater Home Team are always happy to schedule a consultation and walk through it with you.
