Gary Sass, owner of Ad Lib Luxury Tours, has been giving unique tours of Downtown Jacksonville for 15 years. 84 J MAGAZINE | WINTER <strong>2019</strong>
BOB SELF As thousands of Downtown workers head to their offices for the day, Gary Sass is imparting subterranean history lessons in Jacksonville’s urban core “I’M A MAN OF PROPS,” said Gary Sass, and that much is readily apparent. At his feet sits a black-and-white canvas tote bag stuffed with the visual aids he employed while leading a tour of Downtown churches earlier that day. “When people ask me a question, I can physically show them a prop on the tour. It’s a style that I have.” It was a Monday in mid-September, when we met, plowing through bagels and juice before settling down for a bull session that lasted nearly two hours. As the owner of Ad Lib Luxury Tours, Sass has become something of a local icon, a fixture in the urban core who knows this city as well as almost anyone alive today. Sass was born in Kingston, N.Y. in late February of 1963, cultivating a love for history from an early age. “It was the first capital of New York State,” he said, “and then the British burned it in 1777, and the capital moved to Albany.” He attended SUNY-Potsdam in the early ‘80s, majoring in computer science. That work took him all over the U.S. and Europe, paying the bills while helping him build his archive of historical data. “I was a little bit of a confirmed bachelor, and then I met my wife while I was working in London for a year.” Ironically or not, they met on a walking tour. After the birth of his second child 15 years ago, Sass and his wife decided to scale back on the constant moving that went with his IT career. “So we went on a six-month study of the perfect place to live in the United States. My wife went to a website; she answered 250 questions and up popped Jacksonville, Florida as her perfect place to live. So we started researching Jacksonville, and other areas, and Jacksonville came up No. 1, based on all the criteria that was important to us, from cost of living to proximity to the beach, weather, all different types of factors.” Sass and his wife were just two of the thousands of people who’ve moved to Jacksonville over the past decade, but among them all, it’s likely that no one else put more thought into the decision. Once they’d picked their city, they narrowed their focus to specific neighborhoods. “We ended up on the border of St. Johns and Duval County,” said Sass, “in a community called Walden Chase. That community became Nocatee.” He continued in the IT biz for a while, but was often rejected for being overqualified, and that quickly pushed him to finally pursue his passion full-time. “I went two months without a job,” he said, “and then I said to my wife, ‘Well, let’s take this as a sign that we’re supposed to start our own company.’” He had a couple ideas, but the tours that resonated. “Nobody is doing personalized tours, and nobody is doing Jacksonville. In St. Augustine, it was just the trains and trolleys,” he said. They had run such tours successfully in a number of cities previously, around the world, so they decided to reboot the gimmick here, basically starting from scratch. “We decided that we would become the local experts.” FROM THE MOMENT OF finalizing their decision, it was about three weeks before their first tours. Sass had started researching the area from the moment he arrived, leaning heavily on the local library and the Jacksonville Historical Society. “I’m a pretty quick study,” he said. “I became friends with the people who ran the archives,” folks like Wayne Wood and Emily Lisska. “They became some of my first friends here,” he said. He spends as much time researching his subject matter as he does on the actual tours, if not more. This has made Sass, a relative newcomer, an expert on local history. He counts local legends like Wayne Wood and Tim Gilmore as friends. Now 15 years into the venture, business is booming with Sass becoming something of a local icon. “We are definitely slower in the summertime,” he said. “The reason being is that locals don’t necessarily want to do tours in the heat, and the visitors want to go to the beach. The times when we’re busiest are the spring and the fall, when the weather is better for people to do activities. Christmas time, I’m not that busy, unless it’s a theme tour.” Much of the tour activity is conducted on foot, but he also has access to a small fleet to ferry customers. “I’m a transportation company,” he said. “I have one vehicle, an eight-person luxury van; it’s built out like a limousine on the inside. I realized that for a small group, it’s too expensive to rent out a vehicle and driver and a tour guide, so I just do it myself. This works really well for the higher-end tours.” Sass works closely with the hotels in Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Amelia Island and Ponte Vedra. “I’m used as kind of a resource by salespeople when they’re selling the area.” He’ll even [Continued on page 96] WINTER <strong>2019</strong> | J MAGAZINE 85
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