J Magazine Winter 2019

Tunnel
Continued from page 85
dress up in period garb from time to time.
Ad Lib runs a number of tours in and
around the city, but is probably best-known
for tours of the Downtown tunnel system,
which dates back over a century.
“There is a whole underground system,
much of which is connected,” he said.
Most of the tunnel system was devised
to facilitate cash transfers among the banks
that flourished Downtown in the early 1900s.
By his estimate, less than 5 percent of that
system is currently accessible to the public.
They’re now used mainly for storage and
closed off, but a lot of the beautiful vault
doors remain intact.
When you step inside, you are immediately
transported back in time, to a bygone
era of horse carts and fine masonic craftsmanship.
With artificial light reflecting of
those brass doors, the nose is drawn in by
the moist, musty smell of concrete, paper
and steel, materials that predate the memories
of anyone still living. It is the smell of old
money, literally, and it’s easy to imagine the
kind of business that used to get done down
here.
Largely unknown to the general public,
these beautiful tunnels have lingered in
obscurity and disrepair for generations, but
long ago attained a sort of legendary status.
For decades, their existence could only be
confirmed by the whispers of old-timers, but
Gary Sass has single-handedly brought them
back to prominence.
Linking this network, and exposing its
hidden beauty to the public is, for Sass, the
ultimate goal.
“I could do a complete underground tour
in Jacksonville,” he said, “and it would be the
best tour in the whole Southeast if I had cooperation
from the community and the city.”
Obtaining that level of cooperation
among so many competing interests is, as always,
a Herculean task, but where others see
empty space, Sass sees lost opportunities.
“When we had our 450th anniversary,
in 2014, there was a little celebration at City
Hall, and most people didn’t even know
about it,” he said. “There were maybe a
couple hundred people, and that was pretty
much it. St Augustine celebrated for a whole
year, maybe a year and a half.”
The company may be called Ad Lib, but
there nothing ad hoc about these productions.
In fact, the amount of time put
into planning and logistics borders on the
obsessive, and he wouldn’t have it any other
way. Some tour guides are just showing off,
he said.
“It’s not about how much I know. It’s
about what I know that is going to make a
difference in those people.”
FOR SASS, THIS IS MORE THAN
just a job; it’s an adventure. All the thousands
of hours running tours Downtown
have done nothing to diminish his own fascination
with the city and its complex, often
confusing history, and that passion helps
keep his tours fresh and compelling.
“I can do 10 different walking tours
from the Downtown hotels,” said Sass, who
also writes about local history for various
publications.
There is virtually no limit to the subjects
he can cover, but he also allows clients to
customize their tours, narrowing the focus
to a particular era or theme. He does a tour
of the Main Library Downtown, for example,
that runs more than an hour.
Sass views his own business as symbiotic
with the city’s overall agenda for increased
growth and development Downtown. For
civic leaders, these tours are some of the
most effective promotions that money
can buy, especially given that it costs them
nothing.
And there is so much more that Sass
would like to do, but his vision is limited by
the stubborn intransigence of his wouldbe
partners in the business community,
some of whom have thrown up obstacles
to his plans. In theory, any property owner
would welcome a steady stream of potential
customers in and around their buildings, but
that has proven untrue to a surprising extent.
Some folks view him as an interloper,
others as an outright pest, but in reality
Sass is one of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders
this city has ever had, and he seems
to care about Downtown and its future
more than many people who were actually
born here.
For example, he is probably not the only
resident who has a dog named “Bowden”,
but the namesake in actually not the football
coach, but one of our most obscure former
mayors, J.E.T. Bowden, whose brief term
coincided with the Great Fire.
Sass’ advocacy for using the city’s past
to help drive economic growth, by basically
providing free advertising for its existing and
future ventures, reflects an emerging bipartisan
consensus typified by prominent citizens
like Steve Williams, Matt Carlucci and
A group from the Bolles School looks at old safety
deposit boxes during a tour of Downtown tunnels.
Stephen Dare, each of whom has pushed
aggressively (in their way) for monetizing
local history in recent months.
Gilmore has written a series of books
(and the indispensable Jax Psycho Geo blog)
chronicling specific and lesser-recognized
aspects of local history, and Mike Tolbert’s
new book about Jake Godbold vividly
chronicles the city during perhaps its most
aspirational era.
They say that everything old is new
again, and Gary Sass is proving that aphorism
to be true on an almost daily basis.
SHELTON HULL has written for Folio Weekly
for 22 years. He also appears regularly on WJCT.
He lives in Riverside.
WILL DICKEY
96
J MAGAZINE | WINTER 2019