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New Town, Jacksonville — Area Guide & Where to Stay
New Town is a residential neighborhood northwest of downtown Jacksonville, built around the Kings Road campus of Edward Waters University.
About New Town
Where to stay in New Town
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Rooms here are borrowed from Downtown Jacksonville. The neighborhood runs residential from Beaver Street north to the Edward Waters University campus, a grid of single-family houses that the HabiJax program enlarged with more than 100 new homes in 2012. Beaver Street and Interstate 95 frame the drive in.
A downtown base suits you best if the trip is built around a game at the Adams-Jenkins Community Sports and Music Complex or a meeting at the Schell-Sweet Community Resource Center.
About New Town
What are the main landmarks in New Town?
Centennial Hall anchors the Edward Waters University campus on Kings Road, a 1916 building put up by the Jacksonville contractor Richard Lewis Brown and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. It holds the university library and the Obi-Scott-Umunna Collection of African Art. The wider Edward Waters College Historic District followed in 2022.
The Schell-Sweet Community Resource Center opens onto Kings Road, and the Adams-Jenkins Community Sports and Music Complex hosts college basketball.
What is the history of New Town?
New Town went up in the early twentieth century as housing for African-American workers in the railroad yards and industrial tracts east, south and west of it. Edward Waters College began in 1866 as Brown Theological Institute, an African Methodist Episcopal foundation renamed in 1892 for Bishop Edward Waters, and it took new ground on Kings Road by 1904 after the Great Fire of 1901 destroyed the first campus. Centennial Hall followed in 1916.
Mayor John Peyton and a coalition of partners launched the New Town Success Zone in 2008, a Harlem Children's Zone model built around the neighborhood's two public schools.
Where is New Town?
Kings Road closes the north side, Beaver Street the south, and Interstate 95 the western edge of this Urban Core grid.
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Updated September 2026