# JEA Tower

JEA Tower is a skyscraper in Jacksonville, Florida, owned by JEA, but available. Standing 268 ft (82 m) tall, it ranked second on the list of tallest buildings in Jacksonville when built. Until 1988 it was known as the Universal-Marion Building.

## Downtown Center

The Downtown Center in Jacksonville consisted of the Park South building (1960), J.B. Ivey & Company (1962) and the Universal-Marion building (1963). They were connected by open courtyards. Park South was a 5-level parking garage with Purcells, a store for women on the ground floor. Iveys was a department store with 6 floors and an underground parking garage. Universal-Marion was a 19-story office building with a circular revolving restaurant on the 18th floor. The buildings were all designed by noted New York architect Morris Ketchum Jr. in the Mid-century modern architectural style.

### Universal-Marion

This building opened in 1963 as the headquarters for Louis Wolfson's Universal-Marion Company when the firm was the largest tenant. The company owned the Miami Beach Sun (1929–1971) and the Jacksonville Chronicle newspapers and made movies through a subsidiary. The firm co-financed the production of The Producers, Mel Brooks' first movie, which won an Oscar and later became a major Broadway play. At its peak, Wolfson's empire had total assets estimated at $250 million, worth $2 billion in 2025 dollars.

#### Restaurant

The Embers was a 250-seat restaurant that opened on the eighteenth level of the Universal Marion building in 1964. One of a handful of skyscrapers constructed in the South to feature a rotating roof top restaurant, it is representative of a brief period in American history when revolving roof top restaurants became popular after the Space Needle was constructed in 1962 for the World's Fair in Seattle, Washington. At the Embers, live Maine lobsters were flown in from Booth Bay, Maine, every Friday at the restaurant, which stayed open until 12:30 a.m. Rotating 360 degrees every one and a half hours, reputedly the largest revolving restaurant in the world. Expensive to operate, the popularity of revolving rooftop restaurants declined by the end of the 1970s. In later years, this space was used as the office of Charter's CEO Raymond Knight Mason and a meeting space for the JEA board.

#### Charter

Raymond K. Mason and his Charter Company had their corporate headquarters there from 1979 to 1984.

### Iveys

In August 1962 the J.B. Ivey & Company department store opened. Other nearby stores included May-Cohens, Furchgott's (closed in May 1985), Levy-Wolf (closed in 1984) Jacobsons, JCPenney, Sears
Annual Downtown retail sales in 1963 were $94 million. By 1982 it had fallen to $92 million. In contrast, sales at Regency Square in Arlington went from $29 million in 1967 to $319 million in 1982. Sales growth had shifted from downtown to the suburbs. By the time Ivey's department store closed in July 1985, their top three floors were already empty.

### Park South

Purcell's Women's Store opened first, in 1960. It fell prey to the same fate as Iveys and closed in the 1980s.

## JEA

The Downtown Center was purchased by JEA in 1988. Corporate offices were moved into the Universal-Marion building, and it was renamed the JEA Tower with their logo at the top. The Customer Service department occupied the Iveys building, and the Park South building is referred to as the Adair building.
In April 2023, JEA vacated the buildings. In February 2025, the company announced that they were accepting bids for redevelopment of the vacant buildings at their former headquarters.