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Voo Swar Restaurant & Lounge
Welcome to the Atlantic Beach Turtle Crawl! If this is the first turtle you’ve found, there are 23 others scattered throughout our park system, in places of historic significance, and even in some unexpected locations. If you’re up for a scavenger hunt to find every turtle on our Turtle Crawl, you can find a map HERE.
Diamondback Terrapins are carnivorous turtles with ring like patterns on their scutes. Like human fingerprints each terrapin has a unique pattern on each scute. They use their powerful jaws to crack open the hard shells of prey such as mollusks, crustaceans, and other invertebrates. Diamondback Terrapins are one of the only turtles in the United States capable of living in brackish water like at Dutton Island. Terrapins were once considered a delicacy but are now illegal to cook and eat.
Earnest Davis used to dream of a place like the Voo Swar, and during long hours tending the Cleaver-Brooks boiler at the Beaches Laundry, he’d plan it all out: A spot to give black people at the Beaches something they lacked in those segregated days, a decent place to gather, to eat and drink and talk.
Friends agreed it was a great idea, but all they did was talk, talk, talk. So, he just went ahead and drew up some plans. He gave them to an architect who made them all official. He dug the foundation himself. He poured the concrete. He got concrete blocks and started stacking them into walls on an empty lot he owned next to his house on Robert Street, just west of Mayport Road.
In 1963, he opened the Voo Swar Restaurant & Lounge, later adding on a big back room when he could. Although it gained a coat of Jaguar teal and gold paint, inside and out, shortly after Jacksonville got its team, the Voo Swar remains much as it was in the old days — unlike just about everything else at the once sleepy Beaches.
But why Voo Swar?
Some think it has something to do with voodoo. No, Davis says. It’s just that he drew straws with his daughters and he lost. So, they got to choose the name on which he eventually settled. They then dug through a thick dictionary before picking a fine word and showing it to him: “Voussoir.” Said Davis: “It’s the last stone that goes in place in an archway or on a bridge, the keystone. It’s the strongest stone. I guess I’m the strongest point in the building.”
Voo Swar it was.
Inside there’s a diner bar with stools, a pool table, some small tables. A glass case holds a collection of Navy caps from ships that have called nearby Mayport home. In the larger back room there's another pool table, and a fair-sized stage with a drum kit and a PA for the soul bands that play there.
In 2019, the City of Atlantic Beach gave Earnest Davis its Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award. The Beaches Museum also featured him.
Davis was born at home on Shetter Avenue in Jacksonville Beach, with a midwife’s aid. He moved, as a child, to Atlantic Beach, to a black neighborhood people called "The Woods." He was always coy about his age, saying he was “somewhere in his 80s.”
He often spoke of his memory of waking up at 4 a.m. to get ready to walk from Atlantic Beach to the Black elementary school in Jacksonville Beach. Almost five miles, by foot.
From his childhood home in Atlantic Beach, it was only a short walk to the ocean, but he could not walk there in those days. He, and other Blacks, had to go way north on Seminole Road to Manhattan Beach, a short stretch of sand reserved for them. He knew, back then, that that was unjust, but he just kept working his whole life, down at the laundry for years and then at his Voo Swar for decades. He often celebrated that these days his customers are of all races, and he's glad to see them all. "I go by green," he says. "That's the only thing I go by.”
Sadly, Earnest Davis (or “Mr.E”), died January 26, 2019, two days after turning 88. He was survived by 12 children who continue his legacy and this magnificent Atlantic Beach treasure.
(Credit to Matt Soergel, at SHORELINES, and The Florida Times Union, 2019)