The building at 1198 Edgewood Ave S has a well-earned reputation in Murray Hill. Ask anyone who has lived in the neighborhood long enough and they will tell you they have watched three different bars and restaurants open and close there over the past decade. Mustang's Whiskey Bar & Grill. The Stout Snug. Magnolia's Pub. Each one opened, drew a crowd, and later closed.
This summer, a fourth attempt opened its doors. The Forge Restaurant & Bar quietly began serving in late June, and the two men who signed the lease know exactly what they are walking into. What makes this one worth paying attention to is not that it opened. It is what its owners are betting on to make it stick, and how that bet lines up with two other things happening on the same half-mile of Edgewood Avenue right now.
A Corner With a Reputation
The building itself dates to 1917, which means it has outlasted every business that has occupied it. Mathew Bush and Kevin Parrish, the co-owners of The Forge, put roughly a million dollars into the interior before opening, tearing out old electrical and plumbing systems with Starke-based Jeffrey A. Kerr Construction handling the build. That is not the kind of money you spend on a concept you expect to fold in eighteen months.
Bush is a Navy veteran and former federal law enforcement officer. Parrish has several veterans in his own family. Their head chef, Eric Hamilton, also served. Bush told Hoodline he does not plan for a short run: "I'm not used to failing." Whether that mindset is enough to break a ten-year pattern is the actual open question on this stretch of Edgewood, not whether the beer is cold or the wings are good.
The Forge Is Playing a Different Game
Here is where the bet gets specific. The Forge is not chasing a destination crowd. The 3,888 square foot space is built around a front bar with high tops, a dining room that doubles as a game room with a pool table, a stage tucked in back for live acts, and a covered patio for smokers. There is no cover charge for the music. The hours run late. The menu leans comfort food rather than anything trying to impress a critic.
That combination, food plus music plus no cover plus late hours, is designed for one thing: turning strangers into regulars. Landlords and longtime residents along the strip are watching to see how the new approach develops.
It would be easy to treat this as a one-off story about one new bar. It is not. Two blocks away, the exact same bet was placed years ago, and it already paid off.
Two Blocks Away, the Same Bet Already Won
The Jacksonville Daily Record reported that Stacey and Broc Flores, co-owners of Fishweir Brewing Co. at 1183 Edgewood Ave S, opened it in November 2018. It sits close enough to The Forge that regulars of one will likely become regulars of the other. Broc is a former Navy dentist who was stationed in San Diego before Jacksonville, and he has said the couple found Murray Hill reminiscent of San Diego's North Park neighborhood, an area of small older homes. The Jacksonville Daily Record quotes Flores: "When we opened the place, it was all about being a community-focused business," and "We wanted to be wholly and solely focused on building a community."
In the stretch spanning late 2023 into early 2024, four other Jacksonville breweries closed or announced they were closing: Tabula Rasa Brewing in the Rail Yard District, Pinglehead Brewing Co. in Orange Park, Lemonstreet Brewing Co. also in the Rail Yard District, and Hyperion Brewing Co. in Springfield. Fishweir, by contrast, marked its fifth anniversary that same November by rolling out five anniversary brews, nine months after adopting a tipless compensation model with standard wages and benefits for staff.
That history is not just a footnote. It is still running. Every Wednesday from 5 to 8 p.m., Fishweir hosts the Murray Hill Farmers Market, a market that draws vendors selling goods made within ten miles of the taproom:
- Prema Bakes, for bread
- Bee Grateful Apiaries, for honey and wax
- Cbakeryjax, run by Ceren, known for Dubai chocolate and Turkish baking
A larger quarterly version, billed as a collaboration street market, runs into the evening on select dates through the rest of 2026. None of this is new or flashy. It is the same weekly habit that has been drawing FSU game crowds of up to 300 people and hosting meetings for groups like the Murray Hill Preservation Association for years. The market, game-day crowds, and group meetings all add activity to this stretch of Edgewood Avenue.
The Bakery Corner Is Being Rebuilt to Remember, Not Forget
The same logic is showing up in a very different kind of project. At the corner of Edgewood Avenue and Post Street sits the former Edgewood Bakery, a neighborhood fixture run by Gary and Sandy Polletta from 1992 until it closed in 2016. The building sat vacant for eight years until Community First Credit Union purchased it in 2024 and began renovating it into a new branch.
What is notable is not that a credit union is opening a branch. It is how deliberately the project has been built around continuity rather than a clean slate. Community First held its renovation launch event with the Polletta family present, alongside District Councilman Jimmy Peluso and the Murray Hill Preservation Association. Greg Beere, the Preservation Association's president, called the site "a cornerstone of the revitalization of the Murray Hill retail corridor" and said his organization has been engaged with Community First "as the voice of our neighbors." The finished branch will include a mural depicting historical photos of the neighborhood, a nod that Community First's CEO Sam Inman has said is meant to help the building "once again become a neighborhood hub, just as the bakery was." The project is on track to finish by the end of 2026, and it will anchor the neighborhood's annual Murray Hill-O-Ween event each October, another tradition Community First has helped sustain.
A bank did not have to do any of this. It could have razed the building and put up something standard. Instead it chose to build its newest branch around thirty years of someone else's memory.
What Edgewood Avenue Has to Offer
Line these three stories up and you see different ways businesses are shaping this stretch of Edgewood Avenue: a brewery with a community focus, a bar built around no-cover live music, and a credit union incorporating a bakery's history into its new branch. A few blocks over, James Beard-nominated chefs Chason Spencer and Maria LaMota built Chancho King's menu around Ecuadorian street food.
On a Wednesday evening, the farmers market sets up in the same parking lot it always has. If you are picking where to eat tonight or whether the new bar on the corner is worth a second visit, this stretch offers a few places to explore.
If you are a longtime Murray Hill resident, a lot of this will already feel familiar in your bones even if you did not know the specific numbers behind it. If you are weighing what a neighborhood like this actually feels like to live in day to day, from the businesses that stick around to the ones that come and go, Martin Williams has spent enough time in Northeast Florida neighborhoods to talk through it honestly. Let's Connect.
