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 hung a new sign, drew a crowd for a season, and quietly disappeared. Neighbors got used to seeing "now open" banners that never stayed up long.
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 the Jacksonville Daily Record 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. It is a direct answer to what killed the previous three tenants, each of which seemed to be chasing a weekend crowd rather than building a weekday habit. Landlords and longtime residents along the strip are watching to see if a veteran-owned, discipline-first approach can do what three prior concepts could not.
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
Fishweir Brewing Co. sits at 1183 Edgewood Ave S, close enough to The Forge that regulars of one will likely become regulars of the other. Co-owners Stacey and Broc Flores opened Fishweir in November 2018. 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 well suited to young families. "When we opened the place, it was all about being a community-focused business," Flores has said. "We wanted to be wholly and solely focused on building a community."
That focus was tested in the worst way. 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. Inflation and shifting consumer spending pushed each of them past the point they could recover from. 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. The Floreses chose a conservative, community-first approach over the kind of rapid regional expansion that made a brewery like Intuition Ale Works a market leader. It cost them scale. It appears to have bought them survival.
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 pattern holds: businesses built for the neighborhood outlast the ones built to be noticed by it.
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 Actually Rewards
Line these three stories up and a pattern emerges that no single one of them shows on its own. The businesses succeeding on this stretch of Edgewood Avenue, whether it is a brewery that turned down rapid growth, a bar built around no-cover live music instead of weekend spectacle, or a credit union that chose to preserve a mural of a bakery rather than start fresh, all made the same wager: design for the people who already live here, not for the people passing through. It is the same principle behind Chancho King's staying power a few blocks over, where James Beard-nominated chefs Chason Spencer and Maria LaMota built a menu around Ecuadorian street food rather than a trend cycle.
Edgewood Avenue does not reward flash. It rewards whoever is still standing on a Wednesday evening when 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, that is the only track record that actually matters here.
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.
