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Amazing trip , amazing guide - AdLib Tours

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Gary's tour was exceptional. His knowledge of the the local history, terrain, and artifacts was... read more

This was an amazing tour. My son and I became tourists in our own town and learned so much and had... read more

Amazing trip , amazing guide

Gary took 8 of us on a private trip to Tallahassee from Jacksonville after hurricane Dorian forced our game to be moved. We had no way to get to Doak Stadium and were worried we may miss the game but Gary came through in a big way for us. He secured us a luxury 9 passenger van and arrived promptly at 7am so we could make the 2 1/2 hour trek to the game. The van was very clean and he was thoughtful enough to include coolers with ice and some cold drinks for us to enjoy on the ride. He also let us charge our cell phones and told us interesting stories about the Jacksonville and beyond area. We enjoyed his company so much that we insisted he join us for the entire game once we arrived to Tallahassee. I plan to bring my wife and son back to Jacksonville soon and when I do I will definitely be taking another Tour with Gary. He was without a doubt the best guide ever and really came through for our group. More than a guide I now consider him a friend. Thanks Gary! A+

I have lived in Jacksonville 19 years and never knew about the tunnels. We walked downtown to see some of the historic bank and hotel buildings. Toured underground tunnels and a bank vault. Our tour guide, Gary was extremely knowledgeable and funny. You can tell he loves his job. He kept the tour fun with all his quips about the banks and some of the historic people. We walked at a nice pace and were able to take pictures. Great time even in the summer heat. We will definitely be contacting him again for different tours.

We wish we would have went with a local guide in Saint Augustine who was more historically accurate. Gary seems to know more about Jacksonville.

Anything Gary Sass and AdLib Tours does is first class. Our tour guide today, Pam Zambetti, was wonderful. She is an artist along with being a great tour guide, and added much by her knowledge of the art and architecture we passed. Walking tour covered just the right amount of space for our OLLI group of people 50 and "better".

We've lived just south of Jacksonville for over five years and really didn't know much about the city. We had out of town company visiting and decided to learn more. We booked the Top to Bottom Walking Tour and were very impressed. Gary was our guide and we had a great time and learned a lot. He is a real professional and has a lot of depth to his knowledge of the history and architecture of the city. From the tunnels to the top of the tallest building, Gary knew the area, the buildings, and the people who worked in the area, and the history from the founding of the city ("Cowford" - ask Gary) to the present. All of us were delighted with the tour.

Great little walking tour. Not too long or rushed like some. Laura was our guide and she was very pleasant, interesting and not disturbed by questions. Beautiful view from top of Bank of America and unique visit to little known underground bank vault system from early 1900s. Unfortunately, we were not able to go inside the historic Florida Theater (where Elvis performed in 1956) due to an event. However, we were told if we could return on a later date they would take us back. Meet up with tour guide at The Landings shopping mall. Very run down but under refurbishment it appears. Would take another tour in the future.

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ADLIB TOURS (Jacksonville) - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go

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Adlib Luxury Tours

AdLib Luxury Tours offers specialty tours in St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Amelia Island, and Ponte Vedra Beach.

Rates and Hours vary, call for reservations.

AdLib Luxury Tours offers specialty tours in St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Amelia Island, and Ponte Vedra Beach. These tours are customizable to the needs of each group. Adlib Luxury Tours offers guests several options to tour downtown St. Augustine. Additionally, Adlib Luxury Tours also offers tours for the visually impaired. Reservations are required.

St. Augustine Driving Tour takes guests on a guided, escorted tour of the ancient city. The tour stops at the Castillo de San Marcos, Mission Nombre de Dios, the Oldest House Museum Complex, the Ximenez-Fatio House, the Lightner Museum and the Flagler Memorial Presbyterian Church. Additional time for shopping and wine tasting can be added to this tour.

St. Augustine Daily Walking Tour starts in the lobby of Government House Museum. Guests follow a guide through the streets of St. Augustine for an intimate introduction to the nation's oldest city.

St. Augustine Night Out and Driving Tour takes guests for a historical tour of downtown St. Augustine before dropping them off for dinner. After dinner, guests rejoin their driver/guide to listen to the unsolved murders, ghost stories, and paranormal sightings in the haunted areas of St. Augustine.

Sightseeing Tours for the Visually Impaired immerses guests with visual disabilities into the diverse culture of St. Augustine. This tour emphasizes stops that focus on the other four senses. Guests can touch old pirate money, tabby walls, and smell various herbs from the many gardens around the historic district.

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Touring Downtown’s network of tunnels

It’s likely that nobody put more thought into moving to Jacksonville than Gary Sass and his wife.

After the birth of their second child 15 years ago, Sass and his wife decided to scale back on the constant moving that went with his IT career.

“So we went on a six-month study of the perfect place to live in the United States. My wife went to a website; she answered 250 questions and up popped Jacksonville, Florida as her perfect place to live.

“So we started researching Jacksonville, and other areas, and Jacksonville came up No. 1, based on all the criteria that was important to us, from cost of living to proximity to the beach, weather, all different types of factors.”

He continued in the IT biz for a while, but was often rejected for being overqualified, and that quickly pushed him to finally pursue his passion full-time.

“I went two months without a job,” he said, “and then I said to my wife, ‘Well, let’s take this as a sign that we’re supposed to start our own company.’”

He had a couple ideas, but the tours resonated.

“Nobody is doing personalized tours, and nobody is doing Jacksonville. In St. Augustine, it was just the trains and trolleys,” he said. They had run such tours successfully in a number of cities previously, around the world, so they decided to reboot the gimmick here, basically starting from scratch.

“We decided that we would become the local experts.”

From the moment of finalizing their decision, it was about three weeks before their first tours. Sass had started researching the area from the moment he arrived, leaning heavily on the local library and the Jacksonville Historical Society.

Sass has a keen eye for detail. “Given that half my audience is local, they don’t want common knowledge,” he said. “They want something they’ve never heard before.”

He spends as much time researching his subject matter as he does on the actual tours, if not more. This has made Sass, a relative newcomer, an expert on local history. He counts local legends like Wayne Wood and Tim Gilmore as friends.

Now 15 years as the owner of Ad Lib Luxury Tours, Sass has become something of a local icon, a fixture in the urban core who knows this city as well as almost anyone alive today.

Much of the tour activity is conducted on foot, but he also has access to a small fleet to ferry customers.

Sass works closely with hotels. “I’m used as kind of a resource by salespeople when they’re selling the area.” He’ll even dress up in period garb from time to time.

Ad Lib runs a number of meticulously themed tours in and around the city, but he is probably best-known for his tours of the city’s Downtown tunnel system, which dates back over a century.

“There is a whole underground system, much of which is connected,” he said.

Most of the tunnel system was devised to facilitate cash transfers among the banks that flourished Downtown in the early 1900s. By his estimate, less than 5 percent of that system is currently accessible to the public. They’re now used mainly for storage and closed off, but a lot of the beautiful vault doors remain intact.

When you step inside the tunnels, you are immediately transported back in time to a bygone era of horse carts and fine masonic craftsmanship.

With artificial light reflecting of those brass doors, the nose is drawn in by the moist, musty smell of concrete, paper and steel, materials that predate the memories of anyone still living. It is the smell of old money, literally, and it’s easy to imagine the kind of business that used to get done down here.

Largely unknown to the general public, these beautiful tunnels have lingered in obscurity and disrepair for generations, but long ago attained a sort of legendary status. For decades, their existence could only be confirmed by the whispers of old-timers, but Gary Sass has single-handedly brought them back to prominence.

Linking this tunnel network, and exposing its hidden beauty to the public is, for Sass, the ultimate goal.

“I could do a complete underground tour in Jacksonville,” he said, “and it would be the best tour in the whole Southeast if I had cooperation from the community and the city.”

Where others see empty space, Sass sees lost opportunities.

“When we had our 450th anniversary, in 2014, there was a little celebration at City Hall, and most people didn’t even know about it,” he said. “There were maybe a couple hundred people, and that was pretty much it. St. Augustine celebrated for a whole year, maybe a year and a half.”

For Sass, this is more than just a job; it’s an adventure. All the thousands of hours running tours Downtown have done nothing to diminish his own fascination with the city and its complex, often confusing history, and that passion helps keep his tours fresh and compelling, time after time after time.

“I can do 10 different walking tours from the Downtown hotels,” said Sass, who also writes about local history (particularly mansions and landmarks) for various publications.

There is virtually no limit to the subjects he can cover, but he also allows clients to customize their tours, narrowing the focus to a particular era or theme. He does a tour of the Main Library Downtown, for example, that runs more than an hour.

Sass views his own business as symbiotic with the city’s overall agenda for increased growth and development Downtown. For civic leaders, these tours are some of the most effective promotions that money can buy, especially given that it costs them nothing.

And there is so much more that Sass would like to do, but his vision is limited by some in the business community that have thrown up obstacles to his plans. In theory, any property owner would welcome a steady stream of potential customers in and around their buildings, but that has proven untrue to a surprising extent.

Some folks view him as an interloper, others as an outright pest, but in reality Sass is one of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders this city has ever had, and he seems to care about Downtown and its future more than many people who were actually born here.

Sass’ advocacy for using the city’s past to help drive economic growth, by basically providing free advertising for its existing and future ventures, reflects an emerging bipartisan consensus typified by prominent citizens like Steve Williams, Matt Carlucci and Stephen Dare, each of whom has pushed aggressively (in their way) for monetizing local history in recent months.

Gilmore has written a series of books (and the indispensable Jax Psycho Geo blog) chronicling specific and lesser-recognized aspects of local history, and Mike Tolbert’s new book about Jake Godbold vividly chronicles the city during perhaps its most aspirational era.

They say that everything old is new again, and Gary Sass is proving that aphorism to be true on an almost daily basis.

Shelton Hull lives in Riverside.

This column is a condensed version of a piece contained in the coming issue of J, the quarterly magazine produced by the Times-Union’s Editorial Page staff. It will be contained in the Sunday newspapers of seven-day subscribers on Dec. 15. It also will be available at select Daily’s, Gate and Publix stores. The magazine also can be purchased online at www.jacksonville.com/magazine. Stories can be read there as well.

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AdLib Tours - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

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Prize pool for the international 2014 surges to $5.7 million, an rebum nusquam cum duo invenire mundi, jacksonville top to bottom walking tour.

Think you know and have seen it all in Downtown Jacksonville? A new walking tour promises to introduce you to a side of downtown most don't know exist, by way of access into restricted underground tunnels, a silent movie shot on Forsyth Street featuring Oliver Hardy, and streetcars and a roof deck stop on top of the Florida Theatre.

Best in Luxury! Best in Tours! Best in Service! Award Winning, Featured on the History Channel AdLib Luxury Tours & Transportation is a licensed Receptive Tour Operator in North Florida. We offer a custom service for groups of ALL sizes with specialty tours of Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Amelia Island, & Ponte Vedra Beach.  "AdLib" allows customers to be flexible with their itinerary. AdLib Luxury Tour services include:   •  Step-on group bus tours •  Private van tours •  European tasting tours •  Military group tours •  River cruise tours AdLib Luxury Transportation services include: •  Weddings - coordination and planning. Talk directly with your coordinator/driver. •  Meet & Greet at the airport - JAX, St. Augustine •  Football Tailgating - we bring the coolers and the grill •  Charter Bus Day Trips - Orlando/Disney, Cape Canaveral, Daytona, Savannah, etc.

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Local tour guide brings Downtown history alive

September 10, 2013

Any given week, you’ll find Andrew Jackson walking the streets of Downtown – well, Gary Sass dressed as Andrew Jackson, that is.

Sass, a local history buff and Downtown advocate, is entering his fourth year as guide of the Downtown Jacksonville “Top to Bottom” Walking Tour, now available both Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 10 a.m. After eight years of providing North Florida tours from Fernandina to Palm Coast, Sass’s company, AdLib Luxury Tours & Transportation , now conducts more Jacksonville-area tours than St. Augustine tours. And, no surprise, the most popular tour destination is Downtown Jacksonville.

We recently chatted with Gary about why he loves showcasing Downtown Jacksonville and sharing its best historic stories.

Where are you from originally, and what brought you to Jacksonville?

My family and I moved here from upstate New York. Our fascination with Jacksonville started after taking an online quiz from www.FindYourSpot.com . Jacksonville popped up as our No. 1 place to live. We decided to move here first, and then we would create the perfect job. The result was AdLib Luxury Tours & Transportation.

What is your background? Did you learn to give tours, or are you self-taught?

My degree is in computer science, and I worked for 20 years in software development and services for companies such as IBM. My wife and I both took many tours around the world – we even met on a walking tour of London. We were surprised no one was doing tours of Jacksonville or offering personalized tours in North Florida. So we developed our own style, a luxury tour with a flexible itinerary, that would match the first-class service expected at a top resort hotel.

How did the idea for the “Top To Bottom” tour come about?

Visit Jacksonville  asked if we could take a travel writer on a walking tour. The travel writer ended up writing about this great walking tour of Downtown going in and out of buildings. I did not realize how good a product we had until she wrote about it! We decided to create the Jacksonville Walking Tour program about three years ago, and our first offering was the Tuesday 10 a.m. “Top to Bottom” tour.

What does your tour feature?

We feature the “top” of Jacksonville with skyline views from the tallest building and the secret underground tunnels that make up the “bottom.” There are other stops on the tour including The Florida Theatre, The Carling, Greenleaf & Crosby building and the Wells Fargo Center. Each stop features a unique historical or cultural aspect of Jacksonville. The new Thursday “Top to Bottom” version includes a behind the scenes look at the Jacksonville Symphony.

What types of groups do you typically get on your tour?

The majority of the people on tour are locals. Some of our tour guests work Downtown, and some are traveling to Downtown just for the tour. People really enjoy learning about their city. The number of tourist attendees is growing every week as the community realizes we are a destination. Often groups call to reserve a day and time for a private tour, and we’ve customized the tour for school groups and company team-building.

What part of the tour do your guests typically enjoy most?

The tour is designed to strike a responsive chord with everyone given all the cultural touches. However, it is fun to hear the “oohs and ahhs” as you walk through the dark tunnel. Everyone loves to take photos of the underground bank vault and old safe-deposit boxes.

What are your goals with these tours?

Our goal is to deliver the most entertaining tour while showing off the best of Downtown. We enjoy sharing the local history and culture by telling our Jacksonville story through many props. We are also demonstrating every week that Downtown is a safe destination and an awesome place to live, work and play.

What do you love most about Downtown Jacksonville?

From a business perspective, the support we get from Visit Jacksonville, Jacksonville Landing, Downtown Vision, Florida Theatre, Skyline Café, Southlight Gallery, the Carling, 121 Atlantic Place, Wells Fargo, Jacksonville Symphony and others are very key and a win/win for all Downtown stakeholders.

From a personal perspective, I really enjoy the variety of restaurants and events.

Where do you see Downtown tours in the future?

As Downtown grows as a destination so will the variety of tours we offer. We have developed many walking, driving and river tours, so it will be fun to roll them out as people discover Downtown. We’re launching an 8 p.m. Friday “River City Haunts” ghost tour in October, where tour-takers will encounter local ghosts while finding out why they are haunting the city.

To learn more about Sass’s “Top to Bottom” Tour, visit his company’s website . Hospitality employees at hotels are invited check out the “Top to Bottom” tour for free. All “Top to Bottom” tours meet at the Jacksonville Landing escalators at 10 a.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Call 904-827-1845 or email [email protected] to reserve.

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