For 130 years, the historically Black section of Coconut Grove, founded by Bahamian immigrants, has been a foundation stone for Miami, a wellspring of culture and activism, and verdant, fertile soil for the aspirations of tens of thousands of the city’s African American residents.
And now it’s on the brink of extinction, decimated by decades of official neglect and a relentless surge of real estate speculation and residential gentrification that has pushed out thousands of residents and reduced the once-thriving community to a shrinking shadow of its former proud self.
Surrounded by affluent Coral Gables and the predominantly white and equally well-to-do section of the Grove, the West Grove has seen its lush, narrow residential streets of timeworn cottages, bungalows and modest duplexes overtaken by lot-filling, multimillion-dollar “sugar-cube” luxury homes and their mostly white occupants.
The West Grove, said the Rev. Willie F. Ford Jr., a Grove native who leads one of the neighborhood’s churches, has become “surrounded by encroaching affluence.”
“If you haven’t been here in a while, you don’t recognize where you are,” said Ford, pastor at St. Matthew Community Missionary Baptist Church, one of half a dozen churches in the neighborhood.
Many longtime residents say they’re resigned to the neighborhood’s disappearance, but they’re trying to hold on in the face of long odds. And some neighborhood stalwarts are determined to save some of what little remains of the neighborhood’s rich history and heritage.
The Grove family that owns the long-closed ACE Theater, the Grove’s Jim Crow-era Art Deco movie house, have received nearly $900,000 in federal grants to launch an ambitious plan for its revival as a center of community life and culture. The wood-frame home of Bahamian pioneer EWF Stirrup has been rebuilt as an inn, with a new high-end sushi restaurant on the ground floor and plans for expansion into an island-style inn with the participation of the patriarch’s West Grove descendants.
Nonprofit Rebuilding Together Miami-Dade is helping dozens of local homeowners fix their houses so they can stay in the neighborhood. And a retired college basketball coach who grew up in the neighborhood has returned to start a sports museum and a Bahamian-style food and straw-market pop-up on mostly vacant Grand Avenue, once the lively heart of the neighborhood.
But the mostly white half of the Grove has not been spared from the consequences of the wave of luxury residential redevelopment.
In a parallel to the gentrification of the West Grove, the famed canopy and picturesque houses of the old south, central and north Grove are vanishing at an accelerated pace. Quaint cottages and inviting villas are being replaced by what Grovites disdainfully call sugar cubes, behemoth white boxes and antiseptic Lego-like structures that loom over their low-scaled neighbors and the jungle-like neighborhood streets.
