The bustling Overtown of my memory is gone. But has a comeback begun?

Many of us have wonderful memories of our childhood home. That’s because we tend to edit out the bad memories and hang on to the good ones. That’s how it is with me when I remember growing up in Overtown. I usually blot out the ugliness of segregation and Jim Crow laws that had Negroes or Coloreds (as were called back then) living like second-class citizens, drinking from separate water fountains and riding at the back of buses.

While that was a way of life back then, I want to remember only the closeness of neighbors and the camaraderie that existed in Overtown before the highway slashed through it, leaving it nearly a ghost town.

I am a transplanted Miamian, which means I wasn’t born here. I was born in Williston, Florida, a small rural town near Gainesville. We moved to Miami when I was 6, so I don’t have too many memories of Williston. Few of those that I have are happy ones. Now, sometimes Williston seems like somewhere I’d visited a long time ago.

I have always loved Miami. Our first home, at 135 NW Ninth St. in Overtown, was where we made our debut as bonafide Miamians. I love the Bahamians who adopted my mom as one of them and loved me and my brother Adam like family. I loved the mixture of cultures, from the cornbread-making Georgians and Alabamians to the Johnny Cake makers from Cat Island in the Bahamas. I loved attending Overtown‘s schools, especially Booker T. Washington Junior/Senior High, where I was in the graduating class of 1956.

Then, one day the world that I once knew and loved was gone. It all happened so suddenly, this killing off of Overtown. One day we were going about business as usual, and the next day, it seemed, the gigantic bulldozers and tractors had moved in. Homeowners lost their property and homes to and “progress” something called public domain. When the smoke had cleared, Overtown was a devastated village, a far cry from the bustling and vibrant community it once was.

Gone forever was the drugstore on the southwest corner of Northwest 14th Street and Third Avenue. And the Capital Theater where I went to see “Gone With the Wind” when I was 17. And the restaurant around the corner on Third Avenue that the youngsters dubbed the “Nasty Man Café.” Gone, too, was the Pitts’ family dry cleaning store, where the Shop Boys hung out and played car poker from the sidewalk as cars passed along 14th Street.

Houses of worship that had laid their faith foundations in the area decades ago were uprooted. Some relocated. Some were lost forever.

Gradually, there were efforts, through Jackie Bell and the New Washington Heights organization, to revive Overtown. But nothing seemed to work for years, it seems, until Dr. Dorothy Jenkins Fields, founder of the Black Archives History and Research Foundation of South Florida decided she would not let her beloved Overtown die.

She had already led the restoration of a few pioneer homes and businesses including the Chapman House, the Ward Rooming House, the Dorsey House and Dr. S. H. Johnson ‘s X-Ray Clinic, and turned them into tiny museums that told Overtown’s story. Her plan for reviving Overtown also included restoring one of the area’s early iconic structures, the Lyric Theater, which was in ruins. Some people thought it couldn’t be done. The building was too far gone. But in her quiet and determined way and with the help of her family and community supporters, The Lyric Theater was reborn.

With its restoring came hope. And that hope propelled Fields to establish the Historic Overtown Folklife Village, Overtown Main Street and the Miami Dade County Black Heritage Trail. There were guided tours, and other businesses started moving to Overtown. New housing went up. Second Avenue was coming alive again. But it wasn’t enough.

There was still that area left blighted when I-95 and I-395 came to town. People driving over the highways couldn’t see the homeless people, who, until law enforcement drove them away, spent their nights sleeping on discarded mattresses and blankets on mounds of dirt beneath the newly built highways. They couldn’t see the pain, the hopelessness.

Now, we have learned that a $60 million grant from the Biden Administration to build a new Underdeck Park will help bring back the spark to Overtown. The park will be a linear, one-mile multipurpose green space of about 33 acres. It will have bike paths and walking trails, playgrounds and dog parks. People will be able to go for walks in the park. They will say, “Hi” to each other, and perhaps strike up a few new friendships.

Dreamer that I am, I like the idea. I believe that building the new park will help to connect neighborhoods and people. Maybe.

It won’t bring back the grandeur of our old Overtown. Nothing ever will. But everything changes. And maybe, just maybe, the new park will give us a chance to create some new memories.