Banyan trees shade you in Coconut Grove, the oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood in Miami-Dade County and, in many ways, the city's anti-Miami: shaded, slow-paced, draped in trees whose aerial roots have been claiming the sidewalks for a century. The Grove was settled in the 1870s by Bahamian workers and a handful of northeastern intellectuals and writers who were drawn by the warm winters and the untouched tropical landscape. Ralph Middleton Munroe, a yacht designer and naturalist, was among the earliest, building his house in 1891 in a style that responded to the climate — wide verandas, high ceilings, cross-ventilation — that would later be identified as the Dade County vernacular.
The Bahamian community built churches and schools here that are among the oldest structures in the region. In the 1960s and 1970s the Grove became a counterculture center — artists, writers, and hippies drawn by the cheap rents and bohemian atmosphere. The rents are no longer cheap.
Today Coconut Grove is prosperous and traffic-choked, but the old tree canopy survives, the village streets retain their curve and intimacy, and on quiet mornings you can still feel the original spirit of the place: an outpost at the edge of a tropical wilderness.