Overtown, where you have arrived, is one of the most significant and most damaged neighborhoods in Miami's history. From the city's founding in 1896 through the civil rights era, Miami's Black residents were confined by law to this neighborhood, which the city called Colored Town. Despite — or because of — that confinement, Overtown built its own economy, its own institutions, and its own extraordinary cultural life.
By the 1940s and 1950s it was a nationally recognized entertainment district. Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Nat King Cole all performed here — often because the segregated hotels of Miami Beach refused them rooms. Venues like the Lyric Theatre and the Sir John Hotel made Overtown the Harlem of the South.
Then the expressways came. Interstate 95 was driven through Overtown in the 1960s and 1970s, displacing tens of thousands of residents and destroying the commercial district with deliberate thoroughness. What you see today is a neighborhood working to recover — new affordable housing, cultural institutions, and community organizations trying to reclaim the history.
The Lyric Theatre still stands on NW 2nd Avenue, a monument to what was here and what was lost.