The historic Ace Theater on Grand Avenue in Coconut Grove may finally be restored and reopened with grant support from the National Park Service.
In the days of segregation, the Ace Theater on Grand Avenue in Coconut Grove was the Black community’s showplace for movies and entertainment events.
With an auditorium that seated more than 300 people, the historic venue staged live performances, hosted high school graduations and proms, and screened Hollywood movies from the 1930s until 1978, when its doors closed a final time. The theater even served as a designated fallout shelter during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Built, owned and operated by Wometco Enterprises as a “colored only” theater, the Ace is owned today by Dorothy M. Wallace and her daughter Denise Wallace.
The Wallace women have been active in the community for decades. Denise, an attorney, became the first co-chair of the Coconut Grove Village Council in 1992.
Dorothy was one of two black women to integrate the University of Miami’s School of Education in 1963. For many years, she served as the administrator of the COPE Center South in Richmond Heights, a school for pregnant teens and teen parents which was renamed the Dorothy M. Wallace Cope Center in her honor in 1997.
Dorothy’s late husband, Harvey Wallace, bought the Ace from Wometco in 1979 for $50,000 with the hope of reopening it as a center of community life in the West Grove.
More than 40 years later, that dream is moving closer to reality, with grant funding from the National Park Service and two historic designations. The theater was registered as a historical site by the City of Miami in 2014, and then added to the National Register of Historic Places two years later in 2016.
A report to the National Register describes the theater as a rare repository of shared memories from Coconut Grove’s segregated past.
“Although the ACE’s genesis began in the days of legally sanctioned segregation, people’s memories of the ACE are as rich and colorful as the Technicolor pictures that once lighted its screen,” the report states.
The theater’s 2014 designation report to the City of Miami’s Historic and Environmental Preservation Board captures some of those memories.
“The Ace Theater was the community theater,” Grove resident Renita Ross is quoted as saying. “Friday evening, after school, my cousin and I couldn’t wait to walk from my grandparent’s home on Florida Avenue to the Ace.”
The National Park Service recognized the significance of the theater in June 2021 when it awarded a grant of $398,199 to Ace Theater Foundation to rehabilitate the structure as part of its History of Equal Rights program. Three years later, owner Denise Wallace said renovation plans are close to being finalized with the National Park Service.
Next, permits must be secured from the City of Miami, which Wallace said has been “wonderful partners” in working with the foundation. Wallace said the foundation hopes to begin actual brick-and-mortar work later this year.
“It’s been slow, but it’s coming together,” she said. “I’m anxious to continue the work, and the city is anxious to see it happen, so we’re working on it.”
Wallace said she hopes the renovated Ace will serve as a small venue to provide cultural arts programming for students, children and adults. She envisions that, once renovated, the updated facility will accommodate a variety of events thanks to the planned removal of fixed seating, along with updated bathrooms and improvements that comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
She predicts the Ace’s resurgence will be similar to the reopening of this historic Lyric Theater in Overtown, a “colored playhouse” built in 1913.
Wallace can’t wait for the Ace to open its doors once again.
“I went to the movies in that theater and I’ll be glad to see the marquee lit, and when the ACE speaks again, because right now it’s silent,’’ she said. “There are so many stories people have about the theater and right now it’s not speaking.”
FIU student Hennessy Sepulveda wrote this story as part of a cooperative agreement between FIU’s Lee Caplin School of Journalism & Media and the Spotlight.
