The long-awaited upgrade opens new opportunities for sports, education, and cultural events in Coconut Grove.
After four years of planning, City of Miami officials have given the green light for a new $10 million community center at Coconut Grove’s Armbrister Park. Groundbreaking will be scheduled after selection of a general contractor, a city spokesperson says.
The 10,000-square-foot, two-story structure will replace the aging, single-story building at the northwest corner of the 4.4-acre, multi-use park. The center will include sports equipment storage, classrooms for after-school programs, a technology room, a kitchen, meeting rooms, restrooms and an outdoor pavilion. It will also serve as an outreach center during hurricanes or other natural disasters.
Construction is projected to last nine to 12 months. Other areas of the park, including the playing field and adjacent playground area, will remain open, contingent on safety assessments.
For Coconut Grove native Renita Samuels-Dixon, who has lived in the neighborhood for over 60 years, the new center is long overdue. “The facility that our children are in now, it’s deplorable. It’s really in dilapidated condition,” says Samuels-Dixon. “The kitchen is in awful disarray.”
Growing up near the park, Samuels-Dixon says she recalls playing softball on its fields and, as a small child, enjoying the playground. Now, as a realtor and former Coconut Grove Village Council member, she recognizes how critical the new community center is for the next generation.
Armbrister Park has long been a central gathering point for sports and recreation in Coconut Grove. Frank Gonzalez, manager of the Patria y Vida men’s softball team, which plays at Armbrister Park every Sunday, believes the new center will not only expand programming options for park users but will also promote social interactions and strengthen civic bonds.
“Having a community center where we could go after games, socialize, have beer, and hang out would be the best part,” says Gonzalez.
Kimberly Davis, co-founder of the Coconut Grove Optimist Club, which runs a variety of youth sports programming at the park, thinks the center will bring new attention – and park users — to a long-underserved community asset. “It’s going to bring a positive light,” she says. “It’s going to allow us to continue to let others know why Coconut Grove is such an amazing community.”
Her only concern, she notes, is the city’s effort to accommodate a wide range of uses at the center – beyond athletics — which may limit its ability to meet the needs of an ever-expanding sports landscape. The park – through the Optimist Club and other private operators — offers programming in soccer, flag football, volleyball, track, baseball, tennis and sports conditioning.
“I don’t want there to be any misguidance as far as what the community truly wants,” she says.
The park is named in honor of Esther Mae Potts Armbrister, a long-time West Grove activist and local historian of Bahamian descent who passed away in 1997 at age 81.
Within the existing community center, a plaque hangs in honor of Armbrister Park’s first recreation supervisor — Carolyn Evans Payne – and some in the community say they hope her legacy will continue to be honored despite the pending demolition of the existing center.
The new center was proposed in 2020 by former City of Miami District 2 Commissioner Ken Russell. The project has evolved over the years through multiple stages of community input and design revisions. Funding was finally approved in September as part of the 2024-25 fiscal budget.
“The hard part is done. The political will was there to create the plan, listen to the community, and gather the stakeholders,” Russell told the Spotlight.
Russell says the need for the center goes beyond sports and cultural programming. “We were lacking a central hub,” he says. “You need a place within the community that can be a hub with a concentration of resources; And the community center certainly serves as that.”
The center’s design will reflect the cultural and architectural traditions that have long defined the neighborhood and which can still be glimpsed within a few undisturbed pockets of the fast changing West Grove community.
“We were able to utilize design strategies for Caribbean-style architecture, and in this case, Bahamian-style architecture,” explains Craig Aquart of Miami-based MCHarry Associates, which designed the new center.
The design also will include an Art in Public Places component to further reflect the community’s cultural heritage. Although the artwork and artist have yet to be selected, Aquart hopes a local artist will be chosen to incorporate elements that celebrate Coconut Grove’s history and diversity.
This is very good news but with this caveat: Gentrification– if it continues unabated– will mean few or none of Esther Mae Armbrister’s descendants will be using these great new facilities ten years from now. The same for the new Virrick Park swimming pool. Why did it take so long to get these long-desired improvements? For whom are they being built for now? Time will tell if the City of Miami is finally in earnest in helping Miami’s oldest African-American community survive by such things as: stabilizing and supporting existing lower-income homeownership, funding community land trusts, possibly allowing ADU “Granny Flats”, enforcing the architectural guidelines of the existing Neighborhood Conservation District NCD2, funding Mom & Pop loans/grants for neighborhood businesses, building a parking garage near the corner of Grand & Douglas, re-opening and supporting the Barnyard School. The list is long of things that could have been done already. It’s a choice: Many more large new homes and duplexes along with high-rise rental apartments for newcomers, or, a comprehensive, funded and implemented plan for all Little Bahamas residents, both new and existing..