Can A Little Bahamas Visitor District Revitalize the West Grove? 

Amidst ever-rising property values and a fast-changing resident population, an effort is underway to promote the area’s historic heritage and culture.

To some in the West Grove, evening rush hour is an endless caravan of cars making a mad dash past the empty storefronts and vacant lots of Grand Avenue. But in Anthony Witherspoon’s eyes those cars contain not just commuters but also potential customers.

Witherspoon is one of a handful of Grove residents and small business owners who believe the West Grove – officially rechristened Little Bahamas by city officials in 2022 – can cash in on its unique history and heritage to become a destination for tourists and residents who want to experience the authentic West Grove and its Bahamian culture.

The template, Witherspoon says, is not far away: both Little Havana, particularly along Southwest 8th Street, and Little Haiti, north of downtown Miami, with distinctive island music, food and flair, have become reliable tourist draws featuring.

But despite the backing of some local officials, the vision of Little Bahamas as a visitor destination faces uncertain headwinds: gentrification and the ensuing loss of authenticity and cultural identity; infrastructure shortcomings; and true political buy-in and the funding that comes with it. 

Witherspoon, for his part, is undeterred.

A Grove native, Witherspoon lived much of his adult life in Atlanta before returning in 2015. He was shocked by what he saw.  “My heart broke to see how the Grove was gentrified and politically neglected,” he says.

Shortly after his return, determined to help preserve some of the West Grove’s character and history, Witherspoon helped launch the Coconut Grove Sports Hall of Fame which chronicles the achievements of athletes predominately from the Grove’s largely black neighborhood.

A newer venture – which he expects to officially kick off in mid-December – is a more direct effort to promote and market the Little Bahamas brand.

Witherspoon’s Discover Lil Bahamas Tour Attraction will offer golf-cart tours to historic sites[DV1]  like area churches and the Bahamian-style homes of Coconut Grove pioneer E.W.F. Stirrup and Mariah Brown. Tour guides include locals Leona Cooper Baker and Fredericka Simmons Brown who have spent the better part of a century in the neighborhood and can share personal stories of the “Old Grove.”

The tour will also stop at the Coconut Grove Sports Hall of Fame, and at another of Witherspoon’s nascent business ventures: Taste of Coco Bahamas Outdoor Entertainment Venue – a vacant building lot on the north side of Grand Avenue which he envisions as a community space for Bahamian-informed music, art, food, and cultural events.

“[Little Bahamas] really had no significance behind being named,” Witherspoon says.  “There was no mass marketing being done to rebrand it as Little Haiti or Little Havana [have done]. It just stood on its own.”

That began to change, he notes, early in the tenure of City of Miami District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo, who took office in late 2023. Hoping to breathe life into a long struggling and ignored retail sector in the West Grove, Pardo pledged $10,000 to help kick off an effort to rebrand the area as the Little Bahamas Business Corridor.

But while applauding the intent, some business owners scoff at the paltry funding, arguing that a true commitment would come with an extension of the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District (BID) and it’s $2.3 million annual budget, from Center Grove into less affluent surroundings a few blocks down Grand Avenue. 

Pardo, who serves as BID Chairman, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Spotlight. But a spokesperson affirmed his support for the Little Bahamas branding efforts, pointing to a Oct. 3 Instagram video his office posted listing his top achievements as a commissioner.

“A big priority for our office has been emphasizing and the redevelopment of Little Bahamas,” Pardo told viewers. “We would love to see bus tours, we would love to see historic tours, we would love to see pop-ups with conch fritters. Our whole idea is to bring back this community feeling and celebrate the legacy, not only the legacy for Bahamians, but the legacy for all Miamians, which is Little Bahamas.”

The most visible representation of that legacy can be seen each June in the Miami Bahamas Goombay Festival which attracts tens of thousands of visitors to the West Grove for three days of food, arts and crafts, live music and Junkanoo parades. The event has occurred, with a few gap years, annually since the late 1970s.

Another potential component to activate the district is the[DV2]  Bahamian Museum of Arts and Culture, an initiative of U.S. Congresswoman Federica Wilson. Despite promises of a $6 million federal appropriation, Wilson has offered scant details and some community members remain put-off by her staff’s lack of outreach and consensus building on the project. A building site and the construction timeline remain unclear.

Meanwhile, some small business owners in the area hope to leverage the city’s Little Bahamas Business District branding campaign to attract outside funding and assistance. Their first success: a pledge of support from Charlotte, North Carolina-based Truist Foundation and the Main Street America Breaking Barriers to Business Initiative, which provides financial and technical business support through its network to entrepreneurs of color in selected areas. The Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce will coordinate the effort.

Witherspoon says other projects to revitalize the area along Grand Avenue are inching forward as well, such as the restoration and reopening of the historic Ace Theatre planned for next summer, and a new affordable housing and mixed-use project at the site of the long vacant Tikki Club, adjacent to his Caribbean-themed entertainment venue.

But while that project’s developer, New Urban Development, hopes the new units will allow local residents to remain in their increasingly unaffordable community, there are no guarantees who will actual move in.  “It remains to be seen,” acknowledges Witherspoon.

The affordable housing conundrum is an important one for the Little Bahamas marketing effort which, like other culturally branded enclaves, relies on the cultural flare and authenticity of a distinct, multi-generational base of residents. And by any measure, the West Grove is losing some of what set it apart. Between 2010 and 2020 (the most recent data available) the West Grove lost its distinction as a minority community, as the population of Black residents in the area declined from 63 percent to 42 percent.

Tour guide Fredericka Simmons Brown is a 97-year-old Grove native and one of the last people on her street who grew up in the West Grove. She likes the idea of Little Bahamas and believes it’s important to preserve her community’s history. But there are few, if any, newcomers to the West Grove from the Bahamas, she notes.

While she hopes visitors will take an interest in the West Grove’s often overlooked history, Brown says the name change may be more of a symbolic gesture for older folks, like her. “Growing up, it was like a big happy family. Everyone knew each other… We depended on each other, we had to.” Her street – once a bustling Black neighborhood with some of the first Bahamian settlers – is mostly newly arrived white homeowners with little interest connecting with the past. “It seems like everything has been erased from our history. The Grove is gone,” she says. 

And in many cases, others argue, so too is the architectural style that once distinguished the West Grove from surrounding areas. Despite a City of Miami zoning overlay in the West Grove (and a 2002 Grand Avenue Vision Plan) that prescribes Caribbean-themed design features in new construction, city officials routinely fail to enforce the requirements, notes Andy Parrish, a member of the city’s Planning, Zoning & Appeals Board.

Parrish also takes city and county leaders to task for failing to address the commercial parking challenges that a revitalized West Grove retail sector would require to survive. He’s argued for years, he says, for the city to construct a public parking lot, or garage, near the main Grand Avenue/Douglas Road intersection. Now land prices are too high. An alternative solution, he adds, would be to relax parking requirements for storefronts and other small businesses along the Grand Avenue corridor.

Despite the challenges, Mark Burns, executive director of the Center Grove-focused Coconut Grove Business Improvement District, believes in Little Bahamas as a visitor destination. He says the success of businesses in the West Grove depends on convincing property owns and landlords to keep retail lease rates affordable amidst a tidal wave of development and land speculation.

“We have Little Haiti. We have Little Havana. We have all of these cultural areas, and people flock to that,” Burns says.  [But] it’s got to be done right and everybody has got to buy in.”