After a Spotlight report chronicled the removal of public benches at a popular South Grove pocket park, city officials ordered their return.
After a two-and-a-half-year absence the benches are back at Big Hill Park, the waterfront pocket park at the end of Royal Road in South Grove. As the Spotlight reported last September, the benches were removed by city officials following complaints by nearby neighbors of excessive noise and increasing traffic.
Brian Carson, the landscape architect who led a group of community volunteers who spearheaded the park design and designation, applauded their return.
“The public spaces next to the bay need to be publicly accessible,” he said. “That’s the long-term goal of these types of spaces, that they’re not dead-end roads. They’re the public’s access up to and into the National Park of Biscayne Bay.”
Carson credits City of Miami District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo’s staff for working with city officials to negotiate their reinstallation. The rectangular limestone-slab benches were cleaned of spray paint graffiti and returned to their original locations last week. One of the three benches – which cost $2,000 a piece – broke in half during its storage, city officials say, resulting in two smaller sections.
“It was a smooth, easy process,” said Carson, who oversaw the reinstallation.
Big Hill is a category of pocket park known as a “Play Street,” a zoning category that allows it to receive funding for recreation and maintenance through the city’s Department of Resilience and Public Works. While the designation came in 2021, following a campaign demanding improvements at the site, the waterfront minipark has been a community staple for decades, especially among West Grove residents.
City land-use documents show that the location, one of a dwindling number of access points to Biscayne Bay, was historically deeded more than 100 years ago for public use.
Following the benches’ removal in 2022 city officials initially claimed they were taking them back to a storage facility for cleaning, but later acknowledged the decision was an effort to appease neighbors by discouraging visitation to the park. Repeated calls for their return by Carson and other community activists were repeatedly ignored.
In a statement to the Spotlight last September, Pardo confirmed the benches had been in storage and would be returned if residents wanted them back, but that the district had not received sufficient requests.
When that changed earlier this fall, Carson said, District 2 Coconut Grove Constituent Liaison Javier Gonzalez began negotiating for the benches’ return.
The benches, landscaping and other improvements to Big Hill Park were funded by a 2018 grant for $22,500 from the Miami Foundation’s Public Space Challenge program. The city added funding for grading, lighting and security cameras.
“It’s in our interest, in the city’s interest, to make a comfortable space, as long as it is safe,” Carson said.
Local residents, especially from nearby West Grove neighborhoods, have used the parks for decades for fishing, picnicking, and accessing the shallow waters of Biscayne Bay. The tiny sliver of land at the end of Royal Road is sandwiched by multi-million dollar mansions and, a stone’s throw to the north, Ransom Everglades School.
Rolando Usatorres, a 24-year-old lifetime Grove resident has been coming to Big Hill Park since he was 12.
“’I have come here to see family, for special family time, to go fishing, just to get out in the wild to look at the water and the sunrise,” he told a reporter last week.
During a recent visit on warm, sunny day, Usatorres and his family gathered along the waterfront for a picnic. While some of the family prepared the food, others fished to pass the time, hoping to catch bait fish. What they didn’t expect was a 20-pound nurse shark to bite their line. After reeling it in they set the shark free.
“This is therapy for some people,” he said.
Usatorres is glad to see the benches’ return but wishes the park could expand even more. A table, he suggested, would make it easier for picnics.
Carson says city officials will temporarily close the park in about 18 months to perform long overdue repair to the aging seawall. Hopefully, he says, it will reopen as soon as possible.
