On a warm, rainy day in June 1963, Clarice Cooper, Toni Simmons and a crowd of about 500 people gathered to celebrate the opening of Elizabeth Virrick Park and Pool on Plaza Street in Coconut Grove.
Simmons, a young girl at the time, was barely aware of the role her mother Verneka Sturrup Silva played in securing the park and the pool for the neighborhood.
Like other children that day, Simmons was more interested in splashing in the new pool than thinking about what it meant for the segregated West Grove community.
But the significance of the event wasn’t lost on the crowd.
“A lot of people were happy about the fact it was opening up in the predominantly Black community, because nothing like that had happened before,” Cooper recalled.
The swimming pool would come to mean a great deal to Cooper, Simmons and their neighbors. Kimberly Davis, who learned to swim at Virrick Park, associates the pool today with all of the best memories from her childhood.
“Going to the pool was the feeling of your grandma’s hug,” Davis told the Spotlight. “If I could describe it in food, it was a warm honeybun, straight out of the oven.”
Over the years, though, the pool fell into disrepair. In 2020, the facility closed, and a neighborhood that had lost so much to gentrification in recent years suffered another blow.
“That was kind of heartbreaking,” said Cooper, the president of the Coconut Grove Village West Homeowners and Tenants Association (HOATA).
Cooper and her neighbors will be celebrating this weekend, however, when the redesigned pool inside Elizabeth Virrick Park opens to the public, complete with a lap pool, a children’s slide, and a water playground.
The 10:30 a.m. ribbon-cutting on Saturday comes after years of persistent advocacy, major setbacks and tense disagreements between the City of Miami and residents. But it’s finally here, and built to the standard the neighborhood deserved, community leaders say.
“It’s been a long road and it took a lot of patience, but the reward the community is going to reap is exciting,” said Ruth Ewing, the president of the Elizabeth Virrick Park Committee.
Simmons will get a second chance to celebrate the pool, as well as her mother. The new pool is named for her mother — the Verneka Sturrup Silva Aquatic Facility.
“My mother would be honored, but she would be humbled,” Simmons said. “I think my mother would have been really happy to have a place that people would come to and use and benefit from, more so than a street.”
Silva devoted her life to public service, advocating for the Grove and its residents while spending 40 years with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where she became the first Black female assistant principal for secondary administration in an integrated school system.
Born in 1919 to Bahamian immigrant parents, Silva lived her entire life – save the last three years when she went to live with Simmons – in the same wooden home on Hibiscus Street.
She grew up deeply embedded in the community and Christ Episcopal Church, where her father was senior warden, setting her on a path of spirituality. Simmons recalled how her mother would say “Thank God for life” any chance she got.
Silva became the first woman Episcopal lay minister to be named an honorary Canon of the Trinity Cathedral – and later in life followed in her father’s footsteps to serve as senior warden of Christ Episcopal Church.
Known as a “no-nonsense” woman, Silva filled many roles in the neighborhood (too many to list here), including president of Coconut Grove Cares. “She was somebody who really had her boots on the ground,” Cooper said. “I always admired her a lot.”
Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s Silva worked alongside Elizabeth Virrick and the Rev. Theodore R. Gibson to improve the neighborhood, which led in turn to the construction of the park and pool.
“I think it’s just fitting that the two of them (Silva and Virrick) who had worked so much together and dedicated their lives for the betterment of that same community now will be remembered together on the same site,” Simmons said.
Silva’s work was not limited to the Grove, however. She founded and ran several organizations advocating for the betterment of women, particularly those of color, mental health and for sickle cell research.
“I don’t remember her ever just giving up. Even when she retired, she didn’t stop,” Simmons said.
Silva is remembered as well by many today for the 20 years she spent as an assistant principal at Coral Gables High School.
Her appointment in 1966 came at a challenging time. George Washington Carver High School had been desegregated and converted into a junior high school, sending several of its students to Coral Gables High School.
Silva helped guide many of those students through the transition into an integrated school – including her daughter.
“She was very inspirational because she was in that same situation,” Simmons said. “She was an adult, but she still had to adjust. She still had people who may not have accepted her in the role she was in. She had to be there for the students, but also be there for herself.”
When Silva died in 2007 at the age of 87, Cooper said her funeral was one of the best attended she has ever seen in the neighborhood.
“The turnout for her funeral alone was an attestation of how people regarded her,” she said. “She was a mentor and a godmother of sorts to quite a few people.”
Naming the new aquatic facility for Silva is a fitting tribute, Cooper and others say, because the pool’s history reflects the neighborhood’s own struggles for resources and recognition – from its opening in the early 60s to its recent redesign, which followed a hard-fought campaign by residents to ensure the city delivered what was promised.
It was a promise that was nearly broken.
The pool’s construction, which stretched across the terms of three different city commissioners, hit a major setback over a dispute about its depth.
Throughout the design process, residents had asked for a pool capable of hosting competitive swimming and athletic events, including water polo.
But when the concrete was poured in early 2023, the pool measured just 5 feet 3 inches at its deepest point — nearly a foot and a half short of what’s required for competitive swim meets, and almost four feet shallower than the original pool.
That’s when Davis, who learned to swim in the original pool, stepped in.
Davis, who organizes youth sports programming in the neighborhood as president of the Coconut Grove Optimists Club, became a leading voice for change, asking the city to go back to the drawing board and start over.
The appeal appeared to stall when former Miami District 2 Commissioner Sabina Covo told residents a re-do wasn’t possible – a position that likely cost her votes in the next election, especially when her opponent promised to fight for residents.
Read more: Major Project Gone Awry
After defeating Covo in a runoff election in November 2023, current District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo convinced the city to redesign the pool, at an additional cost of $3 million. At its deepest, the new pool has a depth of 7 feet 10 inches.
“For the community, this would have been another broken promise,” Pardo told the Spotlight in 2024. “We took a bad situation and turned it into a celebration.”
Read more: Residents Endorse New Virrick Park Pool Design
Saturday’s opening means everything to Davis, whose children will now get to experience a pool like the one she knew. “It’s just a big full-circle moment,” she said.
For Ewing – the committee president who has overseen the entire construction process – the emotions are more layered, given the rapid gentrification of the West Grove and the displacement of the neighborhood’s Black residents.
“It’s bittersweet knowing that the community has undergone such dramatic changes in its demographic,” she said. “We’ve lost a lot of the Black community. Those families will not be able to reap the benefits of the pool.”
Davis wants to ensure those left in the community take full advantage of the new pool.
While the new pool has been under construction, Davis has been running swim lessons at Ransom Everglades School. One of her swimmers – fifth-grader Kendrick Casimr – didn’t know how to swim until starting with the Optimist Club.
Now he wants to share his swimming skills with friends who have not had the same opportunity. He’s excited that the pool “is close, and that it’s very big.”
The pool will open its doors on Saturday with junkanoo performances, food vendors, and swimming and water polo demonstrations by neighborhood children.
“On May 2, anybody that thought the Grove was gone, they’ll say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, they’re living. They’re up,’” Davis said.
