My first tale in this blog is not the strangest about the run-up to a hotel in the Black-white overlap of Miami’s oldest settlement. Even today you can maybe stay overnight while immersed in Coconut Grove’s side-by-side communities.
This is also a tale about how even lodgings compatible in size and design don’t always advance their localities. As climate travelers, we want to know before we show up.
The catalyst
The two cops at Big Al’s Barbecue told me that I was flat out going to unleash the biggest crime wave that ever hit Miami.
It was early 1977. We were in historically Black West Coconut Grove, a section of Miami where descendants of Bahamians mainly lived in modest homes patterned on streetscapes of Eleuthera.
I was briefing the patrolmen about a weekend street festival that would introduce the everlasting myriad of newcomers to Miami about the Black Grove that had thrived while closely tied to its barely older neighboring white settlement, known as the Village. Its commercial district had collapsed following integration. The four corners at the crossroads of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road now housed bars notorious for hatching crimes.
Whereupon the screen door at Big Al’s flew open, and a young fellow shouted, “Hey, Coppers! They just flatted your tires!” Sure nuff, when we ran out. Four out of four. Pancakes. That’s when the cops predicted doomsday.
Yet, thanks to unstinting public support from The Miami Herald that welcomed the heritage event, the first Miami-Bahamas Goombay Festival four months later pulled 80,000 Miamians and visitors onto Grand Avenue and into Peacock Park with no more crime reported than a few purse snatchings.
There was a deeper reason
The two communities were genuine neighbors, thanks to their patriarchs. These were Eleuthera-born Ebenezer Woodbury Franklin Stirrup, who at one time owned most of the Grove altogether, and Ralph Middleton Munroe, who adhered to the values of transcendentalist Concord, Massachusetts where he grew up. Munroe designed shallow draft yachts ideal for sailing in Biscayne Bay. It was Munroe who invited an English couple, Jack and Isabella Peacock, to open their Bay View House (later the Peacock Inn), that in 1882 became the first hotel in south Florida.
Bahamians who had fled near famine at home had relocated across the Straits of Florida to Key West that at the time was the most prosperous city in Florida. Many came up the Keys to work at the inn.
One who came was the carpenter and jack of many trades, Stirrup. As he prospered, Stirrup built his fine two-story white and yellow-trimmed house surrounded by native tropical foliage including fruit trees. His site on Evangelist Street sat across from the site of Munroe’s home known as the Barnacle, now a state park. Only Main Highway that led south through the Grove separated the two. (Evangelist Street was soon renamed for a son, Charles, of Bahamian Simeon Frow, who was appointed keeper of the Cape Florida Lighthouse on Key Biscayne in 1859.)
The Stirrup House should have become a bed-and-breakfast inn sometime after the first Goombay when EWF III and the family lost interest in keeping the house up. Goombay had grown to attract more than 300,000 celebrants with thousands of Bahamian visitors among them, who together with other Grove visitors might have kept the inn busy. The Goombay also spun off a year-round Saturday farmers market in the overlap that continues to draw hundreds after 45 years, and the annual King Mango Strut in the Village. All could have promoted the inn, and the inn would have been a beacon of integrity in the West Grove including the overlap that the city of Miami was ready to waste by developers.
Demolition by neglect
Moreover, the city’s own protective ordinance of the Bahamian West Grove goes largely unenforced, allowing speculators to buy up houses at windfall sums for residents ready to run with the cash while their homes get bulldozed and replaced by dense, code-violating but hardly affordable
housing, and while longtime defenders of the community like historians Esther Mae Armbrister and Arva Moore McCabe and the civic activist Elizabeth Virrick, pass on.
In 2016, the city allowed the systematic dismantling of the Stirrup House while it was reproduced as handsome as the original that it replaced at the site. The city authorized the restoration as the Stirrup House Bed-and-Breakfast.
Strange. Stirrup descendants and in-laws weren’t willing to preserve it. Now they share ownership with partners who operate the house. But strangely, the bed-and-breakfast designation has been dropped from the name
The house brings to mind Ralph Munroe’s brochure for his glamping site at Camp Biscayne that declares, “Insofar as possible, the hotel atmosphere is eliminated.”
The same can be said for the Stirrup House but for an altogether different reason. The house today repudiates its historical site, and it shows no signs of hospitality.
Strange and stranger
The house website doesn’t describe it as a lodging. It’s merely called The Stirrup House, listed as available for short-term rental. There’s no phone listed. No one works there except when the site rents out or, rarely, for a room, but mostly for weddings or family reunions. There’s no meal service — or there is none any longer. After the house reopening, the partners did allow a sushi bar to open in a neighborhood famed for Bahamian heritage. I do not know if the house contains any indication that it sits on an historic street in an historic neighborhood or about the significance of Bahamian influence upon the city, that Stirrup was Black and so was the community he largely built for which his own house was the gateway.
Descendants of the Bahamians who still live in the neighborhood are not made to feel welcome — at least weren’t after reopening. One longtime Charles Avenue resident said to me by phone that when the sushi bar was shoehorned into a downstairs space, the meal was a price-fixed $160 not including drinks or tips. “Who could afford that?” she asked me rhetorically. “Sushi” soon relocated to Main Highway.
The site’s listing with Booking.com claims as amenities “private parking” although it doesn’t say where this is; there is none on site. It claims 24-hour front desk service, though that’s not the case, as another friend learned when she tried to book a family reunion. The site says “Parties/events are not allowed,” but the only person she found at the house was preparing for a wedding and told her that guests needed to expect this.
The visit was on a midwinter Sunday morning. The house should have been full. It was empty of guests and staff. The Coconut Grove Chamber of Commerce doesn’t list it among Grove lodgings.
“Sham, Herbert,” my friend said. “It’s all sham. A front for what’s going up across the street.”
A small hotel, but who knows
In 2021 the City Commission rezoned six lots and two homes across Charles Avenue to accommodate a three-story hotel with 68 rooms. Adjacent residents complained that the project would pour traffic onto the avenue. The developers — who include Stirrups — agreed to vehicle access and egress only by Main Highway. Further, that the hotel would feature traditional Bahamian design, it would hire locals for $15 an hour in
construction (and hotel operations?) while contributing to a nonprofit that makes grants to homeowners who would otherwise face unaffordable rising taxes. Even so, adjacent owners said they hadn’t been notified of the zoning change. A lawsuit pends.
NOTES
Blog title thanks to Andy Parrish, who knows how to build Bahamian-styled housing in the Grove. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/coconut-grove/article269749251.html#featured-carousel-2
https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/asm0410
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/coconut-grove/article269749251.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/06/archives/hundreds-of-bahamianamericans-in-the-miami-area-celebrate-their.html The headline says “hundreds” turned out, the writer of the story said “More than 50,000,” and he wrote on the first of the two days. A higher number was sometimes used: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1987-06-05-8702200608-story.html
https://www.miamiherald.com/article158709924.html Recollections of Stirrup descendants, 2019
https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780940495159/ Season of Innocence: The Munroes at the Barnacle in Early Coconut Grove
https://glaserorganicfarms.com/ Coconut Grove Organic Market
https://miamidadearts.org/coconut-grove-playhouse-updates
“Two houses on the 3300 block of Day Avenue in West Coconut Grove are so close together that only 4 feet, 10 inches of space separate them despite a Miami zoning law that requires 10 feet of setback space.” Linda Robertson; lrobertson@miamiherald.comhttps://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/coconut-grove/article233087847.html#storylink=cpy
https://notnowsilly.com/who-is-to-blame-for-the-destruction-of-the-e-w-f-stirrup-house/
https://therealdeal.com/miami/2021/06/01/miami-commissioners-approve-west-grove-bed-and-breakfast/
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/coconut-grove/article262670762.html
https://files.constantcontact.com/adebcaae601/7bbf471c-569f-471f-97c7-396064eb8f78.pdf?rdr=true
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/coconut-grove/article262373827.html Rebuilding Together Miami-Dade, a Grove-based nonprofit that pays for house repairs for low-income, elderly homeowners.
Tech support by Ted Wendler
