Gentle warning: this is a longer than usual blog post.
Today, I saw an art exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that took me “home.”
Home as in Miami, Florida. See the video below to learn more. Keep reading if you want to learn even more.
Why this all feels so urgent: In my latest book, I address many issues that inform how I teach. Some of those issues include my beginnings in Miami, which greatly inform how I move through the world. I could say a lot more about the book, but I will leave it there.
I will instead now mention the boxy buildings I saw as a child. They reminded me of the ones in a short film and the photographs in the V & A’s Tropical Modernism exhibit. I am thinking of structures built in a way that allow for a cross-flow of air. The decorative marquees positioned in front of some houses in the Bahas/Baa Haas, the neighborhood to which my family moved when I was five years old, also come to mind. The shotgun shacks in Coconut Grove, the first neighborhood I called home, come to mind, too (A quick aside. I lived in the Grove when black women often wore Afros the way a woman in one of the photos in the V & A exhibit wore her hair. She worked in a shop. She had a low-paying job like my mother had when she, a then-“secretary,” and my father, a meter reader for Florida Power & Light, pooled their resources to make a down payment on our new home north of the Grove in 1972).
The V & A exhibit, for which there is no catalogue as of today even though it has been up since last month, made me think of stuff I took for granted. I did not know why buildings looked the way they did in South Florida until I began my now-decade long research on black Miami and housing. Nor did I know that they did not always look that way. They were functional. They announced a kind of modernity like the dwellings that Ghanaians (and people in postwar India) entered amid decolonization, as the V & A exhibit makes clear (I am thinking now of some of the thoughts Miami artist Roscoè B. Thicke III shared last September at a symposium we both attended. Back then, he noted the differences between the older red brick public housing projects often seen up north and the pastel colored, boxy concrete public housing projects in Miami).
The postwar dwellings people in Ghana and black Miamians entered announced a kind of modernity that brought people who looked like me into view. Such a modernity made room for the natural landscape, too. In the exhibit, I saw the sea, and familiar banyan and palm trees. Similarly, during my childhood, Biscayne Bay was within an easy walk of the boxy Miami duplex my family first lived in. Banyan and palm trees surrounded us, too. The exhibit’s images also brought to mind dwellings seen in black Caribbean and Latin American countries.
Now, when my family and other families moved away from cities near Miami’s center following the Fair Housing Act of 1968, we moved into dwellings in a region with changing architecture. But architecture is the thing most people bypass when discussing neighborhoods filling up with black folk or the neighborhoods we flee. Interestingly, more attention is given to dwellings in which we entered often in a menial capacity: hotels. But the architecture on such dwellings, or ones meant for other folk, never tell the whole story of modernity.
Indeed, some of houses into which we moved in areas like Carol City, a once-unincorporated part of the county that is now the City of Miami Gardens, were made of new mass-produced materials. Some black Miamians might remember jalousie windows that were used in postwar schools and houses. The house in the Bahas, or Carol City, a suburban community, twenty miles north of the Grove, to which my family moved in 1972, had such windows. They were made of horizontal glass panes that maximized the flow of sea breezes before air conditioning was plentiful.
Two things that I must firmly say: jalousies were windows seen on both modest and up-market buildings. Also, these windows figured into the arrival of an architectural trend called MiMo, or Miami-Modern. As I say in my latest book, when you think of MiMo, think of the flourishes seen on Miami Beach’s crescent-shaped Fontainebleau Hotel, This structure was featured in the 1964 James Bond flick Goldfinger. It was very different from the Mediterranean Revival structures in the area, the kind with the wrought iron, lush columns and balconies. It was also different from the 1920s-1930s-era bold, geometric Art Deco buildings and even the International European architecture that had little color and decoration.
But MiMo structures, among them the kind built by Morris Lapidus, the man who gave us that modernist look on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, are not seen only in now-redeveloped motels on Biscayne Boulevard and condominiums on Collins Avenue. One can see them inland communities like the Hampton House, a motel on Northwest 27th Avenue in Miami’s Brownsville neighborhood. This motel largely served people who could not lodge in segregated hotels on Miami Beach. Residents in the Booker Terrace Motel and Apartments were the original occupants of the structure when it was first built in 1953.
Although the Hampton House was several miles west of the ocean, African American guests at the Hampton House enjoyed a stylish five-acre facility. It had 100 air-conditioned rooms. Amenities included a fashionable lounge featuring night clubs acts, meeting rooms, a convention hall, and a swimming pool encircled by tropical foliage. The hotel’s proximity to Miami International Airport was also an asset. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was a regular guest here. Malcolm X, another guest, reportedly counseled Muhammad Ali, then-named Cassius Clay, before his historic 1964 fight on Miami Beach against Sonny Liston here. These black men’s encounters with each other, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in 1964 were chronicled in One Night in Miami, a 2020 Regina King film.
There are several other MiMo structures that black people used before present-day gentrification that includes the razing of Miami’s Liberty Square (aka the Pork N Beans projects), the country’s largest public housing project (See Miami filmmaker Faren Humes’ moving storytelling and the Oscar winning Moonlight by Miami native Barry Jenkins to view this historic complex).
Think now about the Biscayne Plaza Shopping Center, which was South Florida’s first suburban architecture when it was built in 1953 on the corner of Biscayne Boulevard and Northeast 79th Street near Liberty City. This center’s raised glass-encased walkways — and the airport control tower atop the motel once located near those walkways — are cutting edge MiMo designs (Another aside, I used to live in a two-story Spanish Revival house on NE 82nd within walking distance of this shopping center. This early 20th century home, which contrasted sharply with the nearby shopping center, was the first place I lived on my own after graduating from the University of Miami).
Tourists used to race across Miami’s Northwest 79th Street to gamble in Hialeah passed this shopping center when the shopping center’s patrons were mostly white. Biscayne Plaza Shopping Center’s showy architecture complemented the architecture on the former offices for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), across the street. The metal grilles that once graced that tall structure provided shade for employees working for Gulf American, a land development company that was the building’s original occupant. This was the most visible office building outside of Miami’s downtown when it was constructed in 1962. By the 1980s, Haitian immigrants who were unhappy with federal policies and area discrimination regularly protested at the intersection holding the then-INS building and the shopping center.
Other real estate in Miami’s black community fit into the MiMo trend. Consider now The Miami Times, the historically black newspaper located on Northwest 54th Street in Miami’s Liberty City. It, too, has MiMo architecture. I remember visiting this structure when the late Gloria “Gigi” Braynon Watson, a retired French teacher who studied at Talladega and the Sorbonne (and my “play-mom”) was a society columnist for the paper. I sometimes accompanied her whenever she dropped off her latest column. The building had copper sheeting and Japanese as well as Frank Lloyd Wright accents. General Capital Corporation was that building’s first occupant.
Now, farther west on the same block in Doral is bottle cap-like roof on the former Pepsi Cola Bottling Pavilion, which was constructed in 1965. Not unlike the shopping center and the INS building, this structure was sold to developers bent on gentrifying an area facing lots of challenges including ones on the climate front. The Pepsi building had circular construction like the kind seen in Los Angeles’ 13-story Capitol Records tower, which was completed in 1956, Seattle’s Space Needle, completed in 1961, and even the University of Miami Gusman Concert Hall, completed in 1975. Yes, what black folks in Miami regularly saw resembled not only architecture in postwar Ghana, but elsewhere in the States, even areas one would never call the tropics nor subtropics. What does this dynamic say now about people living in what some considered the slums until power brokers themselves reclaimed the land via redevelopment efforts? Notably, weeds choked many of the dwellings in the V & A short film. The same is or was true of some of the structures in South Florida. Before it was restored, the Hampton House was filled with plant life (The Miami Times‘s building and the former INS building, two dwellings where weeds have been plentiful, are part of a redevelopment efforts, too).
MiMo also includes the tall arch beside the Palmetto Expressway in present-day Miami Gardens, near Bunche Park, another community to which area blacks moved from older communities like Coconut Grove, Overtown and Liberty City after the Second World War. It was built near the intersection of Northwest 167th Street and 13th Avenue in 1964, a year before the monumental Gateway Arch went up on the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis.
Finally, MiMo designs include the concrete flower petal-shaped in a five-acre park honoring the late white activist Elizabeth Virrick on the black side of the Grove. My parents were lifeguards at that park during the Jim Crow Miami era.
In making ties between these buildings and the structures seen in the V & A Tropical Modernism exhibit, I am greatly moved by the larger histories involving how people who look like me inhabit an architecturally-changing landscape while surviving many difficulties with irony and audacity. I feel joy (not just exhaustion) when I think about how we survive like that.
PS Pardon all typos. I write these posts without a copy editor nor editor. I used to be a copy editor and editor when I worked in daily newspapers. I edit repeatedly, trying to find typos. I edit until I send it out into the world, hoping meaning is still possible even if my words are imperfectly offered.
“Can you find your way home, Lilith?” – Dawn, Octavia Butler
“Who is you, Man?” – Moonlight (Dir. Barry Jenkins)
catalogue, too 
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