The Village Post

Coconut Grove: Where Miami’s Roots Took Hold


MIAMI — Before the Mayfair, CocoWalk, and Dinner Key Marina, Coconut Grove was a wild, sun-drenched frontier—a crossroads of cultures, smugglers, seaplanes, and early settlers. Often called Miami’s oldest neighborhood, its history is a rich mosaic of indigenous roots, Black Bahamian resilience, and early entrepreneurial spirit.

The story begins with the indigenous black Indians called  TheTequesta people, South Florida’s original inhabitants, who lived in the region for thousands of years. Their deep connection to the land laid the foundation for what would become Coconut Grove.

In the 1870s, Black Bahamian immigrants began arriving in South Florida, many of whom were skilled carpenters, stonemasons, and sailors. They built much of Coconut Grove by hand, from humble homes to community churches—and even the famed Peacock Inn, founded in 1882 by English settlers Charles and Isabella Peacock. The inn became a magnet for naturalists, artists, and explorers drawn to the Grove’s untamed beauty.

Just years earlier, in 1873, Dr. Horace P. Porter, the area’s first postmaster, had officially named the community “Cocoanut Grove”—an antiquated spelling that stuck for decades. While Porter contributed to the Grove’s development, he’s also remembered for an attempt to defraud Isabella Beasley, a local widow whose husband, Edmund Beasley, built one of the area's first homesteads in 1868.

By the 1920s, Coconut Grove took on a new role—this time as a key player in the high-stakes world of Prohibition-era rum-running. Enter Gertrude “Cleo” Lythgoe, known as the “Queen of the Bootleggers,” who used her connections in the Bahamas to smuggle alcohol into the United States. Bahamian laborers, already familiar with the waterways and terrain, were hired to ferry illegal shipments into hidden coves and quiet docks around the Grove. The proximity between the Bahamas and Coconut Grove made it a natural hub for illicit trade—and the Grove's tangle of mangroves and unpatrolled shores made enforcement nearly impossible.

Not far from the smuggling routes, another transformation was taking shape—one that would redefine international travel. In the late 1930s, Pan American Airways selected Coconut Grove’s waterfront as the base for its flying boat operations. The airline built its seaplane terminal at Dinner Key, where massive Clipper planes ferried passengers across the Caribbean and Latin America. Today, the terminal lives on—repurposed as Miami City Hall, a civic landmark that once buzzed with the energy of international air travel.

Through it all, Coconut Grove remained a magnet for visionaries and eccentrics. From the Coconut Grove Playhouse to the Popular Goombay Festival , tand the Art festival,  he neighborhood has long nurtured a spirit of creative rebellion.

But the Grove has also wrestled with its contradictions— from Red lining, and tge new red lining ie, gentrification has erased parts of its past. Longtime residents, particularly from the Black community, and long time business in the Village have seen their neighborhoods transformed or displaced in the name of progress.

Still, the spirit of Coconut Grove endures. It’s a place where seaplanes once soared, rum-runners once hid, and where the streets still echo with the stories of those Bahamians who built it.