Good Bread Alley

The neighborhood stretching from 12th to 14th Streets between 3rd and 4th Avenues was originally known as Good Bread Alley because of the smell of freshly baked bread in the area. 

In the mid 1960’s, the I-95 Expressway was built directly through Good Bread Alley and the heart of Overtown, displacing 10,000 residents and demolishing 40 blocks of Overtown’s main business district. The construction wiped out massive amounts of housing as well as Overtown’s main business district – the business and cultural heart of Black Miami. Because of this, the population dropped from about 40,000 to about 10,000. Today, parking lots for the Miami Arena stretch along 2nd Avenue where Good Bread Alley, the Rockland Palace and the Cotton Club once stood. Before demolition, Purvis Young created the Good Bread Alley Project in protest, painting murals across the houses of those who were forced to leave. 

“During its heyday Overtown was a self-sustaining community with a strong spirit of entrepreneurship among its African American residents and business owners. This was symbolized most clearly by a section of the neighborhood named Good Bread Alley. According to spoken and written accounts it was so named because of the aroma of freshly baked bread that residents made in their homes and sold on the front porches along the alley to passersby. This spirit of self-reliance and small, neighborhood businesses was a fundamental element of Overtown’s identity that helped it to endure and sustain the community for decades.”  Excerpt from the CRA Entertainment Plan, 2019

“Throughout much of the early and middle 20th Century, Miami’s black residents were confined to specific areas through restrictive covenants, racial violence, and exclusionary zoning. By 1930, these local policies and practices restricted most of Miami’s 29,000 black residents to a small area outside of downtown Miami known as “Colored Town,” now Overtown. The growing neighborhood became black Miami’s commercial and cultural center. Yet the district also suffered from substandard housing, public health issues, overpopulation, rental price gouging, and insufficient municipal services, including unpaved roads and inconsistent trash collection. During this time, Colored Town’s housing stock consisted of various cramped one-story wooden “shotgun” shacks that often lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. Absentee white landowners owned most of these overcrowded, dilapidated, and fire-prone properties and often charged residents inflated rents while providing minimal upkeep…

In the mid-1960s, the I-95 expressway project ran right through the heart of Overtown, leveling blocks of dense commercial and residential development. The east-west interchange alone displaced 10,000 residents and razed nearly 40 blocks of Overtown’s main business district. Between 1960 and 1971, the Overtown area lost an estimated 18,000 total residents-about half its population-to highway construction, code enforcement, and urban renewal projects. The proposed expressway route through Overtown received little direct challenge by residents, and local leaders generally supported the project as an instrument of slum clearance and economic development. The Greater Miami Urban League, the Miami Times, and Elizabeth Virrick advocated for the need to link highway building with relocation services. Despite these efforts, very few of the displaced residents received any relocation assistance. The building of I-95 also had a massive impact on local residential patterns by accelerating racial transition in formerly white areas along the fringes of the color line in the central portions of Miami-Dade County. Displacement of poor, minority communities by urban highway construction was replicated in various other cities throughout the nation, including Los Angeles, Camden, and Atlanta. Federal highway building destroyed roughly 330,000 units nationwide between 1957 and 1968.” Excerpt from the University of Miami Housing Solutions lab

In the 1960s, to much disapproval from the community, city leaders moved forward with the construction of I-95 and 395 which displaced the center of Overtown, bulldozing large tracts of homes dislocating thousands in the black community and decimating businesses in the neighborhood. The construction wiped out massive amounts of housing as well as Overtown’s main business district – the business and cultural heart of Black Miami. Because of this, the population dropped from about 40,000 to about 10,000. Today, parking lots for the Miami Arena stretch along 2nd Avenue where Good Bread Alley, the Rockland Palace and the Cotton Club once stood.

Soon afterward, using house paint and plywood, Young crafted his first public construct: hundreds of singular works nailed to the abandoned buildings that once framed Fourteenth Street in Overtown. Known as the Goodbread Alley project, after the fine-smelling johnny-cake and cornbread then made in bakeries and homes along the street, Young’s paintings launched a lifetime of art made in protest, in passion, in the wide tide of his own invention.

//www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2006-10-22-0610180967-story.html

Sources:

//cdn.miami.edu/wda/cce/Documents/Miami-Housing-Solutions-Lab/time-line/changing-neighborhoods.html

//www.miaminewtimes.com/news/black-in-blue-6360329

//www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/purvis-young/work/goodbread-alley-1970s

//miami-history.com/photos/overtown-and-good-bread-alley/#:~:text=A%20short%20video%20on%20You,called%20’Good%20Bread%20Alley’.

//www.jstor.org/stable/25613509?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents