|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
“Uncle Abe” saw this coming and tried to stop it. He failed. Coconut Grove Bahamian pioneer E.W.F. Stirrup, called “Uncle Abe” by his contemporaries, arrived in Coconut Grove in 1899 from Key West. He was trained as a carpenter and with the help of his wife, Charlotte Jane, built and rented many of the original Bahamian-style shotgun houses in the Black Grove. When he died in 1957 Stirrup owned 317 parcels of land in Coconut Grove. At one time Stirrup owned most of the land that is now downtown Coconut Grove including where the Mayfair complex was built.
The Stirrups had ten children, six of whom reached adulthood. In 1990 I interviewed two of them for my book, “Black Miami in the Twentieth Century” both of whom told me that their father did not want the family home to ever be sold out of the family. His descendants got around that by leasing the stately home to a developer who made a bed and breakfast of it for tourists.
Now it is the Stirrup property across the street from the family home which is now the parking lot behind the Coconut Grove Playhouse. The property is zoned for single-family homes but a developer and the family want to build a 62 room hotel on the property. The catch is that the City of Miami would have to change the zoning from residential to commercial, this on historic Charles Avenue, the birthplace of the Black Grove. Some residents in the immediate area are threatening to sue to stop it.
The impact of a hotel on that property at the head of historic and narrow Charles Avenue will be required the street to be widened to accommodate heavy commercial traffic and parking. Portions of some front yards will be taken. The increased noise and disruptions on this quiet street will change it forever into a throughway for trucks and tourists.
Regrettably, Uncle Abe’s descendants care more about profiting on the land than preserving the history of the community or respecting the patriarch’s wishes which I was told, were spelled out in a trust making it difficult for his descendants to do exactly what they are now doing. The Stirrup descendants could build single family homes on the site as the patriarch intended, but much more money will be made by erecting a hotel. Greed knows no color. If Uncle Abe had wanted a hotel across the street from his home, he would have built it himself.
