The Coconut Grove of yesterday was “a tale of two cities”—one black, one white, or what the locals and residents called “Colored Town” and “White Town.” Seventy-five-year-old Thelma Gibson, a University of Miami trustee who was born and raised in Colored Town, remembers it well. She lived on Charles Avenue in a two-bedroom house that had no electricity and no running water. “I sold all of my Girl Scout cookies in White Town, where the folks were very nice to us,” recalls Gibson. “But we knew things were separate and definitely not equal.”

A former nurse whose grandparents were among the early Bahamians to settle in Cocoanut Grove, as it was spelled then, Gibson remembers a thriving area, where many families owned and operated mom-and-pop stores that catered to the local black community. Like the Wallace family, who ran the restaurant on Douglas Road that “served the best barbecue in town.” Or the Dew Drop Inn, a drugstore owned by the Dunn family; “that was where all the children went.” And the Cash family, who owned a store where Walt’s Laundromat stands today. “It had a poolroom on one side, a grocery store in the middle, and a sewing shop on the other side, and the family lived upstairs,” she recalls.

There were lots of barbershops and beauty salons, too, and Grand Avenue, the main drag, bustled with grocery stores, drugstores, restaurants, hardware stores, and dry cleaners.

ut things changed. By the time Gibson returned to the neighborhood in 1947 after graduating from nursing school in Raleigh, North Carolina, Colored Town was known as West Coconut Grove, and many of the small, single-family homes that created the neighborhood atmosphere had been torn down and replaced by what residents called “concrete monsters,” big apartment buildings owned by absentee landlords.

Later, there were other changes. Many of the black families living in the West Grove prospered and moved to new suburban neighborhoods like Richmond Heights. In the late 1960s, social turmoil gripped the area as drugs and crime took a foothold in this once thriving African-American enclave.

Today, segregation is gone, but Coconut Grove is still a tale of two cities—one wealthy, one poor, where opulent shops and eateries like CocoWalk and the Streets of Mayfair exist within earshot of the 65-block, half-square-mile section of West Coconut Grove. It’s where more than 40 percent of 3,000 residents live below the poverty level and median household income is less than a third that of neighboring Coral Gables. And where abandoned buildings and vacant lots, almost 200 at last count, seem like permanent fixtures on the landscape.

But there’s a rebirth taking place in the West Grove, a renaissance that has renewed the hopes and dreams of residents who have struggled for years to revive their community. This revitalization is not being spawned by government or private industry, but by students and teachers from a next-door neighbor to the West Grove for all of Gibson’s 75 years.

The University of Miami, through its Initiative for Urban and Social Ecology (INUSE), is offering research and teaching expertise to West Coconut Grove in hopes of making the quality of life there better. The project, now in its third year, is based on a “community building” approach—that improving the built environment alone is not enough to reverse the urban decay of the West Grove. An overhaul of its social processes also is needed.

Academic departments, schools, and colleges from just about every corner of the University are involved. They are working with West Grove community leaders, organizations, and citizens on projects that address a range of issues, from design, health, and child welfare to legal aid and business assistance.

“Our role is as a catalyst for families and citizens to assume responsibility in their own community,” says Samina Quraeshi, founder of INUSE and the Henry R. Luce Professor in Family and Community at the University of Miami. “The impact of our work is going to hopefully result in a real benefit for the people who live there, whether it’s a new school that is built, new shops and businesses, better access to health and legal services, or refurbished structures like churches and community centers.”

chool of Architecture students have rolled up their sleeves and ventured into the West Grove on a mission. Through the school’s Center for Urban and Community Design, they are designing and building affordable homes, renovating commercial properties, and researching ways to upgrade the area’s distinctive shotgun homes.

The first home designed and built by students—a two-story, 1,550-square-foot Caribbean-style house on Thomas Avenue—is now occupied by Mary Colzie, a resident of the West Grove since she was five years old, with her 16-year-old twin daughters, Sherri and Terri. Colzie was able to buy the house after she qualified through the Coconut Grove Local Development Corporation’s low-interest loan program.

“I had been renting for 11 years. Owning my own home is a dream come true,” says Colzie, a social worker at a West Grove Head-Start program for children ages three to five. “What’s even more satisfying is knowing that the University of Miami is trying to help the West Grove area.”

Students in other architecture classes also are taking part. In assistant professor David Burnett’s Computing in Design course, students have documented the history of Bahamian building types in the West Grove using computers. In an architecture design class taught by associate professor Rocco Ceo, students designed a K-6 charter school proposed by Gibson that would specialize in technology and communications. And three architecture graduate students initiated a summer studies program, called Cityzens, for West Grove high school students.

Meanwhile, the School of Law’s Center for Ethics and Public Service is providing legal aid to the residents of West Coconut Grove. Through the center’s Community Economic Development and Design project, law students have conducted workshops and counseling sessions in the community on small-business development. Law professor and center director Tony Alfieri says his students will conduct other workshops in the future that will address everything from tenant, homeowner, and consumer rights to trusts and estate planning, banking and insurance discrimination, and community health rights.

Behavioral and social psychology students from the School of Medicine are counseling West Coconut Grove families and at-risk children, and are working with teachers, housing officials, police, and social service professionals.

Other INUSE projects: Students in associate professor Gregory W. Bush’s Studies in U.S. History course recorded an oral history of the community from interviews conducted with residents. School of Communication students documented the rich imagery of the West Grove through still photography and documentary film footage.

“One of the things we didn’t anticipate, but are very pleased with, is how excited the students have been about working on a long-term, community-service project like this,” says Richard Shepard, director of the Center for Urban and Community Design and an instructor in the School of Architecture.

Shepard, who is married to Quraeshi, initiated the student-designed Affordable House building project in the West Grove. “Very few architecture schools offer their students design-build projects. The Affordable Housing design studio and all of the INUSE projects, for that matter, have given students unmatched hands-on experience.”

The experience is preparing University of Miami law students for the day when they become lawyers. “Because they counsel the lay community on legal issues, they have to master a field of law in a more comprehensive fashion than is ordinarily demanded in even the most rigorous law course,” Alfieri says.

Working in a distressed community also has taught Alfieri’s students the importance of public service. “We’re trying to teach that public service is more than a meager contribution of hours. It’s a lifelong professional calling, a kind of ministry, and that calling has to be integrated into the daily work of lawyering.”

So far, INUSE projects, supported by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, have covered four semesters of work in the West Grove. More projects are being planned, says Quraeshi, and INUSE hopes to start similar initiatives in other Miami communities, as well as expand by bringing more students and academic disciplines into the fold.

“Often, when universities go into communities to help revitalize them, the criticism is that they are not committed for the long term,” Quraeshi says. “But we’re in this for the long haul and we want to empower citizens to act on their own.”

INUSE, along with other nationwide university initiatives like it, is helping to change the way people view higher education’s role in civic engagement beyond classroom walls. “Historically, universities often cultivated a culture of expertise that highlighted the role of trained professionals, intellectuals, and scholars in shaping knowledge,” says Robin Bachin, the Charlton W. Tebeau Assistant Professor of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. “But more recently, we’ve come to understand that universities have a central role to play in the public sphere—that is, using their tools and resources to engage different constituencies within the community.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s Community Outreach Partnership Center, for example, works with leaders in West Philadelphia to address minority entrepreneurship, education and job training, and other issues. The Great Cities Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago works to improve the quality of life in metropolitan Chicago and other national and international areas. The University of Michigan, the University of Southern California, and many other institutions have developed similar models of civic engagement.

Bachin, who teaches courses on urban planning and design and environmental history, uses the INUSE projects as case studies in her classes. And some of her students, she says, also have conducted research on the history of urban planning in South Florida to provide a context for the work being done in West Coconut Grove.

est Grove residents are hoping that INUSE will help them to accomplish their overall goal of making their community a place in which current residents will want to stay and fight for improvement. That goal, as well as strategies for achieving it, were outlined in a 1997 Coconut Grove Planning Study, which identified affordable housing, home ownership, renovation of commercial properties, small business assistance, and an upgrade of Grand Avenue as some of the area’s most pressing needs.

Will INUSE work? Initiatives to reverse urban decay have been launched in distressed communities all over the nation. Many have failed. “That’s because such strategies were quick-fix cure-alls, like a new stadium or housing projects, that didn’t engage the community,” says Quraeshi.
 

 
INUSE is different, she explains, because it uses design as a catalyst for change and encourages West Grove citizens to take active roles in civic-engagement projects. Over the last few months, for example, dozens of residents, community leaders, and business owners have attended planning sessions where they have shared their vision and desires for community revitalization.

But such neighborhood revitalization also will hinge on restoring a strong fabric of social connectedness that sustains families, says Jose Szapocznik, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the School of Medicine. Szapocznik, also director of the Center for Family Studies, has researched the impact of the built environment on social processes.

“The statement, ‘It takes a village to raise a child,’ is absolutely correct,” he says. “Those neighborhoods that function more like a village are much more successful in raising well-adjusted children than neighborhoods where there is a great deal of alienation.”

Gibson, who still lives in Coconut Grove, knows that fact all too well. She remembers a West Coconut Grove of yesterday where, as a small child walking to school, she could greet everyone by name.

“We were truly a small town where everybody knew everybody else, and any wrong that you did would be told to your parents,” says Gibson. “We used to wonder how Mama knew so much. It was because neighbors talked to each other.”

With the community-building project of INUSE, perhaps the talking will start again.