OVERTOWN: LORD CALVERT HOTEL
The Lord Calvert Hotel in Overtown was home to the popular nightclub Knight Beat, which throughout its history hosted some of the country’s most famous Black entertainers including Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, and more. Much like the rest of Overtown—which the city had officially deemed a “blighted slum”—the hotel was demolished in the 60s during govt-funded “urban renewal and slum clearance,” replaced with a parking lot for a USPS distribution facility.
From @goingovertown: “The Knight Beat was an essential stop on the Chitlin Circuit, the parallel music world that many black artists traveled in the days of segregation. The hotel’s bustling pool was a popular hangout for visiting artists and prominent black leaders, and the scene of Muhammad Ali’s most famous posed photo.” Prohibited from staying in “whites only” Miami Beach, Overtown served as a place of refuge for black entertainers and intellectuals.
Overtown became known as the “Harlem of the South,” owing to its strong local economy and entertainment scene. Overtown was centered on Second Avenue, known as Little Broadway, and its streets were lined with hundreds of Black-owned businesses, including “dentists, law offices, restaurants of every flavor, laundries, beauty salons, and drugstores” NDB Connolly writes in “A World More Concrete.” Between businesses were “wide, large brick and stucco homes, some with two stories, large front porches, and, occasionally, two and three bathrooms to spare. These belonged to Black Miami’s professional class.”
When the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act passed (which provided a 90% federal match for interstate construction), “The Miami Herald connected the dots immediately: ‘Slum Clearance in Miami will start with the building of the proposed highway system’.” Subsequently, throughout the 60s Overtown was gutted. 12,000 residents of Overtown—nearly all of them black—were forcibly displaced due to highway construction. The population of the neighborhood dropped from 50,000 to around 10,000 as “urban renewal” claimed more and more housing for institutional use and parking.
