Overtown / Fashion District

Welcome to Okapi Visuals...an extension of The Lair of the Okapi

A few weeks ago, my friend and I went on a photo expedition into a few of the more overlooked neighborhoods in Miami. We've decided to go on urban photo safaris at least once a month, trying to document some of the things that make Miami so bananas. These were snapped in the neighborhoods of Overtown and the Fashion District.

Overtown, one of Miami's original neighborhoods, is also one of the city's longest neglected areas. In the early 1900s, Jim Crow laws relegated African-Americans, many of whom had come to build the railroad, to the area just north of downtown. Then known as Colored Town, the neighborhood has always struggled with poverty and munipal neglect. Despite its hardships, Colored Town became an outpost of the vibrant African-American culture and arts scene of the mid-20th century. The main street, Northwest Second Avenue, became known as Little Broadway for its nightclubs, theaters and dancehalls and regular performances by cool cats like Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. In the '60s, when official segregation ended, the African-American middle class moved out and two major elevated highways were contructed right through the heart of the community, nearly destroying it. By the 1980s, Overtown was known mainly for race riots and crack.

Now, Overtown is eerily desolate. It feels like Mad Max Beyond Miami with its abandoned and graffitti'd buildings, vast expaneses of empty lots and an occasional post-apocalyptic encampment of vagabonds and crackheads. Just to the north of Overtown is an oddly clandestine area of mainly warehouses and wholesale garment stores called the Fashion District. Despite the name this area is anything but glamourous, and like Overtown, it feels a bit barren. A few years back, the Fashion District was a mainly Puerto Rican neighborhood, but recently Koreans have laid claim to the area, and now signs are written in Spanish, English and Korean - so Miami.