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January 1939. "Grocery store in Negro section. Homestead, Florida." Photo by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
Arriving there as a 2 year old in 1957 and staying for the next 19 years (through High School), I can't recall a black section of town within the city limits of Homestead. My father was stationed at Homestead AFB.
There were significant black populations living in Goulds, Naranja (north), and Florida City (south) which are all very near / adjacent to Homestead, and I had many black classmates in Junior High and High School.
Back then Homestead was a very small rural farming community. Miami was 35 miles north and an entirely different world. There was actually farmland for miles between the two areas. No one lived east of US 1 as it was mangrove swamps or farm fields (closer to town). Krome Ave (then US 27) was the center of the town.
I went back to visit a few years ago and most of the middle class had fled the area after Andrew's devastation. The area is now very poor and heavily Latino. US 1 is now the center of town and east of it is now heavily built up.
God help them if another Andrew strikes the area. Card Sound Rd was inundated with a massive storm surge for miles inland in a storm that struck in the 1920' or 30's. The highway was literally wavy (up and down) from the beating of the flood. I remember an official DOT yellow sign warning of "elephant tracks" going south on Card Sound Road out of Homestead in the 1960's.
Most of the area south of Miami averages 3' - 6' above sea level, even far inland. In fact Homestead is located on a narrow coral ridge the ends just west of town near the Everglades Nat'l Park boundary.
For those who know the area, Roberts was literally just a fruit and veggie stand outside the gate of the Park back then. (http://www.robertishere.com)
It was a great place to be a kid in the 60's!
It took a while for theaters to be able to convert to sound technology. I would think that a theater in a place like this would be one of the latter to get it. The board looks like one that they write the movie schedule on and I sure wish we could read it!
These cute little boys are what initially caught my eye, however!
...are SO cute! I hope they had good lives.
Folks in Homestead must have been a little behind the times, still advertising "TALKING Pictures" about 12 years after the first sound picture [The Jazz Singer] was introduced. However, I have heard that silent films continued to be produced through about 1930-31, mainly for secondary markets.
Bars on the window of the Bodega even back then?
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