Sistrunk is seeing increased development. What does it mean for the Black community?

Stroll down Sistrunk Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, and you’ll catch glimpses of Black history embedded in the community.

Outside the once-thriving Cone Plaza, a portrait of the late Dr. James Franklin Sistrunk, who founded the first Black hospital in Broward County, hangs alongside paintings of other Black historical figures in the city. The now-defunct plaza is surrounded by predominantly Black-owned businesses and fixtures such as the NAACP Fort Lauderdale/Broward Branch.

In May, the building caught fire and now must be demolished. Like others before it, the property will eventually give new life to another business along the corridor.

The familiar landscape of the neighborhood is quickly changing. On the corner of Sistrunk Boulevard and Avenue of the Arts, two new mixed-use developments — The Adderley and The Arcadian — are going up that will include more than 900 total units of housing, including affordable housing. A distillery and an entertainment venue — both Black-owned — will also hold space along the street in a year’s time.

Residents and business owners are divided on how changes in the neighborhood might affect the existing community, though the new development is welcomed by some who have been in the area for generations.

“It’s been dead for quite a long time. So I’m very excited about the changes that are being made,” longtime Fort Lauderdale resident Lillian Small, 83, told the Miami Herald. “So I’m excited about what’s going on now, and I want to stay here to see it all.”

At the Adderley, 10% of the 455 units will be reserved for affordable housing, according to a city report. In 2019, the pricing range being considered for monthly rent was between $990 and $2,300, the Sun Sentinel reported at the time. As of 2022, rents at the Arcadian were expected to be priced from $2,016 to $2,592, with 48 affordable housing units priced at a slightly lower range, $1,680 to $2,089, according to a post from the Fort Lauderdale Community Redevelopment Agency.

Those numbers have other residents skeptical about who the new projects will benefit. Roschell Franklin, a local bail bondsman, said he has his doubts.

“They’re not putting anything in to entertain us,” he said, referring to longtime Black residents. “It’s all for living, but we can’t afford it, either. The rent is too high.”

And while he sees some progress being made in the neighborhood, Franklin said, much of it is out of reach for the average resident.

“There’s nothing done over here that we can afford. So it’s back to square one.”

Growing development

Formerly known as Sixth Street, Sistrunk Boulevard — named for the Black hospital founder — is the main thoroughfare in historic Sistrunk, taking passersby through the city’s oldest African American community and into downtown Fort Lauderdale.

That history is celebrated at Smitty’s Wings, which opened in 2020. The walls are adorned with images of Black Fort Lauderdale’s history, including photos of the late Dr. James Franklin Sistrunk.

Co-owner Chris Smith, a former Florida lawmaker, has owned the building since 2007 and lived in the area since 1998. He remembers when the neighborhood was a thriving community with local shops, such as William Cone Sr.’s Hat and Cap Emporium in the nearby Cone Plaza. Cone, who died in 2005, was a proponent of growth in the area, having sat on the community redevelopment agency for the area.

“But they slowly went away, and it became a cut-through for people to go from the west to downtown,” Smith said of the businesses. He said that while other businesses remained, such as Betty’s Soul Food and Ivory’s Takeout, there weren’t many places to stop and shop in the years before the pandemic. Now, he says, more businesses are populating the strip of Sistrunk Boulevard.

At the corner where Smitty’s sits, Smith said there are three to four developments on the way that will include retail on the bottom and residences atop.

“If you give people something nice to shop, they will stop,” he said.

In recent years, vegan eatery Blue Tree Cafe and Checkmate Barbershop have joined Betty’s Soul Food, a longtime fixture in the community that has served everyone from Hillary Clinton to Janet Jackson.

Betty Taylor, founder of Betty’s Soul Food, said she’s not threatened by the new development and in fact welcomes the new business that could come with it. “That really inspires me because that means that we’re gonna have a lot of [racially] mixed neighborhoods now, and then your business is gonna pick up,” she said.

Tasha Sledge has worked at the restaurant since she was a teenager, taking over for her grandmother who had also worked at the restaurant. She said she has seen the neighborhood change over the past 30 years, saying crime made the area unsafe in the 1990s for people to even ride down.

With time, Sledge said, things improved in small ways, including with efforts to keep the streets clean and to string lights at Christmastime. And in the past five to six years, more businesses have populated the strip, she said.

Sledge said the new development is a double-edged sword: “I think it’s bad because it does take [business] away from us, but good because it’s still bringing more people in different cultures and different things to have them come and try out, because we do have a lot of different cultures coming in more than before.”

And getting used to that dynamic is taking time. Sledge said she would often worry if she saw white people in the neighborhood after a certain time of day. When a white couple was leaving the restaurant a few weeks ago, she instinctively asked if she could call them an Uber. “I don’t want to say it like that, but I was a little worried,” she said, thinking of how unsafe it once seemed for residents to be outside late in the neighborhood. At the same time, “back then versus now is totally different.”

Bob Jackson, 75, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale who lives near Port Everglades, echoed similar sentiments as he ate at nearby Smitty’s. “Back in the ‘60s it was kind of rough,” said Jackson, who is white. “It was a tough neighborhood. You’ve got to be careful where you’re driving.” But things have changed since then, he said. “It’s a big improvement, very nice.”

For now, Betty’s is contemplating ways the restaurant can attract customers who may ride down Sistrunk and patronize other businesses.

“Right now, we’re trying to keep this restaurant here,” Sledge said.

Neighborhood changes

Blue Tree Cafe co-owner Sharon Allen has been in the neighborhood a few years but is concerned about the developments coming to the community and what that means for rent prices for small business owners.

“We’re just kind of riding the wave,” she said. “And the thing is, I’m glad that I did come in when I did, because in the future, I probably wouldn’t be able to afford it, like a lot of the small businesses won’t be able to afford it.”

The changes don’t bother Gregory Wright, who owns Checkmate Barbershop at the corner of Sistrunk and Northwest Ninth Avenue. He embraces the new development, with the hopes that it will bring him more business.

“You know, that just comes with life,” he said as he cut hair.

Wright has been in Florida for eight years and heard about how rough the area had been before he arrived. “Everything has to change at some point. So I got an opportunity to come here and open up a barbershop. I like seeing the changes happening. So I was like, I’d love to be a part of that.”

His client Neil Dhruve agreed, saying it’s nice to see the city you live in grow. While Dhruve acknowledged that inflation is hurting some people, he said younger residents are helping bring new business to the community.

“It seems the younger population that’s coming down here is coming for new job opportunities, and it seems like a lot of companies are moving down here,” Dhruve said. “So you would expect that these businesses would continue to do well if you have young professionals coming down here who love to go out to eat and who are making more money, as opposed to the older community that might sit at home and cook at home and things like that. I think you got to look at it holistically versus maybe just being afraid of change.”

Checkmate hairstylist Debresia LeSane said the gentrification in Fort Lauderdale is nothing like she sees in nearby Pompano Beach, where she lives. In Fort Lauderdale, she said she sees Black residents working in many of the new businesses in the neighborhood, whereas in Pompano, workers don’t seem to live in the community.

“Over here [in Fort Lauderdale], you have new buildings, but if you go inside, you see our faces,” said LeSane, who is running for mayor in Pompano Beach. “So even if it’s a Jimmy John’s or Papa Johns, there are people from the community working there rather than strangers that we don’t know.”

Aytia Tarpley, 26, a customer at Smitty’s, has only lived in the area for about four or five years but said she’s happy with the changes being made in the community. “The changes aren’t gentrifying; it’s just upgrading a community,” she said. “I feel it’s more cosmetic than structural. I’m appreciative of it.”

But that’s not how longtime Fort Lauderdale resident Roschell Franklin, the bail bondsman, sees it. Sitting at a counter inside Betty’s Soul Food and sipping on his coffee on a hot July afternoon, Franklin criticized the development and questioned if it would benefit those living in Sistrunk.

“We have very few businesses in this area that employ people,” Franklin said. “Most of them got one person at a time. They only have two, three or four people.”

“People move out. People can’t afford [to live here], or people make money and they move out. They don’t want to stay in the same neighborhood,” he added. “But we can’t get the funds to do what we need to do to survive. It’s a struggle.”

Smith, of Smitty’s Wings, described the ‘80s as a time when upwardly mobile Black people would leave for western cities such as Coral Springs or Sunrise.

“So instead of having a lot of good pocketbooks in this area, there were only people that couldn’t afford to move, and they really didn’t have the money to sustain the type of businesses we need,” he said. “It was a good thing that we had upward mobility of the Black community, but it was kind of a bad thing in that good paychecks left the community and took the money elsewhere.”

He called it “Black flight,” noting that in other cities, such as Atlanta and Charlotte, there were Black families whose children went to school in those communities and kept their knowledge there, whereas he doesn’t think that’s the case in South Florida.

Notably, some of the new businesses in Sistrunk will be run by entrepreneurial Black families. A tribute to the long-gone 1940s-era Victory Theatre is being undertaken by veteran distiller Victor Harvey and his kids, including his son Victor Harvey Jr., who will be at the helm of a new restaurant at the site.

The property will sit five blocks from the site of the former theater, which was converted to a church in 1959 and later acquired by the city through eminent domain. It was torn it down in 1989. Harvey will own the new building and the distillery inside, and the rest of building will be leased out.

Harvey is hoping the soon-to-be Victory Building — which will house the distillery, restaurant, a cigar bar, a whiskey lounge, an event space, and a rooftop bar and lounge — will help reinvigorate the area with entertainment and job opportunities.

“We wanted to do something that would give back to the community to help rejuvenate the community, give them a reason to stay in the community and bring people over here to see what this community and what Sistrunk has to offer,” he said.

Harvey thinks his development and others will attract those upwardly mobile Black people back to the neighborhood.

“When you come from something that’s not so great, you want something that’s better,” he said. “I don’t blame people for going to look for something better. But when you’re able to give them something and a reason to come back, there’s no reason for them to go.”

Housing concerns

Lillian Small, 83, once worked at the Victory Theatre and has seen the neighborhood morph over the decades. While she welcomes the changes, she’s also noticed that current residents are concerned about outsiders wanting to buy their houses as development in the area ramps up. Small believes they want properties near Sistrunk in part because they are closer to the beach.

“This is the least expensive property that you’re gonna find around here,” she said. “They didn’t have much foresight when they decided they were going to ... relegate us Black folk to live over here, but now [this area has] become crucial.“

Emmanuel George, curator of the Old Dillard Museum, which documents the history of Black Fort Lauderdale, said he is skeptical of the changes and, like Franklin, questioned if it will benefit Fort Lauderdale’s Black residents.

“I hate to sound very cynical, but it’s still concerning, even though there’s talks of affordable housing,” he said. “We’ve seen what was happening down in Liberty City with Liberty Square. There was talks about affordable housing and to keep people, and we see what happened with that. ... I’m all for seeing expansion and seeing more people coming in and investing into the community. But for me, it has to benefit the people who have been living here. And if they cannot afford to enjoy these things that’s coming here, then is it really for them? Or is this for bringing in a new social class, demographic over here?”

READ MORE: Is the new Liberty Square delivering on its promises to public housing residents?

Longtime Fort Lauderdale resident Greg Brewton cautioned against the narrative that the housing being built won’t be affordable for residents, emphasizing that the developments will include affordable housing units.

Brewton, a former planner with the city of Fort Lauderdale and the city’s former director of sustainable development, has lived in the Sistrunk area his whole life and recalls when the neighborhood was in rough shape. Now, when you drive along that stretch of the street, you’ll see newer development among single-family homes and businesses.

Brewton welcomes that: “The younger generation isn’t going to move into those older structures. If we want to bring life back to the community, we have to provide housing and opportunities for the next generation,” he said, adding that more single-family homes need to be built as well.

He also disagreed with the notion that longtime homeowners would be pushed out of the neighborhood against their will.

“I believe you can be bought out,” he said. “How can I criticize someone from a family who may have owned a piece of property since the ‘50s that they bought for $20,000, and the family members today have been offered half a million dollars? Am I supposed to tell that family, ‘Don’t accept that’? They’ve earned that right. They’ve held on to their property for that amount of time. They’ve earned the right to benefit from the growth of that value of their property.”