Black History Month: Restoring South Florida’s Black Culture Through Architecture
C. Spencer Pompey, a teacher and coach, and Frank T. Hearst carry the Carver Eagles mascot in front of the school. Photos provided by Spady Cultural Heritage Museum.
Black History Month serves as both a celebration and a reminder that Black history is American history. It is essential to celebrate the enormous contributions of Black Americans as well as confront the centuries of injustices that have taken place and still take place today.
There are two projects that we have been working on that have really allowed us to dig deep into the history of South Florida’s African American community. We want to take this time to highlight and celebrate the work we are doing with Victor George Vodka Distillery and Delray Full Service Adult Education.
Victor George Spirits, a nationally certified Minority Business Enterprise was introduced in South Florida in 2019 by Founder and CEO Victor G Harvey. Harvey’s ambitious vision is to create a four story facility that will house a distillery, restaurant, cigar bar, whiskey lounge, co-working space and a rooftop bar and lounge located on historic Sistrunk Boulevard help transform a once vibrant area back to a destination where neighborhood residents and other locals can dine and drink.
Sistrunk Distillery. Rendering of the front of the Victory Building provided by Peacock Architects.
Many of the prospective tenants will be minority-owned business, which will ease concerns about gentrification as the historically Black neighborhood undergoes a wave of redevelopment. The Old Sistrunk Distillery would produce whiskey, rum, gin and Victor George Vodka. The other prospective tenants will be Wine Down, a wine bar specializing in Black-owned wines; Smoke on the Boulevard, a cigar lounge owned by Ozzie Gomez; Lorna’s Grille, a Caribbean restaurant in Miami Gardens; and event/meeting space Sistrunk Social.
This new building will be named The Victory Building after the historic Victory Theatre once located on Sistrunk. This was the mecca of entertainment for Black people in Fort Lauderdale and the only theatre they could attend up until the end of segregation in 1964. The historic Sistrunk area was once “The Heart and Soul of the City” and Fort Lauderdale’s oldest African American community.
The Victory Theater was an African-American theater located on NW 5th Avenue in Sistrunk. Image Credit: www.distillerytrail.com
Sistrunk Boulevard was named in honor of pioneering Black physician, Dr. James Franklin Sistrunk. Dr. Sistrunk is the founder of Provident Hospital, Broward County’s first Black hospital.
Historic Sistrunk has stood at the center of African-American culture and heritage in Fort Lauderdale since the earliest recorded settlers migrated from Georgia, South Carolina and the Bahamas more than 100 years ago. Many were railroad workers who settled in shanties along the railroad tracks before the turn of the twentieth century. Like elsewhere in the segregated United States, a close-knit Black community emerged to provide living essentials, share values of hard work, integrity and faith, and courageously advocate for full participation for all citizens in the American dream.
The Victory Building will serve as the first Black Owned Distillery in Fort Lauderdale.
“We are thrilled to be a part of this historic project, also being a minority-owned (female-owned) business. This type of project reminds us why we started our business: to push the boundaries of design forward to build a better community and serve those that live there forevermore,” said Vice President of Peacock Architects, Cristin Peacock.
Another historic project we’ve been working on is the renovation of Delray Full Service School (DFSS). This school is a representative example of an equalization school built in response to the US Supreme Court's decision in the Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. This school was constructed with the purpose of providing black students with separate educational facilities equal to their white counterparts until 1970.
Students gather in the library at Carver High School in Delray Beach in the 1950s. Image Credit: The Costal Star
Our project included the demolition of 7 of the campus buildings. Four of the original buildings are still on site and we will be preserving The Gymnasium that was previously abandoned and condemned due to the unsafe floor structure. We will be doing a complete renovation of The Gymnasium and converting it to a multipurpose building to be utilized by the school and the community, including a historic interpretive room displaying the historic Carver High Logo from the gymnasium floor, 3 multipurpose rooms, and a testing lab. A new 2-story 20,000 sq. ft. Adult Education Building is being constructed to compliment the Village Academy on the neighboring property. This school will have a new construction lab, health science lab, information technology lab and general classrooms. We are adding 8 modulars as well which will contain a cosmetology lab, information technology labs, and general classrooms.
“We did several community outreach meetings to speak with the community and get their input on the programming of the school and what types of classes they wanted taught here. This is a predominately black school located in a predominately black neighborhood where the community is very involved. We were able to come together and provide the community with an updated Adult Education Center aligning with their wants and needs. We are so proud to breathe new life into this educational hub so the community can continue to flourish,” said Cristin Peacock.