Coral Gables Museum will turn its attention Wednesday to a question confronting historic immigrant neighborhoods across South Florida: how to preserve the people, places and culture that define a community as development and rising rents change the ground beneath them.
The museum will host “Link + Learn: Preserving Culture and Places” on Sept. 2, a panel centered on Miami’s Little Santo Domingo and the pressures facing the Dominican community that has helped shape the neighborhood.
The discussion accompanies “Many Voices, One Nation: En Nuestras Palabras,” a bilingual exhibition on view at the museum through Sept. 6. The exhibition was developed by the Allapattah Collaborative CDC in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum on Main Street program and Florida Humanities as part of a national series tied to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
The museum says Allapattah Collaborative was one of only 10 organizations nationwide selected to participate in the Smithsonian initiative.
Little Santo Domingo as a case study
Wednesday’s panel is organized by the Allapattah Collaborative CDC and will use Little Santo Domingo as a case study in cultural and historic preservation.
The neighborhood has long been associated with Miami’s Dominican community. Organizers say rapid development and rising rents increasingly threaten to displace longtime residents and businesses while changing the physical and cultural character that made the area distinctive.
Fernando Ortiz, preservation and community development manager for the Allapattah Collaborative CDC, will moderate the discussion. Each panelist will be asked five prepared questions on historic and cultural preservation before the program opens to questions from the audience.
The format is intended to move beyond preservation as simply a question of saving buildings. The broader issue is what happens to a neighborhood’s identity when the structures remain but the residents, businesses and institutions that gave them meaning can no longer afford to stay.
Three perspectives on preservation
The panel brings together perspectives from architecture, historic preservation and visual documentation.
Rodolfo Pou, a Dominican-American architect and philanthropist, chairs the Diaspora and Development Foundation and has written two volumes examining the Dominican diaspora and its influence on American cities.
Megan McLaughlin is director of preservation projects at the urban planning firm Plusurbia and previously served as a historic preservation officer for the City of Miami. She led a 2023 historic survey of Little Santo Domingo’s commercial corridor for the Allapattah Collaborative, documenting the buildings and places that help define the neighborhood.
Architectural photographer Steven Brooke, a Rome Prize recipient, has photographed more than 40 books on architecture and design and teaches at the University of Miami School of Architecture. His work adds another dimension to the discussion: how places are recorded, interpreted and remembered as they change.
A familiar question in a different setting
The subject has particular resonance in Coral Gables, where debates over development and preservation have repeatedly reached City Hall during the past year.
Those disputes have involved different neighborhoods, histories and economic forces. But they turn on a related question: how much of a community’s inherited character can be protected while accommodating change.
Wednesday’s discussion approaches that question through Little Santo Domingo, where preservation is inseparable from the fate of the people and businesses that made the neighborhood what it is.
If you go…
Coral Gables Museum, 285 Aragon Ave., Wednesday, Sept. 2. Doors and bar service open at 5:30 p.m.; the panel begins at 6 p.m., with audience questions scheduled for 7:45 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
