Grand Avenue's Main Street Has No Board Yet. Its Storefronts Are Filling In Anyway.

In September, Grand Avenue between Margaret Street and Brooker Street became "Little Bahamas Grand Avenue Main Street." The designation comes from Florida Main Street, a program of the Florida Division of Historical Resources that backs economic development and preservation in historic downtowns. Coconut Grove became the 58th designated Main Street in Florida and the third in Miami, after Allapattah and Overtown, according to the Coconut Grove Spotlight.

So far the program has no nonprofit, no board, and no work plan. Its storefronts are filling anyway. The laundry and the shipping counter that Center Grove residents used for years moved here after a redevelopment pushed them out. A café opened in a space that had been empty for almost a year. A gallery opened a new show last week. The corridor the program is meant to revive is already picking up the businesses that Center Grove development pushes west.

The line on the map, and what sits two blocks east of it

On Grand Avenue, the Main Street boundaries follow a historical line. The Spotlight's reporting describes this section as a center of Black commerce during segregation. Restaurants, bars, grocery stores and shops lined the street, and the Ace Theater hosted films, graduations, proms and concerts. Many of those businesses closed over the decades and left vacant storefronts behind.

Two blocks east of the district, at Matilda Street, the Allen Morris Company's Ziggurat project replaced a group of low-rise commercial buildings. Coconut Grove Laundry & Cleaners was one of the businesses in them. The company has demolished the laundry's old building at Grand and Matilda to make room for a five-story office building and luxury condos.

The laundry and the UPS Store both moved farther west along Grand Avenue, into what is now the Main Street district. Inside the district itself, developer Silver Bluff has two projects planned or under construction between Margaret and Elizabeth Streets: a five-story, 27-unit apartment building and an 80,000-square-foot Class A office building. Florida Main Street coordinator Katherine Beck told the Spotlight that the corridor faces development pressure like many urban Main Streets.

Walking it by address

Here is the stretch in address order, with each place's own published hours where they exist.

Three of these stops are errands that used to happen closer to Center Grove or that a Center Grove dog owner would make anyway. The laundry's current storefront at 3634 is temporary. It takes drop-offs and pickups, sends dry cleaning out, and does alterations on site. Its owners intend a permanent home at Douglas Road and Frow Avenue but had not set a timeline as of March 2026. The UPS Store now sits at Grand Avenue and Douglas Road and keeps Sunday hours from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Where to stop this week

ARRAE Gallery has the most concrete date on the corridor. Its Hyperbloom exhibition opened October 8 and runs through Saturday, October 17, with a closing reception that evening from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. The gallery's regular Saturday hours start at 10:30 a.m., so a daytime visit that day leaves room for a stop at Fookem's Fabulous at 3606, which opens at 10 a.m. on Saturdays and sells key lime pies alongside its jerk chicken melts.

Garin Art Caffé sits at the far end, in the blue, Caribbean-style building at Grand and Brooker that it shares with Lux Hair Salon. The Spotlight reported in January that the storefront had been empty for nearly a year before owners Carlos Garin and Clara Garcia, Coconut Grove residents for 25 years, opened the café. The menu covers coffee and matcha, tapas and burgers, wine and mojitos. The walls are lined with art, and the shaded patio sits under mature oaks. The owners have talked about live music on Saturday evenings, but at the time of that report it was a plan, not a set weekly event.

Garin and Garcia describe the café as the first step in a broader plan of their own. They want to revive the south side of Grand Avenue as a small-scale business and arts hub rooted in the Grove's Bahamian heritage. Their café opened in January. The state program arrived in September, so the work the Main Street designation is meant to support had already started before the designation existed.

The anchor that isn't open yet

The Ace Theater at 3664 Grand Ave. is the building the corridor is organized around. It does not have a reopening date.

It was built in 1930. The City of Miami designated it historic in 2014, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016. In May 2026, the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation named it to its "11 to Save" list of threatened historic places. The Wallace family has owned the building for 47 years. According to the Spotlight's May tour of the site, the money assembled so far covers about half of the estimated $2.5 million restoration. That includes a $200,000 City of Miami grant approved in April, a 2021 grant of nearly $400,000 from the National Park Service's History of Equal Rights program, and private contributions. The Ace Theater Foundation's next step is a fundraising campaign through its website.

At the time of that tour, the walls had been stripped to bare concrete and the sloped floor had not been leveled. ADA-compliant bathrooms and doors were still to come, and the plans call for a mezzanine and an elevator. The October Main Street report still described the renovation as ongoing. Co-owner Denise Wallace told the Spotlight that the Ace "is the oldest landmark in that section of Grand Avenue, and it is the only one in that sector of Coconut Grove that's on the National Register for Historic Places, so it could play a role in helping revitalize the area."

What the program actually adds, and when

Miami Dade College's Gibson Center on Grand Avenue is the anchor institution. It provides space, coordinates community meetings and handles administration while the program gets started. Gibson Center director Gener Romeo helped secure the designation. The next step is forming a community nonprofit to run the program, and the college has already hosted two meetings to recruit a board, an advisory council and committees. Once the nonprofit is in place, it will write a work plan with Florida Main Street. Beck expects that plan by next fall, which means fall 2027.

The process has drawn some criticism. According to the Spotlight, when Romeo gave an update at a Coconut Grove Village West Homeowners and Tenants Association meeting, some residents said the process had not been as transparent or inclusive as it should be. Romeo responded by inviting more people to take part, telling the paper, "We're building the plane as we're flying it."

The most concrete idea from the early meetings speaks directly to the vacancies. It is a pipeline to help local entrepreneurs fill empty storefronts. Miami Dade College would offer commercial-readiness training, and grant money could fund an incubator space on the corridor. Starting Main Street organizations can apply for a $50,000 grant. Beck was direct about the timeline in the Spotlight's report:

"In three to five years, you'll see a big difference in that corridor."

The public space on the other side of Ziggurat

The other change residents can count on is two blocks east, at the redevelopment that started the westward shift. In June, the Miami City Commission approved final designs for Kirk Munroe Park on Matilda Street and for Fuller Street. Kirk Munroe Park gets a new pavilion, a children's playground and a great lawn, with five refurbished tennis courts along Oak Avenue. Fuller Street gets pavers, a level streetscape and more trees.

The project is budgeted at $5 million. The city allocated $3 million, and Allen Morris agreed to contribute $2 million, manage construction and cover any cost overruns. The approval depends on final sign-off from the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District, and the company has said it expects to break ground next summer, which the Spotlight describes as tentative. Measured against the Main Street work plan due in fall 2027, the park work east of Matilda and the storefront planning west of Margaret are on roughly the same schedule.

Until either arrives, the laundry on Grand Avenue is at 3634, the UPS Store is at 3692, and ARRAE's Hyperbloom closes Saturday night.

If you own near Grand Avenue and want a read on how the Ziggurat project, the Silver Bluff projects and the Main Street work plan could affect your block over the next few years, Melva Garcia can walk you through it. Request a Concierge Consultation.