Once upon a distant time, the village center of old Coconut Grove was so anything-goes mellow that a blind man — folk-rock star Jose Feliciano, to be specific — could pedal a bicycle a short way down the street without fear of running into anything.
That was long ago, during a near-mythical age when hippies, artists, writers and folk singers mixed in the streets, the cafes and the jungly neighborhood cottages with the descendants of the Grove’s pioneer gentry, and you could bump into Tennessee Williams at the Coconut Grove Pharmacy’s lunch counter, and David Crosby and Joni Mitchell shacked up, pre-fame, on a sailboat at Dinner Key.
“It was,” recalls longtime Groveite and Grove Arts Fest co-founder Charlie Cinnamon, “mind-blowingly beautiful.”
What has happened since is by now an oft-told tale: The old Grove, the oldest place in Miami and for many years the only place worth going out of your way for, was buried by an onslaught of big money, by malls, chains and McMansions, and then, for a decade at least, after the big money went to South Beach, by a steady decline into a general drabness — some bright spots aside — of shuttered storefronts, third-shelf boutiques, bad-news bars and tourist-trap eateries.