By Carlos Pouver
11/14/19
What do you think when you hear someone mention the city of Opa-locka? May you think of the FBI arresting a commissioner for bribery. Maybe about the poorly run water system in the city. Maybe its poverty and crime. Maybe to think of Rick Ross and how he mentions the city in his songs. As someone that has lived there for the last 15 years, I thought of Opalocka the same way, not a bad place to live but not the best.
You may not think of Opa-locka as a cultural center in Miami, that’s reserved for your Wynwoods, Biscaynes, and South Beaches. I never say it like that but that all changed when I say something important go missing, the little castle houses and buildings. You know the ones that I’m talking about. They kinds of look like discount Agrabah from Aladdin, plus the streets have theses weird names that are hard to say.
These buildings are built after something called Moorish architecture. When the city was built it drew inspiration from One Thousand and One Nights which is why the streets are named, the way they are. Like all cities change is inevitable and that’s what is curtly happening in Opa-locka. Most of the Moorish buildings have been abandoned with no one giving them maintenance, while others have just outright been destroyed.
You can blame this problem on many things, the cities lack of funds, maybe the citizens are disinterested in keeping them up, but for me I think gentrification is what’s to blame. We all know what gentrification is because of Wynwood, but not many know that its also going on in Opa-locka. Many mom and pop shops in Opalocka have been forced to close their door because of the lack of sales. The property value has gone up forcing people to move out.
Which brings us back to out little castles that once ruled the town. They have become too expensive to maintain or rebuilt. An important part of the city is going to be lost. Opa-locka is so much more then what you think. It is as much of a cultural force as the other important cities in Miami-Dade.
Below I have included some pictures of how some of the Moorish buildings look verses how they look now:
