The Lyric Theater

What It Is

The Lyric Theater is a historic venue in Overtown, reportedly built around 1913, that became the cornerstone of a thriving entertainment strip known as Little Broadway. In an era when Miami's hotels and clubs were closed to Black patrons and performers, Overtown built its own circuit, and the Lyric was its showpiece. Touring Black entertainers who played the segregated rooms of Miami Beach by night famously came to Overtown afterward to perform, eat, and stay among their own community. The historian Marvin Dunn is among those who have documented this world. After decades of decline the theater was restored and reopened as a cultural and heritage venue.

Why It Matters

The Lyric is the most tangible relic of a neighborhood that was, for the first half of the twentieth century, the cultural capital of Black Miami, a community rooted in Bahamian migration and Southern Black settlement. That world was largely destroyed mid-century when expressway construction was routed straight through Overtown, scattering residents and gutting the district. Restoring the Lyric is an act of memory against that erasure. It complicates the city's familiar Latin-and-Anglo story by insisting on the Black Miami that came first, the Overtown that the rest of the city was built around and then over.

Neighborhoods: Overtown Eras: The MiMo / Postwar Boom Related people: Marvin Dunn