Smokey Hollow: A Community the Capitol Erased

A few blocks east of the Florida Capitol building, there was once a neighborhood called Smokey Hollow. It got its name from the persistent haze that rose from cooking and heating fires in the low ground, a hollow in the landscape where African American families built their lives from the eighteen nineties onward.

Smokey Hollow was never wealthy. It was built by formerly enslaved people and their descendants on the margins the law permitted, in a literal depression in the earth that nobody else wanted. But what they built mattered enormously. There were churches, barbershops, restaurants, schools, and hundreds of family homes. It was a place where, under the constant pressure of Jim Crow, a Black community had constructed something resilient and self-sustaining.

Starting in the mid twentieth century and accelerating through the sixties, the state and city dismantled it systematically. The widening of Apalachee Parkway cut through the neighborhood's core. Then urban renewal legislation cleared what remained. State office buildings went up on the footprint. The families who had lived there for generations were displaced, receiving little or no compensation, and told to find somewhere else in a city where they were still not welcome in most neighborhoods.

The records of who owned what, who was paid what, and how many families lost how much are incomplete and contested. What is documented is the result: a thriving Black neighborhood, several blocks from the seat of state power, was eliminated to build that state's bureaucratic campus.

The Cascades Park development completed in two thousand fourteen includes the Smokey Hollow Commemoration, open-air Spirit Houses designed to evoke the shotgun-house architecture of the original neighborhood. A preserved barbershop from the community, once run by Raleigh Powell for decades, sits in the park as a remnant and a reminder. It is said to be the last physical structure from Smokey Hollow that still stands.