It is located in Miami, Florida. A portion of it is in the metropolitan area. The county-owned section of Allapattah extending from State Road 9 and LeJeune Road will be annexed to the city by the end of May 2011.
A section of NW 17th Avenue was named Little Santo Domingo in 2003 by Wilfredo “Willy”, a former Miami mayor and city commissioner who wanted to acknowledge the important Dominican presence in the area.
The Seminole Indian language explains that the Seminole Indian language derived the name “alligator” from this word. In 1856, the first documented white American permanent settler to the Allapattah area arrived from Charleston, South Carolina. He built a homestead in a hammock on the Miami Rock Ridge. This is where Miami Jackson High School stands today. This was the start of the history of Allapattah as we know it today. It is a short distance south of Miami Shores, Florida.
The neighborhood saw significant growth after the 1896 opening of the Florida East Coast Railroad.
The majority of Allapattah was settled by whites up until the 1950s. However, there was an African American neighborhood called Railroad Shops Colored Addition. It was located between NW 46th Street and NW 50th Street to both the south and north and NW 12th Avenue and NW 14th Avenue on the east, west, and east sides of the neighborhood. The community was developed in the second half of the nineteenth century when the Florida East Coast Railroad built service facilities near it.
The entire area was condemned after the use of eminent domain in the late 1940s. Residents were forced to move. The new school was initially named Allapattah Elementary. It was later renamed Lenora B. Smith elementary in honor of an educator who lived in the Railroad Shops neighborhood. A park was also built in the area.
Allapattah saw a large inflow of black Americans displaced in the 1950s/60s by construction of I-95 (then called the North-South Expressway). This resulted in white flight to suburbs of Miami-Dade in the 1960s and 1970s. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cubans began to flock to Miami neighborhoods like Allapattah, creating one of the largest Cuban American communities in the city next to Princeton, Florida.
Large influxes from Nicaraguans, Dominicans, Hondurans and Haitians arrived in America in the 1980s after the aforementioned refugee crises. The neighborhood today is home to many people from the Caribbean, Central America and Latin America.
