MLK Hialeah: Life on the "Right" Side of the Tracks

As you head west on NW 62nd Street (MLK Blvd.) through Liberty City, you will cross the CSX / Tri-Rail tracks.

This will mean that you are in Hialeah, but nobody will have to tell you that.

You will be able to tell that something changed by how many name-brand stores and franchises that you see on both sides of the road.







To Hialeah's credit, many other cities would have let MLK Blvd. end at the tracks and retained the old name of the street (in this case, W 9th Street), but Hialeah continued MLK Blvd. all the way to the canal, and this was courageous.




What is telling is that the inner-city ended as quickly as it did.







Marshall Davis, the manager at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center in Liberty City, talked about living in "The Canyon" as a child, which was what they called the corridor of homes that backed onto the tracks.






At the time he lived there (and he is probably in his late 50's), there was nothing beyond the tracks at the time. That means that Hialeah got a fresh start as a "new" city and didn't have the baggage of being a segregated city.



That gave them a leg up on Liberty City, and the difference is a clear as night and day.

Indexing for This Topic:

"Wrong Side of the Tracks"

MLK Pompano Beach: On the "wrong" side of the tracks.

A visible railway presence in this day and age almost always means that you are either in an industrial park or in the inner city. It also could be both.

MLK Blvd in Pompano Beach falls in the category of "both," and it doesn't just have one major rail corridor, but two.

The easternmost tracks follow Dixie Highway, which also (coincidently?) marks the point where 3rd Street becomes MLK Blvd. This photo is taken while sitting on 3rd Street at the tracks, looking onto the beginning of MLK Blvd.

Behind me in this photo above is a fairly tidy neighborhood of single family and apartment homes. The volleyball court had a nice crowd of primarily white 20-somethings playing a game while their dogs watched from where they were tied to the chain link fence. I have good friends who live in a very upscale townhome just a few blocks away. In their minds, when I cross these tracks in front of me I will be on the "wrong side of the tracks."


View Larger Map

The above map shows Dr. Martin Luther King Blvd prominently, but a Mapquest map showed the road as Hammondville Road, which is a story for another blog post. The rail corridor in the above photo is out of sight to the right of the above map.

Next (below) is a photo of the other major rail corridor, which is on the west side of the I-95 freeway and runs along the Andrews Avenue industrial park (dead center in the map above). That is Andrews Avenue above us in this photo.While this is the Tri-Rail and Amtrak corridor, as well as a freight corridor, it does not mean that people who live here have good transit. There is a single bus (Route 60) that runs along MLK Blvd and it would take at least two connections to get to the Cypress Creek Tri-Rail Station. It is not too likely that anybody in this neighborhood will be taking Amtrak, so I won't concern you with how complicated it would be to get to the nearest Amtrak stop at Broward or Deerfield Beach.

Now, what you see out the window while riding in the Tri-Rail or Amtrak passenger cars from Northern Palm Beach County to the Miami Airport is the subject of an entirely different blog. Suffice it to say that a "white guy" riding on Tri-Rail fully understands what it means to be "in" the world, but not "of" the world. Most would focus on a book or the morning paper, diverting their eyes from a view that at times looks like a landscape from Calcutta.

Indexing for This Topic:

"Wrong Side of the Tracks"

What I Do to Review an MLK Blvd.

At the bottom of each blog post you will see the footnote "Indexing for This Topic."

The reason for this is to underscore the idea that these problems are pervasive and affect almost every major city in the United States. They definitely affected every area that I have visited in South Florida over the last three months.

For the indexing I have created the "http://white-guy-on-MLK.com" companion domain.