Surfside home next in historic designation line

Two Northwest Miami-Dade homes won historic site designations last week from the county’s Historic Preservation Board.

The decisions were unanimous for both the Clark house at 1360 NW 98th Terrace, home of civil rights activist Vernon H. Clark; and 2931 NW 52nd St., a Brownsville house referred to as the Jackson-Mosley/Johnson residence.

The 1,336-square foot Clark residence is in the North Shore neighborhood between Northwest 13th and 14th avenues. It is surrounded by single-family homes.

As a teenager, Mr. Clark joined efforts to desegregate the Miami bus system and was among students who did a “wade in” at a whites-only beach, according to a report by Adrienne Burke with the county’s Preservation Regulatory and Economic Resources Department.

Historically, the land where the Clark residence sits was settled by the Tequesta and Seminole people.

The site meets two requirements for historic designation, a report from the county’s Preservation Regulatory and Economic Resources Department says. It was “associated with the lives of persons significant in our past,” and the house “embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, style or method of construction” as a “ranch-style building representative of architecture built during the 1950s and 1960s.”

The construction of the Brownsville home and its sale to an African-American family “tells the story of segregation, integration and housing struggles in the Jim Crow South,” the county report attests. The home is connected to the lives of Ida Bell Jackson-Mosely, Ruth Johnson (the original owner) and real estate developer Wesley Garrison, a white man.

Mr. Garrison was “instrumental in building and selling properties to black families in Brownsville,” notes the report for the 1,104-square-foot house in the Glenwood Heights subdivision.

The home, the report says, “is a minimal traditional style building representative of architecture built during the 1940s and 1950s in Brownsville.” It qualifies as an historic site, the report says, for the same reasons as the Clark house.

The designations by the Historic Preservation Board are final unless someone appeals, in which case they would land on the laps of the county commission. That’s unlikely, Historic Preservation Chief Sarah Cody told Miami Today, “since the property owners requested the designations.”

Vernon Clark’s daughter, LaTrease Clark, was at the meeting and noted it was her father’s birthday. Born Dec. 21,1937, Mr. Clark died in 2006.

Next up on the preservation board’s targeted historic sites is the Surfside “Fisher-Sapero residence” at 9200 Carlyle Ave. Built in 1954, the house is “historically significant for its association with the continued development in the Town of Surfside through the Altos Del Mar subdivision, originally platted during the 1920s,” its designation report states.

The home, the report continues, “is… an exemplary example of a ranch structure with regional/Miami Modern (MiMo) elements designed by a locally significant architect, Gilbert M. Fein.”