Cocoa's Black neighborhoods, 1880s to 1948: Florida Avenue, Lapham's Addition, College Park

Black Cocoa began in the town’s first decade. According to the 2019 National Register nomination for Cocoa Junior High School, which traces the history of the neighborhood around it, white and Black residents of early Cocoa often lived close together, and in the 1880s the white landowners R. A. Hardee and T. K. Dixon sold lots in their subdivisions to Black and white buyers alike. The chance to own a home drew many Black families to those subdivisions, south of Cocoa’s business district along what is now Florida Avenue, and a neighborhood grew there with Black-owned businesses and churches.

The railroad through the middle

Then the railroad came through. The nomination says that the Florida East Coast line built in the early 1890s ran straight through the heart of that neighborhood, splitting it and bringing the noise and smoke of the trains to people’s front doors. As traffic grew, the land beside the tracks became valuable for business, and many residents sold and moved.

The Lapham subdivisions

The new Black neighborhoods grew west of downtown, on land that belonged to one family. Arthur O. Lapham, a local businessman and citrus grower whose father had homesteaded in Cocoa, began platting his land with his wife, Viva, around 1910, and sold many of the lots to Black buyers. The nomination lists three subdivisions:

Subdivision	Platted
Lapham’s Addition	1912, with more lots added in 1922
Sunnyside	1922
College Park	mid-1920s, less than a mile west of downtown

College Park’s 1926 amended plat shows a “School Lot” bounded by Avocado Avenue, Pomolo Street, Mango Avenue and Satsuma Street. The nomination thinks the Laphams probably donated it to the school board, though no record of the transfer has been found. That is where Cocoa Junior High School, built in 1923, stands; Avocado Avenue is now Blake Avenue. The school’s story is on our Cocoa schools page.

Living in College Park

College Park was platted just as the land boom ended, and the 1930 Sanborn maps show many lots still empty. The houses that were built crowded around the school. Under segregation, the nomination says, most residents worked in what jobs were open to them: men in the citrus groves and packing houses, women as cooks and maids in private homes and hotels. Some ran small businesses or taught at the neighborhood school.

The neighborhood was also denied basic city services. Apart from Blake Avenue, its streets were still unpaved in 1948, and it went without connection to the city’s water and sewer systems until local activists in the Cocoa Civic League and the Liberty League pressed the city to extend them.

Further Reading

• Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore by Ben Green
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon