Cocoa Village: the old downtown and the buildings on the National Register

Cocoa Village is the name the old downtown of Cocoa goes by: the blocks of two-story commercial buildings along Brevard and Delannoy Avenues, near the Indian River. It is often described as a National Register historic district. It isn’t one: the Register number sometimes given for it, 86001245, belongs to Shrewsbury Church, and Brevard County’s listings include no Cocoa district. What the Register does hold are three buildings in the Village, each listed on its own.

The downtown the Village grew from

The Aladdin Theater’s 1991 nomination gives the best short history of the area. When the theater went up in 1924, Brevard Avenue was a dirt road with sidewalks, and most of the buildings around it were wood-frame homes and shops of one or two stories. The land boom brought brick: the Sanders Block in 1917, the Masonic Temple, then the most modern building in town, in 1919, and the Aladdin in 1924.

After World War II the downtown faded, the nomination says, as its buildings aged and shoppers went to newer shopping centers in the suburbs. Then the city and merchants pushed back. Beautification work in the 1970s added shade trees and planter boxes along Brevard Avenue, and by 1991 the downtown, now called Cocoa Village, was supported by the city and some fifty merchants working to preserve its small-town character.

On the National Register

Building	Address	Built	Listed
Porcher House	434 Delannoy Avenue	1916	January 6, 1986
Aladdin Theater	300 Brevard Avenue	1924	October 17, 1991
Cocoa Post Office	435 Brevard Avenue	1939-40	Florida’s New Deal Resources submission

The Porcher House, at the south edge of the Village, is a coquina-faced classical revival house built for the citrus grower Edward Porcher; it was Cocoa’s city hall from 1945 (our Porcher House page). The Aladdin Theater opened on August 18, 1924, and is now a playhouse (our Aladdin page).

The Cocoa Post Office was a New Deal building. According to its nomination, Congress appropriated $70,000 for it on July 1, 1939, the cornerstone was laid on December 15, 1939, and it opened in 1940 at the corner of Orange Street and Brevard Avenue, a one-story poured-concrete building in what the nomination calls the WPA/PWA Moderne style. It was a post office until 1965, then federal offices, and since 1997 it has belonged to the Florida Historical Society, which uses it as a research library.

Main Street

The Village’s revival has a formal program behind it. Cocoa Main Street was designated a Florida Main Street community in 1995, according to the Florida Department of State. When the state named it Main Street community of the month in June 2014, it credited the program with 1,555 construction and rehabilitation projects worth $124.5 million and 398 new businesses in the downtown since the designation.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon