For much of the last century, West Coconut Grove was home to dozens of small mom-and-pop grocery stores and markets, including some that served as informal community centers where residents could pop in for a loaf of bread or something for dinner and perhaps linger to talk to a neighbor they hadn’t seen for a day or two.
Throughout the historically Black section of the Grove, shopkeepers mentored neighborhood youngsters, sponsored sports teams, cashed paychecks and even extended credit to customers they knew.
“It was like family,” says Winifred Pope, who, with her late husband Isiah “Ike” Pope, Jr., for 30 years ran the Douglas Road grocery that still bears his name.
“If people came in and they didn’t have money, Ike had a book where he wrote down the name and the amount. If they paid later, fine and good. If they couldn’t, fine and good. He thought no one should go hungry.”
With the recent closing of Queen Supermarket on Grand Avenue, only one of those small groceries remains in the West Grove: Ike’s Food Center.
The store is now owned by Richie Cooper, who began working for the Popes as a teenager and then bought the business when Ike Pope retired in 1999. Ike’s is run by a group that includes store manager Mohammed Jamal. (Cooper could not be reached for comment.)
Ike’s is an enduring West Grove institution, and still a neighborhood store. No one travels from Westchester or even Central Grove to shop there. Two and a half years ago, the discount grocer Aldi opened a no-frills supermarket six blocks away on U.S. 1, but many local residents prefer the familiarity and convenience of Ike’s.
“People with no car come over for water, soap, whatever they need,” said lifelong Grove resident David Washington, 60. “We don’t like going out of our neighborhood.”
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Nate Donaldson, 76, pops into Ike’s “at least twice a day,” he says, often to buy a lottery ticket. Donaldson remembers getting to know the grocer before going to Vietnam as an Army combat infantryman.
“Ike was an icon,” says Donaldson. “I knew his family, his kids. At that time, Ike’s was in a Black neighborhood. Now there’s a variety of people in the neighborhood. The face of the Grove has really changed.”
The history of Ike’s and its predecessors in the same location, 3374 Douglas Road, reflects the evolving nature of life and culture in a section of the Grove that is steadily being eroded by gentrification, a soaring cost of living and out-migration of the descendants of the original Bahamian settlers and migrants from the South who can no longer afford to live there.
The African-American population of the neighborhood dropped more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2020, according to an analysis of U.S. Census figures by the University of Miami law school’s Center for Ethics and Public Service. At the same time, the number of white residents climbed by 178 percent.
As the number of Black residents of the West Grove declines, places like Ike’s “are very rare and more important than ever,” says Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a professor at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture. “They bring people together.”
The question now, added Plater-Zyberk, is, “How to keep those places in place?”
Ike’s has endured, but, like the neighborhood, it is not the same. The sunburst logo on the front of the yellow-and-white stucco facade remains over the name, “Ike’s Food Center,” but red-letter signage added to the side of the portico reads “Ike’s Market Smoke Shop and Vape.”
Just inside the front door is a grill where customers can order a hot breakfast of ham and eggs or a sausage sandwich for lunch. There is no meat counter. There are surveillance cameras.
As manager, Jamal spends much of the day in an elevated booth behind a bullet-resistant acrylic shield selling lottery tickets and working the register.
He says the booth was installed after the COVID-19 epidemic. The store’s doors are locked at midnight, Jamal says, but customers can make purchases all night through a secure slide-out transaction drawer in the front of the building.
After 10 years at the store, Jamal knows most of his customers by name, and tries to stock items that people request. He realizes most patrons want to quickly get what they came for — drinks, snacks, cigarettes, cereal, beans — pay and get out.
“They don’t want to wait,” he says.
He has also been known to run a tab for regulars. “When you see the same customers every day, it becomes a relationship,” he says.
But Jamal is not from the community.
He is not Ike.
Ike’s in the 70s, 80s and 90s was a family operation. Winifred kept the books. Ike’s sister Maggie worked the register. His brother Harold was the butcher. Deliveries were free. Customers were extended family.
In a 1996 story in the Miami Herald, Pope was portrayed as a role model for the community, a shopkeeper with a heart who knew almost all the kids in the neighborhood.
If he caught a youngster shoplifting, he said at the time, he didn’t call the police; rather, “I just try to talk a little to the kid, to tell him how he’ll end up if he keeps going that way. Most of the time, he listens.”
Pope noted that while the neighborhood was changing, he still knew 90 percent of the kids who came into the store. “If I don’t know their names, I know what family they belong to,” he said in the Miami Herald interview.
Pope certainly knew the family of Denise Wallace.
“I can recall rushing to Ike’s and other stores in the neighborhood, like the Dew Drop Inn, to show our report cards,” said Wallace, harking back to the late 1960s when she walked home from Frances S. Tucker Elementary School. “We would show our grades to Ike and he would give us a penny candy or a cookie. And he’d give us words of encouragement.
“He never denigrated anyone,” said Wallace, a third-generation Grove resident and former co-chair of the Coconut Grove Village Council whose family owns the nearby Ace Theater. “He always found something encouraging to say.”
Winifred Pope says she can recall no incidents of violence when she and her husband ran the grocery.
But the world has changed. While West Grove, like other parts of the city, has seen a sharp drop in crime in recent years, Miami Police Commander Freddie Cruz, who oversees Coconut Grove, says the area around Ike’s remains stubbornly troubled.
Over the past month, police have made four arrests for drug- or alcohol-related offenses and one arrest for theft within a block of Ike’s. In August, a 30-year-old Coconut Grove man was shot and killed by an assailant who chased him into the store during what Cruz at the time described as a drug- and gang-related incident. The alleged shooter, Keith Wilson, 33, is being held without bond on a second-degree murder charge.
Ike’s and nearby corners are hangout spots, despite many “No loitering” signs, including one on the front of the building that includes the name Isiah Pope Jr., as if in memoriam. Young men congregate. The smell of weed floats on the breeze. There is a rumble of lively voices all through the day and evening.
Occasionally, says Jamal, he goes outside and asks people to move away from the door. “Most of the time, people are respectful,” he says.
The first business known to occupy the lot where Ike’s stands was the New York Bargain Store, which relocated to the Grove from downtown Miami in 1925, according to Miami historian Iris Guzman Kolaya.
At that time, the surrounding blocks were dense with small groceries, meat markets, and corner stores, many within walking distance of each other. The Bargain Store closed by 1927, followed a decade later by Joe’s M.G. Market, run by Joe Mongay.
The current two-story building was constructed in 1937, according to Miami-Dade property records. By the early 1950s, the address was home to Phil’s Food Center, owned by real estate developers Philip Bloom and Bernard Hammersmith.
“Phil’s carried forward the corner store’s tradition as a social space, hosting community events and an annual holiday party for hundreds of neighborhood children,” said Kolaya.
Retired teacher Judith Davis recalls Bloom giving a silver dollar to each member of the 1966 senior class at Carver High School to commemorate the last class to graduate from the segregated school.
As a grade schooler, Davis and friends made candy apples from ingredients found in the store and sold them out front to raise money to pay for choir robes. Her aunt lived in the apartment over the store.
“Everybody knew everybody,” she said. “It was a community center.”
Ike Pope was in his teens when he began his career in the grocery business at a store in Goulds. He then took a job at Phil’s, becoming manager in 1964.
Five years later, Bloom sold the business to Pope, who used a Small Business Administration loan to open Ike’s Food Center. For the next three decades, Ike made the 20-mile drive from his home in Goulds to the store daily. He rarely took time off.
“He felt that he had to be there,” said Winifred Pope.
During his 35 years in the Grove, Ike made the grocery thrive by giving locals what they wanted. If he ran out of a product someone asked for, he would often drive to a distributor to get it, said Winifred Pope recently from the same Goulds home.
He also began acquiring other nearby properties: a beauty parlor, a laundromat, a beauty shop, a fish market. He sold everything to Cooper, Winifred Pope said.
Ike died in 2020 at the age of 83.
The Popes’ younger son, Kraig, worked in the market for most of his childhood.
“On Saturday morning I’d go in early with my father,” he recalled. “The old timers would meet there, have coffee. My father had Krispy Kreme doughnuts delivered. It was fun, and gave me a lot of insight on life to hear all the old men talk.”
After he got out of the Army, Kraig Pope, now 60, said he considered going into the business, but could see that small stores were struggling. He works as a security manager for the federal government.
Developer J.S. Rashid also has indelible memories of Ike, and especially the little book the proprietor used to track accounts. But Rashid has not been in the store for years. Little markets like Ike’s are “being edged out,” he says.
Neither has Winifred Pope been there for a long time.
“I hope it can survive,” she says of the business that stands as her husband’s legacy, “because Ike was a Black man who wanted things to be good, and stay good, for the Grove. Sometimes you have to just hope and wish.”
This story was originally published in the Coconut Grove Spotlight, a WLRN News partner.
