Overtown, Miami
Miami's longest mural, painted on a corporate fence in the shadow of Brickell.
The fourth wall is in Miami, and it is twelve hundred feet long. It wraps the perimeter fence of an electric-utility property at 60 NW 17th Street, in the neighborhood once called the Harlem of the South. Overtown in the early twentieth century was the cultural and economic center of Black Miami — the Lyric Theater, the Booker T. Washington and Mary Elizabeth Hotels, and the rooms where Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nat King Cole stayed and played when the segregated Miami Beach hotels turned them away. At its peak the neighborhood housed roughly forty thousand people.
In the 1960s the federal government ran Interstate 95 directly through it. The highway demolished the commercial corridor and forced out more than twelve thousand residents, nearly all of them Black. The Lyric remained. The freeway has been overhead ever since.
The mural is the Overtown Hope Mural, painted in 2021 by Kyle Holbrook and the Moving Lives of Kids Community Mural Project. It depicts Michelle Obama, Serena Williams, Maya Angelou, Madam C.J. Walker, Harriet Tubman, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Colin Kaepernick, Kobe and Gianna Bryant — and, in a section painted in the orange of gun-violence awareness, local Overtown residents killed by gun violence, names that never made the national news. The towers behind it belong to Brickell, the most expensive submarket in the city.
Miami’s longest mural. Painted on a corporate fence. Five years and counting.
This is one of four neighborhoods in Painted Claims →.
— Eve Moss
Map & Parcel. Field Notes. June 2026.
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