Overtown’s Award-Winning Rainbow Village
Regional O’Neal, Rainbow Village (2020)
Overtown’s Award-Winning Rainbow Village
by Nadege Green
Rainbow Village, completed in 1970, offered a modest response to the mass displacement and disruption caused by Interstate 95’s annihilation of residential and commercial districts in one of Miami’s oldest Black communities, Overtown.
As with many Black neighborhoods across the United States, Overtown was the dumping ground for a massive highway project in the early 1960s.
When Rainbow Village’s 100 units rose above northwest twentieth street and third avenue, an invitation was made— of the thousands forcibly relocated from their homes, a tiny percentage would get top priority to return home to Overtown in this new construction. For the few that got in, it marked a rare, though deeply inadequate, opportunity of repair in a community otherwise fractured by racist policymakers.
Affordable housing developments at the time were typically cast in harsh box-like structures shaded in somber gray tones—the community called them “concrete monsters.
Rainbow Village was different, it was a jewel designed by famed modernist architect Alfred Browning Parker who is heralded as a leading figure in modernist residential architecture. He is best known for his subtropical single-family home designs found in South Florida’s historically white and affluent neighborhoods like Coconut Grove, Miami Shores, and Coral Gables—the Gables being where he built his personal waterfront estate.
Parker’s work in Overtown, on an all-Black public housing project, is hard to find in any of the retrospectives—locally or nationally—about his architectural imprint.
In Rainbow Village, Parker employed his nature-infused vernacular, building in harmony with the environment. Drawing from the townhouse style, he used modular dimensions to stack the form and flow of the exterior, while inside he accounted for South Florida’s heat, designing to capture the smooth passage of the southeast breeze.
In thinking about the substandard housing conditions Miami’s low-income tenants are typically relegated to and the depersonalized institutional feel of public housing, it was Parker’s idea to visually steep the interior of the living spaces in warmth and color—greens, yellows, purples and browns. Each apartment had an individualized color palette different from the one next to it. It is these arrays of color that gave Rainbow Village its name.
One year after its opening, in 1971 Rainbow Village won a gold medal design award from the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials.
In 2025, the award-winning Rainbow Village built by one of the premiere architects of his time is no longer standing, recently demolished to make room for a new development. All that remains are memories and an empty grassy lot where a community once flourished.
Given Miami’s history, we are left to ask, who will be welcomed back?
This essay by Nadege Green was commissioned as part of our collective memory initiative, which began in conversation with artist Reginald O’Neal and was embodied in the artist’s tribute to his former home, Remembering Rainbow Village, in historic Overtown.