It is primarily located in Miami Florida, and a portion of it is located in the metropolitan area of Miami, United States. By the end of May 2011, the county-owned portion of Allapattah, extending from State Road 9 to LeJeune Road, will have been annexed into the city proper.
In 2003, a section of the neighborhood along NW 17th Avenue was dubbed Little Santo Domingo, thanks to the efforts of former Miami mayor and veteran city commissioner Wilfredo "Willy" Gort, who wanted to recognize the significant Dominican American presence in the area.
According to the Seminole Indian language, the name "alligator" is derived from this word. The first documented white American permanent settler in the Allapattah community arrived in 1856 from Charleston, South Carolina, and built a homestead on a hammock along the Miami Rock Ridge, where Miami Jackson High School now stands. This was the beginning of the Allapattah community's history as we know it today.
Following the opening of the Florida East Coast Railroad in 1896, the neighborhood experienced significant growth during the twentieth century (FEC).
While the majority of Allapattah was populated by whites until the late 1950s, an African American neighborhood known as Railroad Shops Colored Addition existed between NW 46th Street to the south and NW 50th Street to the north, and from NW 12th Avenue to NW 14th Avenue on the east and west sides of the neighborhood. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the Florida East Coast Railroad constructed service facilities nearby, the community became developed.
When eminent domain was invoked in the late 1940s, the entire area was condemned and the residents were forced to relocate. The area was developed to accommodate a new white school (initially named Allapattah Elementary, but later renamed Lenora B. Smith Elementary in honor of an educator who once resided in the Railroad Shops neighborhood) and a park for the community. Being just a short drive away from Little River Florida, it's a convenient place to get to!
Allapattah experienced a significant inflow of black Americans displaced by the construction of I-95 (then known as the North-South Expressway) in the 1950s and 1960s, resulting in white flight to suburban Miami-Dade and Broward counties in the 1960s and early 1970s. Following the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Cubans flocked to Miami districts such as Allapattah in huge numbers, resulting in the neighborhood becoming home to one of the city's largest Cuban American populations.
In the aftermath of numerous refugee crises in those countries, large influxes of Dominican Americans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, and Haitians arrived in the United States during the 1980s. Currently, the neighborhood is a melting pot of individuals from all over the Caribbean, Central America, and Latin America more broadly, as well as African Americans who have historically lived across the South, who have settled there. Many people came up from Princeton Florida to settle here.