Once a part of Tampa’s Central Avenue District and built as the Allen Temple A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in 1902, this building was in the heart of the African American community in 1926. By the 1930s, the Central Avenue District, known as The Scrub, had become the business center for many black businesses, including hotels, restaurants, and retail stores. There were hundreds of residential houses in the area as well. It prospered until the 1960s when Jim Crow laws legalizing racial segregation were abolished, people began to move away, and the neighborhood started to decay.

In 1967, Tampa’s biggest race riot occurred in the Central Avenue district following the shooting of an African American teenager by a white police officer. Buildings were burned, and businesses destroyed. By the 1970s, in the name of the Urban Renewal Program, almost all of the buildings in the area were demolished. A new type of renewal is happening today, and a new mixed-use large-scale development called Encore is being built. In 1990, Allen Temple moved to N. Lowe Street. Paradise Missionary Baptist Church took over the building in 1991, and its name still appears on the blue awning outside. It once housed a museum of Black history and art in its basement, but it is now permanently closed.  

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