A cricket ball carries over a boundary rope on a turf pitch within sight of State Road 7, and a few hundred people who grew up watching the West Indies on grainy television in Kingston and May Pen rise out of their seats at once. The Jamaicans in Lauderhill, Florida have built something unusual in America: a suburb of 75,000 where their flag rises over city hall every August, where the mayor was born in Manchester parish, and where a county park was given a stadium no other American city thought to want.
They call it Jamaica Hill. Nobody voted on the name. It simply stuck.
The Place
Lauderhill occupies 8.57 square miles of north-central Broward County, wedged between Tamarac, Sunrise, Plantation, Lauderdale Lakes and the western edge of Fort Lauderdale. It is flat and laid out on the grid logic of 1960s Florida, with State Road 7, known locally as 441, running down its eastern flank.
The city was incorporated on 20 June 1959. The developer Herbert Sadkin wanted to call it Sunnydale, until the columnist William Safire talked him out of it: Sunnydale sounded like a neighbourhood in Brooklyn, and there were probably no dales in Lauderdale either.
What Sadkin built was mid-century Florida in its purest form: garden apartments, low-rise condominiums, a golf club, and in 1966 an enclosed shopping centre with central air conditioning, the first of its kind in the southeastern United States. It is now a majority Black, heavily Caribbean city of 74,482 residents. The turnover took one generation.
How It Became Jamaican
The Retirement Suburb, 1959 to 1980
Early Lauderhill sold sunshine to retired Northeasterners, most of them white, many of them Jewish, arriving from New York and New Jersey. In 1980 the city was still 82.75 per cent non-Hispanic white, and the golf course was the social centre of gravity.
That golf course was Inverrary, and in 1972 it acquired a famous resident. Jackie Gleason moved from Miami-Dade to a house on the course, lending his name to the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic, a PGA Tour event that drew Jack Nicklaus, Bob Hope and President Gerald Ford to a town most Americans could not place on a map. By the time his association with it ended after 1980, something else was under way two thousand kilometres south.
Why They Left Jamaica
The modern Jamaican exodus to South Florida is usually dated to 1974 and 1975. Jamaica’s economy was contracting, political violence between the two main parties was escalating, and the middle class in particular began to calculate that its future lay elsewhere.
Prime Minister Michael Manley gave the migration its unofficial slogan in 1974, when he told Jamaicans who disliked his policies that there were five daily Air Jamaica flights to Miami. Thousands took the advice literally. Miami was ninety minutes from Kingston and full of work. The first wave settled in Miami-Dade, in Cutler Ridge, Perrine and West Kendall. That is where the story begins. It is not where it stayed.
The Move North, 1980s
Through the 1980s, Jamaican families in Miami-Dade did what every settled immigrant group eventually does: they looked north for cheaper square footage and better schools. Broward County offered exactly that. Its condominium stock, built for retirees now dying or moving into care, was suddenly available at prices a nurse and a truck driver could carry between them.
By the mid-1980s the commerce had shifted with them. The Lauderhill Mall, built for retirees buying housecoats at J. Byron and Woolco, filled with independent traders selling what the new residents wanted.
In January 1987, a group led by the radio pioneer Ramon “Ray” Hooper put South Florida’s first 24-hour Caribbean programming on the air at WAVS 1170 AM. Until then a region with hundreds of thousands of West Indians had no broadcaster of its own.
Critical Mass, 1990 to 2010
By the 2000 census, roughly 33.65 per cent of Lauderhill’s residents had been born outside the United States, 24.63 per cent in the Caribbean, and 14.73 per cent of the entire population, one resident in seven, in Jamaica alone.
That gave Lauderhill the highest concentration of Jamaican ancestry of any city in the United States, at 20.11 per cent. It has not given up the title since. The share of non-Hispanic white residents fell from 82.75 per cent in 1980 to 9.17 per cent in 2020, while Black residents rose from 12.74 per cent to 75.61 per cent.
The Cricket Ground
In 2007, Broward County finished something no other American local government had attempted. Central Broward Regional Park opened on 9 November on 110 acres off 441, at a cost of 70 million dollars, with a turf cricket pitch inside a stadium at its centre.
The then mayor of Lauderhill, Richard Kaplan, had pushed hard for it. “Cricket is going to put us on the map,” he said. “Some day Lauderhill is going to be known as the cricket capital of the United States.”
It became the first ground in the country certified by the International Cricket Council for full internationals, staging its first in 2010, a Twenty20 series between New Zealand and Sri Lanka. In September 2019 it hosted the United States men’s first One Day International series and their first ODI victory, and in June 2024 it was a venue of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup.
For a Jamaican household in Lauderhill the significance is simple. Cricket was the civic religion of the anglophone Caribbean, and their children could now watch it ten minutes from home.
Taking the City
Political representation followed slowly, and then all at once. South Florida now counts more than 28 elected officials of Jamaican descent, and Lauderhill has more Jamaican-born office holders than any city in the region.
On 5 November 2024, Denise D. Grant, born in Manchester parish in central Jamaica, was elected mayor, the first Black woman to hold the office. She had been a commissioner since 2018 and vice mayor from 2020, and she succeeded Ken Thurston.
She sits with commissioners who share the accent. John T. Hodgson, educated at William Knibb Memorial High School in Trelawny, served 13 years in the Jamaica Constabulary Force, two of them protecting the Prime Minister, before becoming a morning broadcaster on WAVS 1170 and then a commissioner. Melissa P. Dunn, also Jamaican-born, holds Seat 2.
The city raises the black, green and gold on 6 August, and in 2026 Marcia Griffiths and Beenie Man headlined the 64th Independence anniversary at the Lauderhill Performing Arts Center.
The Landmarks
Central Broward Park and Broward County Stadium, 3700 NW 11th Place. The 110-acre county park that made Lauderhill a name in world cricket, opened in November 2007 to serve seven central Broward cities. It also hosts the Junior Carnival and official J’ouvert of the Miami-Broward Carnival.
Lauderhill Mall, 1267 NW 40th Avenue. Opened in 1966 on 40 acres along State Road 7, the first enclosed air-conditioned mall in the southeastern United States. It is now a Caribbean bazaar of independent traders, and its faded McCrory ghost sign is one of the last traces of the town Sadkin thought he was building.
Lauderhill Performing Arts Center, 3800 NW 11th Place. A 1,106-seat theatre that opened on 20 January 2016, beside the park. It hosts the city’s Jamaican Independence celebration each August, where reggae royalty collects keys to the city: Sizzla in 2025, Beenie Man in 2026.
Juici Patties, 5419 North University Drive. The American flagship of a chain Jukie Chin started in May Pen, Clarendon, in 1980, after baking his first patties in his mother’s kitchen at sixteen. It reached more than 60 Jamaican shops before crossing to Florida, and the Lauderhill store performed well enough to argue for a national rollout.
Jean’s Jamaican Restaurant and Bakery, 8777 NW 50th Street. A neighbourhood kitchen on the western side dealing in oxtail, curry chicken, jerk and hard dough bread. The menu assumes you know what escovitch is, which is a fair test of how Jamaican a Florida suburb has become.
Inverrary, Inverrary Boulevard. The golf-and-condominium district Jackie Gleason made famous after moving there in 1972, host to 15 PGA and LPGA tournaments. The country club closed for good in 2020, while the 1970s towers around it, built for retirees, now house Caribbean families.
Where They Came From
Lauderhill’s Jamaicans are not drawn from one parish. The city’s public life alone spans the island: Denise Grant from Manchester, John Hodgson schooled in Trelawny, and behind them the two great sending regions of the migration, Kingston and St Andrew in the southeast and Clarendon in the middle.
The Kingston contingent is the oldest and most political, the people who left through the crisis years of the mid-1970s. Many were teachers, nurses, police officers and civil servants, professionals with transferable credentials who could rebuild a career in Florida in years rather than decades.
The rural parishes came later and more often through family sponsorship, one relative at a time, the mechanism by which a village in Clarendon ends up with a second address in Broward County. Juici Patties reaching Lauderhill from May Pen is that route in commercial form.
Florida holds at least 336,000 people of the Jamaican diaspora by Migration Policy Institute estimates, second only to New York, and Jamaicans are Broward County’s single largest immigrant group.
Lauderhill Today
Roughly 27 per cent of Lauderhill’s residents are Jamaican, more than 20,000 people, and the city government does not treat that as a demographic footnote. “When Lauderhill celebrates Jamaica,” Denise Grant has said, “we celebrate who we are.”
It is a working-class city, not an affluent one, and should not be confused with the wealthier Broward suburbs further west. Housing is cheap by South Florida standards, which is precisely why the community formed here, and Florida’s rising insurance and property costs press hardest on this kind of place.
The cricket ground has had a mixed commercial life too. As early as 2013 the city was writing to the ICC about converting it into a multi-sport facility for want of marquee fixtures. Yet it is still the only certified ground of its kind in the country, and West Indies internationals keep returning.
What has held is the thing hardest to build and easiest to underestimate: a place where a Jamaican accent in a council chamber is unremarkable. Second-generation Lauderhill children are American in a way their parents are not, and the questions here are the ordinary ones of any settled diaspora. It is the same conversation happening among Jamaicans in Flatbush, Brooklyn and Jamaicans in Hartford, Connecticut, and the one that shaped Cubans in Doral and Nicaraguans in Sweetwater one county south.
South Florida absorbed a great many arrivals in fifty years, from the Haitians of Little Haiti to the South Africans of Naples. Not many ended up running the city.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Lauderhill called Jamaica Hill?
The nickname comes from the sheer density of Jamaicans in Lauderhill, Florida. Around 27 per cent of residents are Jamaican, and the city has produced more Jamaican-born elected officials than anywhere else in South Florida, including the current mayor.
How many Jamaicans live in Lauderhill?
Roughly 20,000, about 27 per cent of a city of 75,000. At the 2000 census, 14.73 per cent of residents had been born in Jamaica, and the city held the highest percentage of Jamaican ancestry in the United States at 20.11 per cent.
When did Jamaicans start moving to Lauderhill?
Mainly in the 1980s. The migration to South Florida began around 1974 and settled first in Miami-Dade. Families then moved north into Broward through the 1980s and 1990s for cheaper housing, taking over condominium stock built for retirees.
Is there a cricket stadium in Lauderhill?
Yes. Central Broward Park and Broward County Stadium at 3700 NW 11th Place opened in November 2007, the first ground in the United States certified by the International Cricket Council for full internationals. It hosted the country’s first men’s ODI series in 2019 and 2024 T20 World Cup matches.
Who is the mayor of Lauderhill?
Denise D. Grant, born in Manchester parish, elected on 5 November 2024 as the city’s first Black woman mayor. She serves alongside Jamaican-born commissioners John T. Hodgson and Melissa P. Dunn, which is unremarkable only by the standards of Jamaicans in Lauderhill, Florida.
Where can you eat Jamaican food in Lauderhill?
Along and around State Road 7 and University Drive. Juici Patties at 5419 North University Drive and Jean’s Jamaican Restaurant and Bakery at 8777 NW 50th Street serve patties, jerk, oxtail and curry chicken, and the Lauderhill Mall holds independent Caribbean traders.
Further reading: the city’s own history pages and the Wikipedia entry for Lauderhill, Florida carry the census detail behind it.
If your family’s story passed through Lauderhill, or any of the places Jamaicans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Clarendon to a condominium off 441, to wherever you are now.