Goldman Properties, often credited with revitalizing Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, said it’s now turning its sights on “Wynwood 2.0” — a slew of projects in the coming months for the Miami neighborhood, including breaking ground on an eight-story car garage and an expansion of the public art project Wynwood Walls.
“Wynwood is an extraordinary community,” said Goldman Properties CEO Jessica Goldman Srebnick on Friday, during a “Champions of Business” lunch panel organized by the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce. “It’s what we love — to see thriving neighborhoods come from something hopeless.”
While the neighborhood is still in its infancy, Goldman’s focus right now is the next phase of development she told the audience at the St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort.
Wynwood Garden, an extension of Wynwood Walls that will include large-scale art installations, will open in time for Art Basel.
Shortly afterwards, a 430-car garage with retail and office space is scheduled to break ground on Northwest 3rd Avenue between 26th and 27th Streets in December, Goldman Srebnick told The Real Deal.
“You have to dig down and discover the DNA of a neighborhood,” Goldman Srebnick told attendees during the panel. “In Wynwood, it’s street art.”
Also on the horizon: a mixed-use office, retail, residential and hotel project on Northwest 2nd Avenue between 27th and 28th Streets.
Goldman Properties is one of the largest landowners in the neighborhood, with investments that were started by the late Tony Goldman, Jessica’s father. Following his success in New York’s SoHo and Wall Street neighborhoods, Jessica Goldman Srebnick acknowledged that these days it’s hard to accomplish what her father was able to do, buying, for example, one property a month for 18 months on Miami Beach.
“People watch where we go,” Goldman Srebnick said. “It’s harder to stay under the radar and get a critical mass of real estate”.
Now, you have to be more creative, use stealth, and just move faster, she said.
Goldman Srebnick, who spoke alongside filmmaker Billy Corben, fashion designer Rene Ruiz and chef Ralph Pagano, originally studied fashion. After five years as an associate fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, she told her father she would work for him on a one-year contract.
A year turned into 18, many of those sharing a desk with her father, who passed away in 2012.
She described working alongside her father as “the greatest experience” of her life.
“I feel really lucky that I went to the Tony Goldman School of Business,” she said.
Goldman Srebnick told TRD she wants Goldman Properties to be an “intensely creative” business that isn’t just about neighborhood development, but also focuses on architecture, large scale art projects as well as neighborhood building.
The mother of three boys, Goldman Srebnick considers her morning ritual spending 15 minutes perusing artists on Instagram her “morning cup of coffee.” She said she hope she inherited some amazing things from her parents. Among them, that artists are “the focal points of fabulous neighborhoods.”