Often called the most beautiful horse race track in the world, Miami's Hialeah Park has had a long and storied history. Famous for its setting, its prestigious races, the many famous horses that won there, and of course the flock of bright pink flamingos that nested in its infield, Hialeah Park was, and still is a legend. Opening for thoroughbred horse racing in 1925, Hialeah Park by now is almost one hundred years old. A faded grand dame that no longer holds thoroughbred racing, but stays alive as much as it can through its newer casino, Hialeah's track, grandstands, clubhouse, and paddock areas all still exist and could easily be brought back to their glory days. Hialeah really comes alive, however, in many vintage newsreels recorded there, some of which are still available online.
In April the owners of the Mai-Kai, the iconic and now-shuttered polynesian themed restaurant in Broward County, unveiled their grand plans to the City of Oakland Park and neighborhood residents for the property, including an enhanced entrance experience and banquet hall, along with necessary repairs to the roof and air conditioning systems, a new kitchen, and restoration of the main dining rooms. A part of the 65-year-old building's roof caved in back in October of 2020, leading to the closure of the Mai-Kai and questions as to the venue's future - a future that is increasingly looking to be in safe hands.
In this real estate market, prices keep rising and rising to a point where it's almost embarrassing to write about a property when in the back of your mind you keep thinking "you get THAT for THAT???" This is not one of those houses. Compared to some of the hovels on offer in Miami Beach for literally the exact same price, this rather stately and elegant home in South Coconut Grove doesn't feel like its price, a cool $4 million, is extravagantly out of step with what's on offer.
The 1980 roared in Miami. Not only was the city's image and identity transformed in ways both good and bad, mixing global glamour with global intrigue, but the city itself changed physically. In that decade Greater Miami saw a building boom, blending luxury condo towers with avant-garde architecture, new public amenities and institutions, and a flood of stylish, luxury hotels catering to different kinds of travelers than the old beachside hostelries of earlier.
When the exquisitely wealthy businesswoman and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht listed her magnificent and massive Miami estate for sale in January, spectacularly priced at $150 million, it was a news item significant enough to command splashy spreads on the covers of the Miami Herald and the Wall Street Journal's Mansion section. To put it mildly, it was a major, major news item, not just because it could set a new record for the most expensive residential sale in South Florida, but because of the size, prominence, and history of the property itself.
Acclaimed Miami-based architect Rene Gonzalez's Prairie Residence, completed in 2017 on a landlocked residential street in the heart of Miami Beach just off sunny and somewhat hostile Dade Boulevard, is one of his most extraordinary designs to date and a really masterful yet particularly unusual home. The 3,312-square-foot contemporary luxury residence was designed for its environment and its future environment, impacted by forces such as sea-level rise. Priced at a precise $15,151,000 apparently, the house has been on the market since last November, and, well, it's still here.
With just over one acre of land on South Bayshore Drive, the rambling estate of John T. Peacock, a member of Coconut Grove's founding Peacock family, this 111-year-old historic pile is on an unusually large piece of land for a property in the heart of the Grove. Overlooking Kennedy Park, and an old sheltered inlet that practically ends at its front gate, the listing is asking for a healthy $12.9 million.
Onda Residences, a high-end luxury condominium being developed by CMC Group and Morabito Properties, had its ceremonial groundbreaking today, as one of the few in-person real estate events that are finally starting to happen these days. The building, which features 41 residences beginning at $1.8 million a pop, is on the former site of the Bay Harbour Continental, a MiMo residential building that was a gem of midcentury flair and which preservationists fought, unsuccessfully, to preserve.
When you take a spectacular piece of early modernist architecture, such as this streamlined moderne house on Pine Tree Drive by important Miami Beach architect Igor Polevitzkty, and give it some bland contemporary renovations that are supposed to "improve" it while blending in with the existing architecture, the results often leave something to be desired.
When architectural critic and curator John Margolies took these photos in the early days of South Beach's art deco revival, from approximately 1980 to 1990, many thought it was a lost architectural cause, or perhaps not even worth the effort. But Margolies's photos document the raw beauty of South Beach's architecture at the time and are a stark comparison to what came later, as anybody who has seen what South Beach has become can immediately tell. These were the dark days of Miami Beach's art deco resurgence, but the light would soon come.
