Boulevard 57 Cancels Condo Sales, Keeps Retail, Might Swing a Trader Joe’s
July 11, 2016 by Lucas Lechuga
Well, there goes one of the good ones. The Miami real estate boom of 2011-ish to 2016 must definitely really be over now that it's started taking with it class acts such as Boulevard 57, a well-designed, contextual, and high quality building that was planned on Biscayne Boulevard and 57th Street. According to Hector Torres, chief operating officer of Unitas Development Group, who talked to The Real Deal, residential unit sales have been called off. Not according the Torres, however, who when asked by TRD said only that everything's for sale at the right price, the entire site is being marketed for sale at $26 million. Real Deal heard that from "sources," which probably just means a sales agent who is pissed they don't have anything to sell there anymore.
On the positive side, the large site in the Upper Eastside might not have to sit fallow for years again, with deteriorating relics of a canceled condo project, because the ground-level retail is still on. After Kubik, planned for that spot during the last market boom, was shelved, a crane suspending a lit up (and eventually burned out) cube sat forlorn there for years. It probably got taken out of its misery by a hurricane or something. Thanks Wilma.
Torres said the retail portion of the project is moving forward and might even get ten or twenty thousand square feet larger. Lyle Chariff, who is marketing the retail, totally name dropped Trader Joe's as a potential, or at least hoped for tenant, although the grammar is technically a bit vague on whether they are actually talking to them. They've had "interest from Trader Joe's and Publix-type tenants" Chariff said. A courteous comma would have really cleared things up here, people.
The years of drama at this site (don't even get us started on all the shit that went down when they pulled the plug on Kubik), just makes you wish some shortsighted bonehead had never demolished the beautiful old Northeast Miami Women's Club's Mediterranean Revival clubhouse to make it all happen. Read this excerpt about it from a Soyka Restaurant press packet:
Fun Fact: Garden Room is also meeting spot for the Northeast Miami Woman’s Club. It features an historic awning initially used by the organization in its hay day. Soyka purchased its main headquarters in the late 1990’s but insisted the group still host its meetings in the Garden Room, which they do on the third Thursday of every month between September and June.
sean- I saw hay day and wondered if it were harvest time on a farm in its former life-see heyday instead!