Wynwood: how Miami's garment district became its art district, from the Rubells to the Wynwood Walls

The best place to start in Wynwood is a building most visitors walk past. At 561 NW 32nd Street stands an Art Deco industrial bakery built in 1926. American Bakeries left it empty in 1977; in 1985 a group of artists and patrons bought it, with help from city and county development grants, so that Miami's artists would own their studios and could not be priced out of them (Bakehouse). Forty years later the Bakehouse Art Complex still owns the building, with about 60 artist studios, and this year it bought the lot next door to build affordable housing for them (Bakehouse).

Owning the building turned out to be the lesson of Wynwood. Cheap industrial space drew garment makers, then collectors and artists, then the money that priced out both. Told building by building, the story is the clearest account of how Miami became an art city, and of what that cost the people who made it one.

The facts below come from the institutions' own pages, city records and contemporary reporting, checked on October 24, 2026. Where sources disagree, as they often do about Wynwood's early years, we say so.

Before the art: Wyndwood Park and the garment district

The neighbourhood began as a residential subdivision north of downtown Miami. Its developers ran a contest for the name, and in December 1917 the winner was announced: "Wyndwood", later shortened (NBC 6). By the 1920s the houses were giving way to industry: the bakery, a Coca-Cola plant and warehouses, with the beginnings of a garment trade along NW Fifth Avenue.

By the 1950s that trade was Miami's garment district, a strip of cutting rooms and sewing floors roughly between 23rd and 29th Streets. Miami was then among the country's largest clothing producers, and the workforce, as the documentary Miami Schmatta records, came from Cuba after 1961 and from across Latin America and the Caribbean (PBS). Sources disagree on how big Wynwood's district was, so we will not rank it.

Little San Juan, and the hard years

For decades Wynwood was also the center of Miami's Puerto Rican community, known as Little San Juan or simply El Barrio. Families arrived from the 1940s, and by 1970 Miami-Dade counted more than 17,000 Puerto Ricans (NBC 6). In 1974 the neighbourhood park was renamed for the baseball player Roberto Clemente, and it still carries his name (Miami Today).

From the late 1970s, as the garment work moved offshore, the American Planning Association writes, unemployment, poverty and drug trafficking turned Wynwood into a place of disinvestment (APA). On December 3, 1990, hours after six Miami officers were cleared over the death of a Puerto Rican man, Wynwood saw five hours of looting and arson; a resident told reporters, "We've been completely ignored" (Deseret News). The neighbourhood was poor, but it was not empty, a point worth keeping in mind when the art arrives.

The first arrivals: warehouses for art, 1993 to 2007

After Hurricane Andrew in 1993, Don and Mera Rubell bought a former Drug Enforcement Administration warehouse on NW 29th Street to show their collection, for what they later called the price of a one-bedroom apartment in New York. The street was then shoe factories and wholesale outlets, and people told them no one would ever go to Wynwood (Cultured). In 1998 three artists, Elizabeth Withstandley, Westen Charles and COOPER, opened Locust Projects in a converted warehouse, among the first artist-run spaces in the area (Locust Projects). The collector Martin Z. Margulies opened his warehouse in 1999 (Margulies Collection), and in January 2000 Brook Dorsch opened one of the first commercial galleries, living in the space; he remembers it was "filled with junk and debris" when he first saw it (Biscayne Times).

Art Basel's arrival on Miami Beach in December 2002 turned a handful of pioneers into a district. Within a few years the galleries had agreed to hold their openings on the same night each month, the second Saturday, and the Art Walk began; sources give four different years for the first one. By Art Basel week in 2005, artnet counted more than 60 museum and gallery spaces on Wynwood's hand-out map, including Emmanuel Perrotin's first Miami gallery and an outpost of MOCA North Miami in a Goldman warehouse, and called it the fastest growing art neighbourhood in the country. One dealer predicted it would be "like SoHo was and Chelsea is" (artnet). Fredric Snitzer moved in, and in 2007 Nina Johnson opened Gallery Diet as a tenant of Goldman Properties.

Tony Goldman and the Wynwood Walls

Tony Goldman had done this twice before. In 1978 he began buying and restoring buildings in SoHo, and from 1985 he bought a property a month for 18 months on Ocean Drive, at the start of South Beach's revival (Bisnow). In 2004 he and his son Joey began buying Wynwood warehouses, most of them then leased to shoe wholesalers. "Artists go to places that have an urban edge," he told The New York Times, and he planned the neighbourhood, as he put it, from the street up (The New York Times, via the author's archive). Within a few years his company owned more than two dozen buildings.

His idea for their windowless walls was to paint them. In 2009, with the curator Jeffrey Deitch, he opened the Wynwood Walls for Art Basel week, across six buildings, with murals by Shepard Fairey, Os Gemeos, Barry McGee, Swoon and Aiko, and work by Kenny Scharf and Futura (Arrested Motion; Obey Giant). The Walls became the face of the neighbourhood. Goldman died in 2012, aged 68, and his daughter Jessica Goldman Srebnick has run the Walls since; today they show more than 130 artists from over 30 countries (Wynwood Walls).

The bill comes due: 2013 to 2016

Success changed Wynwood fast. In 2013 the city created the Wynwood Business Improvement District, voted by property owners; the galleries, as tenants, had no vote (City of Miami). In September 2015 the city approved a new zoning plan for the neighbourhood that raised the allowed density to 150 homes an acre (City of Miami). In August 2016 Wynwood became the first place in the continental United States with local Zika transmission, and visitors were warned away for seven weeks (PBS NewsHour).

Rents rose with the restaurants and bars, and the galleries began to leave. Locust Projects had gone to the Design District in 2009. In 2014 Fredric Snitzer moved downtown and David Castillo to Miami Beach; in 2015 Gallery Diet bought a former church on NW 2nd Avenue, between Little Haiti and Little River, and Dorsch moved north too. A gallerist told NetJets magazine in 2016 that Wynwood was "turning into Wynwood Retail District", and the same piece put the count at more than 70 galleries at the peak and about 25 by then (NetJets). Bernice Steinbaum, who closed her gallery in 2014, said the neighbourhood was "becoming a tourist trap, a social scene" (Biscayne Times).

The last chapter is being written now. On September 29, 2026, the developer Moishe Mana, who had assembled much of Wynwood's land since 2009, sold about 30 acres to Citadel's Ken Griffin for $1.1 billion (Fox Business). The next day Griffin announced a $2 billion gift for a Carnegie Mellon campus in Wynwood, with building to start in 2027 (AP).

Wynwood now: what is left to see

If you see one thing in Wynwood this Art Week, make it the Margulies, the one great collection still in the district. Then pay your respects at Bakehouse, the building that started it, and walk the murals in daylight. Most of the serious galleries are now a short drive north, in Little River and Little Haiti, or west in Allapattah beside the Rubell Museum.

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse

A 50,000-square-foot warehouse of photography, video, installation and large-scale sculpture, hung with very little fuss. It reopens for the season on November 4, 2026, with kinetic sculpture by Yuko Mohri, light installations and a survey of realism, on view to April 3, 2027 (Margulies Collection). Hours and the full story are in our private collections guide.

• Address: 591 NW 27th Street, Miami, FL 33127.
• Hours: not yet posted for 2026–27. In Art Week 2025 it opened Monday to Saturday, 9 am to 5 pm.
• Admission: it has long been $10, with proceeds to the Lotus House shelter; confirm on reopening.

Bakehouse Art Complex

Studios for about 60 artists in the 1926 bakery, with exhibitions in its galleries. For Art Week it holds Baker's Brunch: Open Studios + Cafecito on Thursday, December 3, from 9 am to noon, which it calls an annual tradition: the chance to meet the artists in their studios (Bakehouse).

• Address: 561 NW 32nd Street, Miami, FL 33127.
• Hours: daily, 12 to 5 pm.

Museum of Graffiti

Founded in 2019 by the graffiti artist and historian Alan Ket and the lawyer Allison Freidin, it opened in Art Basel week that year and calls itself the world's first museum dedicated to graffiti (NBC 6). Its ORIGINS show includes paintings by the UGA collective from 1973 (Museum of Graffiti).

• Address: 276 NW 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127.
• Hours: Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, 11 am to 6 pm; Friday to Sunday, 11 am to 7 pm; closed Tuesday.

The Wynwood Walls

The murals that made the neighbourhood famous, in an enclosed block of walls and gardens, with more painted on the streets around them. This year ten new murals made for the video game Grand Theft Auto VI, by artists including FAILE, Ron English, Tristan Eaton and Lady Aiko, are up until January 1, 2027, and since October Miami-Dade residents get in free, a program running through 2028 (Hoodline).

• Address: 2516 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL 33127.
• Hours: daily, 10:30 am to 6:30 pm; last entry 30 minutes before closing (Wynwood Walls).
• Tickets: $12 adults, $10 seniors, $5 ages 13 to 17, free for children 12 and under; free for Miami-Dade residents with ID (Wynwood Walls).

Wynwood in Art Week

The galleries that made Wynwood's name now hold their Art Week openings elsewhere, but the district still has a full day. A Wynwood morning that works: Bakehouse's open studios on Thursday, December 3, then the Margulies, then lunch and the Walls in the afternoon light, with the Museum of Graffiti a block away. The Art Walk is on second Saturdays, which in December falls on the 12th, after the week.

For the collections that started it all, see Miami's private collections during Art Week; for how the fair came to Miami in the first place, how Art Basel came to Miami Beach; for the week as a whole, what Miami Art Week is.