Factory town miami music week1/18/2024 Once a haunt for prostitutes and the street drug trade, the corridor is today a vibrant strip of restaurants, shops and offices in historic and new buildings alike that draws people from across Miami.įactory Town, to be sure, is a different animal, self-contained and hemmed in by working warehouses and active industrial businesses. She’s best known for rescuing the jazzy, iconic Vagabond Motel on Biscayne Boulevard and helping remake the Miami Modern historic district that surrounds it by renovating a half-dozen other historic mid-20th century motels and converting them to other uses, like offices and cafes. In an unconventional two-decade career in Miami development, Jain has shown an unusual knack for reinventing broken-down old places redolent of history and architectural zest that no one else would touch. It’s a tall order, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Jain. An open path lined with tall, freshly transplanted royal palms leads to a vast open space with a miniature man-made cypress swamp at one end, and a small grove of mature, rescued native trees arrayed along another concrete enclosure.Īt least that’s the outsize ambition laid out by developer Avra Jain and the city of Hialeah, which has embraced her still-evolving plan to turn the former factory’s six fractured acres into the cornerstone of a new, utterly un-Hialeah thing - a hip, youthful district with outdoor music, art, cool restaurants, bars and places to live. Piles of debris and salvaged Dade County pine beams from the partial demolition of crumbling warehouses lie scattered everywhere. In a concrete shed with shattered glass windows and part of the roof missing, a hulking, well-used compressor sits like a sculpture on exhibition, which is what it will be once the space is turned into the Machine Bar. Steel beams support streaked, bare concrete walls, open to the sky and garlanded by graffiti-style murals by Hialeah artists. It’s as if the Roman Forum was made up of industrial detritus and transplanted to east Hialeah, or something out of a dreamlike painting by Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico: A lofty, rescued kapok tree, sprouting its first leaves after being hauled by truck and crane from a south Miami-Dade property where it had been slated for destruction, stands like an impassive totem at the center of an industrial yard. Wend your way through the ramshackle old warehouse district on Hialeah’s eastern edge, past the wrecked cars in the street awaiting repair, and you’ll arrive at a nondescript iron gate that slides open to reveal what seems, at first befuddling glance, a surreal ruined landscape.
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