Wynwood pushed artists out. A neighborhood arts complex wants to build them a home

Miami Herald

20-06-2025

Nearly 40 years ago, the fading working-class neighborhood of Wynwood landed its first cadre of artists when a group fleeing rising rents in Coconut Grove moved their studios into a ramshackle Art Deco-era former commercial bread factory in the shadow of Interstate 95.
Now, as the artists and galleries who helped turn Wynwood into Miami's hippest urban district all but disappear under a tsunami of redevelopment, the Bakehouse Art Complex remains a funky, thriving oasis of creativity.
But the people who run it want to do much more.
They have just unveiled an ambitious plan, years in the making, that would provide artists a permanent residential foothold in Wynwood — by building some 60 affordable apartments on the Bakehouse campus — as the nonprofit organization embarks on a long-range campaign to fully revamp and expand its studios and workshops and cement its influence in the neighborhood for decades to come.
There's a long way to go: The Bakehouse must now build support in political circles and the broader arts community, raise millions of dollars, sign on an affordable-housing developer to partner on the project, and, potentially, enlist Miami-Dade County's housing agency in a side plan to provide even more housing for the surrounding community.
But supporters say they believe the unusually far-reaching plan, developed with substantial community input, would allow the Bakehouse to extend its already deep ties to the surrounding neighborhood, where it's long served as an economic and cultural fulcrum, as it expands its longtime role as a pivotal hub for the visual arts and a launch pad for young Miami artists.
'We're going to have more for artists, and more for the community,' said Bakehouse executive director Cathy Leff. 'It's not just about Bakehouse. It's a real grassroots effort. It's about a community and Bakehouse serving the community.'
'We all had this epiphany'
The novel housing idea hit Bakehouse administrators as they began planning necessary repairs and renovations to the former industrial building, which turns 100 in 2026. They realized the center's artists were spending less time in their studios because most teach school or have day jobs, sometimes more than one, and commute to far-flung neighborhoods where they can afford to live amid Miami's skyrocketing housing costs.
'We were seeing that the artists weren't here during the day,' Leff said. 'We all had this epiphany — that we had the studios and this big piece of land, and we could do something with it.'
That germ of an idea led first to the creation of a new zoning plan to stimulate low-scale construction and preservation and renovation of housing in the neighborhood, the mostly residential and still largely un-gentrified section of Wynwood that lies north of Northwest 29th Street and was once the locus of Miami's Puerto Rican community. Bakehouse representative went door-to-door in the neighborhood to seek input on the plan, which received strong and enthusiastic support from residents and property owners.
Called the Wynwood Norte Neighborhood Conservation District and approved by the Miami commission in 2021, it also allows Bakehouse, zoned for civic uses, to add apartments and artistic businesses.
Then, thanks to grants from the Miami-based Knight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Bakehouse leaders spent the next four years drilling down on the new campus concept with Los Angeles architect and planner Michael Maltzan, well-known for his inventive approach to museum and cultural projects as well as residential buildings.
The result is an elaborate plan that would add eight stories of apartments for artists behind the Bakehouse's original 1926 industrial building, which would be fully renovated inside and out. A new wing would incorporate new studios, workshops and a suite of spaces for artists' creative businesses. The new wing and a soaring breezeway would frame a new public green space for Bakehouse and neighborhood use at the center of the roughly 2.5-acre property.
Because Leff, former director of the Wolfsonian-FIU museum in Miami Beach, and her team and board members don't stint on ambition, the plan also sketches out a suggested redevelopment scheme for an aging, low-density Miami-Dade County subsidized housing project that occupies most of the rest of the block.
The Maltzan design would replace it with a denser mid-rise building with 226 mixed-income apartments, a food market that the neighborhood now lacks, and an art education center for the community where Bakehouse artists could provide lessons and workshops.
The county, which has aggressively sought redevelopment of its aging and obsolete housing projects, did not request the proposal from Bakehouse. But Leff said it came out of conversations with residents and reflects their priorities and needs, and she hopes the county will take up the idea.
Leff casts the effort as a revitalization endeavor aimed at mitigating the worst effects of gentrification as it marches gradually north from the rapidly changing Wynwood arts district.
An 'anchor' for the neighborhood
So does Wilfred 'Will' Vasquez, a Bakehouse supporter who grew up two blocks away and now owns several residential properties in the neighborhood.
As a child, Vasquez, whose parents settled in Wynwood after emigrating from Central America in the 1960s, would ride his bike the two blocks to the bakery, then the headquarters of the American Bakeries Company, where he would pick up fresh loaves in exchange for a thermos of coffee brewed from beans roasted at a neighborhood plant. He nostalgically recalls the aromas of roasting coffee and baking bread mixing in the air as he pedaled.
As an adult, once Leff took the director's position at the Bakehouse and needed help with upkeep at the deteriorating building, Vasquez would volunteer his crews to make repairs free of charge. And when the center and a group of locals began planning the conservation district, Vasquez joined the nascent Wynwood Community Enhancement Association and became a leading supporter of the new zoning and the Bakehouse plan.
That's how important the center has been to the neighborhood's history and, now, to what supporters hope will be its resurgence, he said. The Maltzan plan accommodates historic preservation, the center's artistic and institutional ambitions, and the neighborhood's future, he said.
'It's a beautiful plan,' Vasquez said. 'This is something that is needed. I am happy they're keeping the original portions of the building, and the affordable housing for the artists — it's all win-win. I hope the county does come in. If you ask me, what's there now is wasted space. Those residents don't have to be permanently displaced, and they would come back to a much better situation.'
The plan, he says, dovetails with the changes already underway in Wynwood Norte, which after World War II served as the residential neighborhood for the garment and factory workers, mainly from Puerto Rico, who worked in the Wynwood industrial district to the south. As the industry faded in the 1960s and 1970s and the Puerto Rican residents were gradually replaced by Cubans and Central Americans, its identify as Little San Juan faded.
Today, Vasquez said, the neighborhood is a mix of elderly residents and young people from all over the hemisphere who are drawn by its relatively affordable older housing and Wynwood's hip international reputation.
At the same time, Wynwood Norte is seeing some of the fruits of the rezoning in the form of several low-scale, neighborhood-friendly workforce apartment buildings that are now under construction, said Miami attorney Steven Wernick, who helped steer that plan to approval.
'I think the Bakehouse has been an anchor for the neighborhood, and it can now become an even more integral part of the neighborhood and continue pulling people together,' Wernick, a partner at the Day Pitney firm, said. 'It's that kind of institution that's key to its present and will be central to what's to come in the future.'
Bakehouse revival
The Bakehouse has served as an artistic incubator since it opened in 1986, long before Miami had an arts public high school and college, or a real museum, or an Art Basel Miami Beach.
The bakery, which had employed 300 people and made the popular Merita bread, closed in 1978 after its parent company was sold. (Merita is now produced by Flowers Foods). The city helped a group of artists fleeing the Grove and its rising rents negotiate its purchase for $10 as a tax write-off for the company, Leff said.
The inside of the factory was partitioned into a warren of about 60 studios — the walls don't reach the ceilings — and over time wood and metal workshops were installed in un-air-conditioned ancillary buildings on the property. Thousands of Miami artists, including some of its most successful, have at some point had studio or shop space at the Bakehouse.
By the 2010s, however, it was struggling. Artists had discovered plenty of cheap industrial space for use as studios and even living space, in Wynwood. Half the studios at the Bakehouse were vacant, few artists were paying any rent, and the building was declared structurally deficient by the city.
Now that's all drastically changed. Artists were shoved out as the Wynwood arts district redevelopment drove prices up and knocked down the warehouses and industrial buildings they used.
Since Leff arrived in 2017, she has helped spearhead a Bakehouse revival. The building has undergone extensive repairs, has a new electrical system, a revamped roof and is close to obtaining recertification from the city. Studios are full and, as the city's arts scene has exploded, so has demand, to the point where many artists are now doubling up. Rent amounts depend on what artists can pay — some pay nothing — and grants and contributions help cover costs.
'It was obvious there was so much talent in the town and not enough spaces for them to work,' Leff said.
Just as importantly, Leff said, Bakehouse also provides its artists with a supportive community of peers. They employ one another as studio assistants for artistic projects, serve as mutual sounding boards and critics and develop long-lasting friendships.
'The mission is to get people in here and get them to evolve and then get them launched so they can come out with a sustainable artistic career,' said Philip Lique, an artist and sculptor with a studio at the Bakehouse who serves on staff as technology strategist and planner.
The center increasingly turned its attention to the long-neglected community around it when the COVID-19 pandemic hit as it was launching the planning effort. Its artists already provided art classes to students at Jose de Diego Middle School directly across the street, but now staff and artists began delivering baked goods from Wynwood's Zak the Baker — a reminder of the center's historical origin — to the homes where neighbors were in lockdown.
When Leff and her staff realized the neighborhood has poor WiFi signals from commercial providers, they bolstered the center's network and made it available to them.
They have also hired locals for staff positions, including the beloved property manager, Oscar Cortes, and a husband-and-wife gardening team, Julio Rodriguez and Emma Sierra. Sierra, who grew up in the neighborhood, and her husband are so dedicated to the Bakehouse that they constructed a landscape sculpture from layers of soil of different colors that a center artist drew up for an exhibit at Little River gallery.
Supporters acknowledge the Bakehouse plans, the product of years of hard work, may seem forbiddingly imposing, especially in Miami, where many a high-minded scheme has come to naught. But Vaszquez, who is 69 and jokes he hopes to live long enough to seem them come to fruition, said he is keeping faith.
'It hasn't been easy,' he said. 'But it will happen.'