Note: This interview with Jessica Goldman Srebnick, in which she talks lovingly about her father, the legendary Tony Goldman, took place several days before he sadly passed away. Our sympathies are with Jessica and the entire Goldman family.
Jessica Goldman Srebnick is having a less-than-perfect music day. Excited about a new wireless sound system that allows her to play her favorite iTunes songs—little ditties by Bruno Mars, David Guetta and Maroon 5—from any device in her lushly appointed Miami Beach home, she’s trying hard to show it off to her guests. She glides a finger across her iPad, picks a song and perks her head up to listen. Nothing. She runs over to the kitchen wall, pushes a button on a panel that controls speakers throughout the house and...nothing. She heads upstairs to her home office and tries to press play from her desktop computer. Nada. “Ah, technology,” she finally says with a defeated laugh. “Sometimes it can make you look really silly.”
Perhaps, but not even a temperamental, highfalutin music system can unsettle the poised and polished likes of Goldman Srebnick. She is, after all, about as close as we get to royalty in Miami, a bona fide real estate princess. Managing partner and heiress to one of South Florida’s most successful empires, Goldman Properties, she is a creative force behind the transformation of the Wynwood arts district, from gritty neighborhood to cultural epicenter. “We go into neighborhoods when there is no interest, no hope, when it’s dilapidated and dirty and unsafe,” she says, explaining her day job at the real estate company her father, Tony Goldman, launched more than four decades ago. It’s the same company that revitalized New York’s Soho in the 1970s, South Beach’s Ocean Drive in the 1980s and Philadelphia’s Center City in the 1990s. “We identify potential and opportunity. We buy real estate and start to do things to effectuate change. We open restaurants, hotels, bring in really creative, artistic tenants. We create community.”
It is inspiring work, she says, but when she’s home Goldman Srebnick, 42, is focused on forging different kinds of connections—of the more familial kind. A mother to three young boys and wife to Scott, a criminal defense attorney, she’s adamant about making time to spend with family and downright vigilant about what happens around her dinner table (“There are no electronics. There’s no watching television,” she says. “There’s time for that later.”) She invited INDULGE to spend the day with her in her beautiful, bright kitchen, which she calls “the nucleus of our home.”
Was the kitchen different when you first bought this house?
The kitchen was pretty much this way back then. But after a few years of living here we expanded it and we added the breakfast banquette. It was the best thing we did. We use it everyday. We have our breakfasts and dinners there. Even though we both work very hard, my husband and I make it a point to be home and have family dinner five nights out of the week. It’s our time to be with our children and sit down as a family and talk about each other’s day and what’s happening in the world. And we do it at that banquette. There are no electronics. There’s no watching television. But a lot else happens at that table. We do homework. It’s where we start our day and often its where we end it. Life happens around that table.
