Jeffrey Berkowitz, the Miami retail developer behind Dadeland Station, dies at 78

Jeffrey Berkowitz, the Miami retail developer behind the Dadeland Station and Fifth & Alton shopping centers who was also instrumental in securing a permanent home for the Miami Children’s Museum on Watson Island, died Saturday, April 25, at his home in Coral Gables. He was 78.

A graduate of the University of Miami law school, Berkowitz started a legal career in the 1970s. While helping a developer put together the contracts needed for a project, Berkowitz concluded he could probably do well trying to build things himself, according to his wife, Yolanda Berkowitz.

“He just became a dealmaker,” she said. “It was much more suited to his personality.”

A regular on Miami’s charity gala circuit, Berkowitz loved wearing a tuxedo, regularly set out solo at the wheel of his 47-foot sailboat, Daydream, and wrote a memoir while laid up in bed from a serious car accident suffered two years ago near the Berkowitzes’ summer home in Maine.

“He fought so hard,” Andrew Berkowitz said of his father’s final stay in the hospital for a fall he suffered while in frail health from the auto accident. “He never complained.”

One of Berkowitz’s most high-profile projects never got built. The planned 1,000-foot-tall Miami SkyRise tower on city-owned shoreline by Bayside Marketplace won approval by city voters in 2014 when first proposed, then sparked controversy and political drama when Berkowitz sought county funds to subsidize some of the infrastructure for a tower with rides and an observation deck designed to be a tourist attraction.

He eventually walked away from the subsidy request in 2016, then dropped the Skyrise plans altogether after the 2020 coronavirus pandemic upended tourism projections.

“He thought it would be transformative for Miami,” Yolanda Berkowitz said, adding that she put a SkyRise pin to the lapel of her husband’s suit before his burial. “His resiliency and steadfastness and refusal to be discouraged was exceptional.”

Family members said Berkowitz wrote his self-published book, “Reflections,” largely as a way for his grandchildren to know him better once he was gone. The book strung together stories he loved to tell again and again, including the time in the ‘80s when presidential candidate Gary Hart attended a party at Berkowitz’s house before heading out for an overnight trip to the Bahamas on a boat named Monkey Business.

Guests at Berkowitz’s funeral on Tuesday included childhood friends from Boston who would gather once a year for a holiday weekend reunion. The group named themselves the “Labor Day Loonies.”

Jeffrey Lee Berkowitz was born on Feb. 4, 1948, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Paul and Elinore Berkowitz. His family owned the Old Mr. Boston liquor company. After attending Deerfield Academy for high school, he earned a political science degree at Cornell University before heading south to Miami for law school.

He launched Berkowitz Development Group in the 1980s, and in the 1990s pioneered the idea of vertical retail by stacking big-box stores atop each other in the Dadeland Station shopping complex off of U.S. 1 near Kendall. “That was a unique concept of taking advantage of a smaller piece of property,” said Henry “Hank” Adorno, a Miami lawyer who was a longtime Berkowitz friend.

Berkowitz repeated the strategy in South Beach a decade later with the opening of the Fifth & Alton retail center on Fifth Street, creating the unofficial entrance to South Beach for drivers on the MacArthur Causeway. In all, Berkowitz developed about 2 million square feet of commercial real estate.

A prominent donor to national Democrats and a reliable donor at the local level, Berkowitz used his political connections and development know-how when the Miami Children’s Museum needed a new home in the 1990s. He helped secure a deal with the city of Miami for public land on Watson Island, encouraged leadership to pursue alternative revenue sources that included housing a charter school, and led the way through the local political hoops needed to get a digital billboard approved on museum property visible from the MacArthur.

“He was an incredible risk taker. He believed the institution could dream big,” said Deborah Spiegelman, chief executive of the museum, which Berkowitz helped found and where he served as board chair until his death. “When you say Children’s Museum in Miami, it’s synonymous with the name Jeff Berkowitz.”

He was active in other charities, particularly Voices for Children, which helps children in Florida’s foster-care system. Berkowitz also helped his wife’s work reducing the number of homeless pets through her Friends of Miami Animals Foundation. The couple had three dogs at home.

Along with his wife, Berkowitz is survived by a brother, Richard Berkowitz, and sister-in-law, Sandy Grossman; and Andrew and Michael Berkowitz, the two sons he had while married to Elaine Berkowitz. He is also survived by four grandchildren: Dylan, Jagger, Kaia and Alora; and nieces and nephews.

Both sons joined their father’s development firm in Coconut Grove. Michael, the company’s president, said his father kept a Hunter S. Thompson quote on his desk about the value of a full-throttle life that ends in a “puff of smoke” instead of living timidly and departing with a “well preserved body.”

“I believe that’s how he lived,” Michael Berkowitz said. “He didn’t leave anything on the field.”

This story was originally published April 30, 2026 at 12:37 PM.