Starting with the Vagabond, here are developer, preservationist Avra Jain’s greatest hits
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Hialeah gets hip
Buoyed by developers such as Arva Jain, who is converting warehouses into an entertainment venue, Hialeah is becoming a place to see and be seen.
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Developer Avra Jain and her Vagabond Group have established a high-profile reputation in Miami by working small: preserving and revitalizing overlooked but historically and architecturally resonant buildings in the city’s oldest neighborhoods.
Her mark is especially notable in the Miami Modern historic district that runs along Biscayne Boulevard in the city’s Upper East Side, once a haunt for prostitution and street drug trade. She helped transform the district into one of Miami’s hottest strips by reviving and adapting half a dozen kitschy-classic, neon-soaked 1950s motels in which few others saw value. Now in perhaps her most ambitious project, she’s redeveloping a former mattress factory in Hialeah into Factory Town, a live music entertainment and arts venue.
Vagabond Group has, among other projects, also undertaken conversions of a handful of older buildings into affordable housing in Little Haiti and historically Black Overtown.
Some of Jain’s greatest hits are:
* The Vagabond Motel (1953). The crown jewel of the MiMo district and Jain’s portfolio, the Vagabond brought her into the public eye. The jazzy motel, designed by architect Robert Swartburg, also responsible for South Beach’s iconic Delano Hotel, had been closed for years after a failed renovation attempt when Jain bought it for $1.9 million in 2012. After a multimillion-dollar gut rehabilitation, she reopened the Vagabond in 2014 as a hip boutique hotel that draws locals as well as tourists.
The project set the template for Jain’s successive MiMo district reclamation projects. It was the first historic preservation project in the city to use a program allowing the sale of “air rights” by owners of historically designated properties, who can’t build up to the height otherwise allowed by zoning for the property. The rights are then bought by developers in Edgewater and other high-rise districts to add “bonus” height over what’s permitted by basic zoning in those areas.
* The South Pacific Motel (1953) is known for its much-photographed, zig-zag “leaning” stone facade. Jain converted the motel into office space. In a fit of wit, she stressed the property’s new working use by flipping over the “M” in its historic neon signs, turning it into a “W” to spell “Wotel.” Next door, she preserved two wings of a modest period motel, also for use as office space, then added a curving, standalone new building for Starbucks in the middle of what had been a parking lot.
* The Miami River Inn (1908) can lay claim to being the city’s oldest surviving hostelry. Designated by the city in 1986 as the South River Drive Historic District, the inn is a collection of six wood-frame homes and four small masonry apartment buildings in east Little Havana, originally an early Miami suburb known as Riverside, that were turned into a bed-and-breakfast by a group led by preservationist Sallye Jude in the 1980s. The wood-frame homes had served as rooming houses for early Miami settlers.
Jain bought and renovated the inn in 2015, adding what she said is Miami’s first permanent, permitted bar housed in a cargo container, and winning an award for historic preservation from Dade Heritage Trust in 2017. The inn operates as a Selina hotel.
* 16 Corner and Superior Apartments are mid-century buildings that Jain converted into “high-grade” affordable housing using financial incentives from Miami’s Omni Community Redevelopment Agency and Miami-Dade County. 16 Corner consists of five “concrete monster” apartment buildings in Overtown that were renovated without displacing existing tenants, while the Miami Modern-style Superior apartments in Little Haiti was originally a courtyard motel.
* 225 Midtown, also known as the Anatomy building for the high-end gym that occupies its first floor, is a three-story 1962 shoe warehouse in a Modernist industrial style that Jain converted into loft-like prime office space in 2018. The top floor, with a new rooftop terrace, will become a boutique hotel. The building is now also home to the Ford Models agency’s Miami office and the Miami Ad School.
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