After long and successful careers in New York, Zach Berk and Marlene Krauss settle into a new life in Coconut Grove.
Editor’s Note: As part of a series we’re calling Village People, the Spotlight is profiling a mix of interesting people and personalities who live and work in Coconut Grove. If you know of someone we should profile, drop us a note at [email protected]
Florida had the highest migration increase of all states in 2022, with a net population growth of 249,064 people. In 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the majority of those moving to Florida (91,201 individuals) came from New York. Many New Yorkers have relocated to Coconut Grove. The new towers in the South Bayshore Drive corridor, opening this year or planned for the near future, are likely to attract more.
Zach Berk and Marlene Krauss have deep roots in New York, but they now live on the 19th floor of a sleek South Bayshore tower with panoramic views of Dinner Key Marina and Biscayne Bay. They gave up their New York City residence three years ago after several decades of managing a series of successful New York venture capital funds. Since arriving in Coconut Grove, they haven’t looked back.
Coincidentally, Berk and Krauss, both now in their seventies, started out in the Bronx. Though they have a lot more than a Bronx childhood in common, they didn’t meet until several decades later.
In New York, Berk attended Walden, a progressive private school on the Upper West Side. Unlike many New Yorkers, he yearned for new adventures out west and left New York for the University of Wisconsin. During the late 1960s, he became a student leader, organizing marches and be-ins. He married, had three children, and pursued his dream of moving westward by getting a degree in optometry at Pacific University, in Forest Grove, Oregon.
Eventually, his optometry practice led him back to Wisconsin, specifically the town of Dodgeville, near Madison. There he became a community leader and an advocate of historic preservation and economic development. One of his outstanding achievements at that time, he says, was helping to convince the Lands’ End company to relocate to Dodgeville and hire several thousand unemployed women.
In 1945, Krauss’s father, an émigré from Hungary, teamed up with other Hungarian immigrants to buy the Chelsea Hotel, on West 23rd Street. Built as a haven for artists and writers, headquarters to generations of sometimes disreputable celebrities, the Chelsea needed a lot of work.
“They were people of modest means who depended on the hotel for their living,” says Krauss. “My father was the carpenter-electrician holding this massive mess together for decades.” Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the Chelsea was bought by new owners in 2011 and has since been extensively refurbished.
Krauss attended the Bronx High School of Science, still New York’s premiere elite public high school. From there she went to Cornell, where she studied hard, did well, and joined a circle of bright women. Some of them still meet as a book club.
The next step for Krauss was into a world of crusading feminism, though that wasn’t what she intended. All she wanted to do was go to Harvard Business School. “Most of the students were in their twenties, and they came to registration with their wives and kids,” she recalls. “I came with my parents. There were 11 women out of 700 men. It was the best thing I ever did, but the discrimination was horrible. It was mostly from the professors. One of them called me in after class and said, ‘What are you doing here, you’re taking the place of a man who wants to earn a living for his family.’ I said, ‘I want to earn a living for my family if I ever get out of here.’”
Even with an MBA, getting a job was a challenge for Krauss. Finally, in 1968, she found one at “a small, scrappy investment bank at half the salary the men were getting.” In 1970, with a salary of $8,000, she made $100,000 in commissions.
At this time, Krauss became friendly with a group of New York women that included Brenda Feigen and Gloria Steinem, the founders of Ms. Magazine and activists in the Women’s Action Alliance. Krauss led the WAA during the 1970s and wrote articles for Ms. Magazine.
Then she decided that businesses weren’t doing enough for people generally. She gained admission to Harvard Medical School, where she specialized in ophthalmology and retinal surgery. After practicing for several years, first in Boston and then in New York at Mt. Sinai Hospital and New York Hospital, Krauss realized that her background in the investment community and medicine was unique. “In health care investing, nobody had an M.D. or a Ph.D. at the time,” she says. “Now everybody who invests in health care does.”
It was at this time that Berk and Krauss started working together. Eventually, in 1991, they created KBL Healthcare Ventures, a venture capital firm dedicated to investing in early stage and emerging growth healthcare companies.
The two met at a family funeral in New York City in 1982. Berk was living in Wisconsin, but by then was divorced. Krauss was doing her residency at Mt. Sinai. At the funeral, after being introduced to Krauss by some cousins, Berk was holding a door for others to pass through, and Krauss said, as she walked by, “Does anybody need a ride to the cemetery?” Berk recalls thinking, “I’m the only one here, so she’s talking to me even though she wasn’t looking at me. I ran up to her and said, ‘Yes, I need a ride.’” The bonding began on the way to the cemetery.
Berk and Krauss worked together in the venture capital business for 35 years. Their most recent funds closed two years ago. Once married, they had three children of their own, first a girl and then twins. Never one to be hemmed in by convention, Krauss had her first child at 44. The twins arrived when she was 53.
With their venture funds winding down, Berk and Krauss, like many other New Yorkers, started thinking about a move to Florida as a way to lower their tax burden. They bought a one-way ticket to Florida to explore. At one point, while driving south on I-95 after lunch in Boca Raton, they received a call from a friend who lived in Coconut Grove. They joined her for a cocktail party that day and stayed in a Coconut Grove hotel that also offers apartments for sale. First they rented an apartment in the building. Eventually they bought their spacious 19th-floor condo. The original plan was to divide their time between Miami and New York.
“We were renting at first, and we started walking around and we said, ‘This is an interesting place.’ We fell in love with the Grove. It’s one of the best places in the world to live,” says Berk. It didn’t take long for them to find a group of like-minded people, including one who had recently retired as the director of Massachusetts General Hospital. Then, three years ago, they made the move permanent.
“My eldest daughter got upset,” says Berk. “She said, ‘It’s so important at your age to travel and have your mind stimulated by different experiences.’ I said, ‘Look, half the time I can’t find my phone in my apartment, let alone when I’m traveling.’”
Then Krauss was diagnosed with macular degeneration. “It’s ironic and sad because I was a retina surgeon,” she says. “I was seeing a doctor at Bascom Palmer, and I said, ‘I really want to help other people with this condition.’ He said, ‘You should go to Miami Lighthouse for the Blind and work there.’ So, that’s what I’m doing now. Some of it’s in development, and some of it is strategy and programs. This disease doesn’t usually end up in total blindness. But your vision can get pretty bad. I want to know what it’s like to have visual impairment so I can give back because I’m an ophthalmologist. I can also learn about myself, what my life is going to be like.”
Berk is also exploring new frontiers. For many years he has been deeply interested in personal, spiritual, and physical development related to diet, health, and mindfulness. “The main focus of my life has been peacemaking,” he says, starting with his involvement in the peace movement at the University of Wisconsin.
Working with programmers and developers, he has created an online program that promotes self-awareness and spiritual and personal fulfillment.
Spearheading this new career is a series of personal development and meditation activities available through HappCo (https://www.happco.com/), a company he founded in 2024 that offers a guided meditation app and Berk’s companion book, “Embracing Your Higher Self: A Practical Guide to Enlightenment.” Berk also leads meditation groups in his South Bayshore Drive living room.
“If you really want to change the world in positive ways, which is what I’m focused on,” Berk says, “you need to figure out how best to do it. I’ve had an incredible life of amazing experiences, and I’m trying to crystallize all those experiences and provide the best tools that I can to make positive change occur. I’d like to live another 25 years and stay very productive. I think I can.”
these are the type of people that have come down and ruined Coconut Grove for locals born and raised here. do us all a favor and go back to NY.
Marlene and Zack, I am so glad you found Coconut Grove. Our neighborhood is richer having two community-minded people living here. It’s a wonderful area rich in history and natural beauty. BTW, I used to live in Forest Grove. It’s nice to know there might be an FG to CG pipeline in the making. 😉