The partial demolition of the adjacent Coconut Grove Playhouse paves the way for the $35 million garage and retail complex but legal and design delays leave construction schedule in question.
With the partial demolition of the Coconut Grove Playhouse plowing ahead – and the adjacent surface lot partially closed for staging – all eyes are on the Miami Parking Authority (MPA), the semi-autonomous city agency that has been promising a multilevel parking garage at the site for close to a decade.
“It’s very critical,” Coconut Grove Business Improvement District (BID) Executive Director Mark Burns told the Spotlight. “I think it’s a game changer, not only by adding more parking spaces but, also, the garage’s ground-floor retail will be activating an area that right now is almost a dead-end.”
Since taking the helm of the BID a year ago, Burns has looked for any signs of progress on the $35 million garage project.
“It got to the point of why don’t they just build the garage if nothing is being done with the playhouse,” Burns said. “I guess it wasn’t possible.”
Officials with both MPA and Miami-Dade County say ongoing legal challenges to the adjacent Playhouse demolition and reconstruction are not slowing down their construction schedule on the 300-space garage.
The actual start date, they say, is tied to the demolition of the playhouse auditorium – what they call Phase 1 of the overall Playhouse development – and to ironing out details on site and design plans.
The garage design, while mostly complete, is still undergoing minor tweaks. A contractor for the garage construction has not been selected.
“The goal is to complete Phase II of the project simultaneously,” Liliana Hernandez-Constenla, the marketing and public affairs officer with Miami-Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs told the Spotlight in an email.
“Phase II includes the renovation of the front building, the construction of the new theater and garage building, and all site improvements including open plazas, paseo, and pocket park.”
The four-level garage will also feature 33,500 square feet of offices wrapped around the front and rear facade, as well as a 4,700-square-foot restaurant space on the ground floor, according to a memorandum of understanding between the MPA and the county.
The MPA will be responsible for leasing the offices, the restaurant and 13,750 square feet of retail on the first floor of the portion of the Playhouse that the county is not tearing down.
The garage funding has been in place for some time, according to MPA spokesperson Margarita Delgado. The MPA is kicking in $12.1 million from the proceeds of the $16 million sale in 2015 of a 388-space public garage a few blocks north on Oak Avenue.
That garage, despite assurances to the contrary and the lingering consternation of some residents, was converted by its new owners – Coconut Grove-based development firm Terra Group – for office and retail use.
The Coconut Grove BID is contributing $2.3 million of the garage’s construction cost, and the remaining $20.4 million will be financed through the sale of municipal bonds, Delgado said.
When complete, the garage will boost inexpensive parking options in the Center Grove.
MPA charges between 50 cents and $1.75 per hour at its metered spaces and at the Dinner Key garage – far less than the area’s private parking-lot operators who’ve been criticized for charging exorbitant rates and, in some instances, hefty fines for nonpayment and other infractions.
In an interview with the Spotlight, Miami District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo, whose district includes Coconut Grove, said the garage is expected to take 18 to 24 months to complete after groundbreaking. “There are a lot of moving parts,” he added.
Since he took office in late 2023, business owners and residents have been very vocal about getting the Playhouse garage built, Pardo said.
“Parking in Coconut Grove is very much under-supplied and over-demanded,” he said. “We have been wanting this garage for many years.”
Because the front facade of the playhouse and some interior architectural elements will be incorporated into the new theater complex, demolition may take longer than expected, county officials say.
The playhouse abruptly closed in 2006 due to financial woes. Since then, its restoration – along with construction of the adjacent garage – have been tied up in legal limbo by a coalition of preservationists and local residents who oppose the county’s plan to reopen the playhouse as a smaller theater with 300 seats.
The original 1927 playhouse and its 1,100-seat auditorium was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.
A year later Miami-Dade, which leases the Playhouse property from the state of Florida, sued the City of Miami to overturn Mayor Francis Suarez’s veto of a city commission decision approving the playhouse redevelopment. The county judge ruled that Suarez’s veto should be nullified due to his undisclosed communications with project opponents.
Local activists have so far failed in their legal efforts to stop the demolition, including a case last year in which a panel of county judges overturned a decision by the Miami Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board that had denied the county’s request for a demolition waiver.
As usual, the public has been strategically deceived. Drawings leaked by disgruntled Arquitectonica employees show a multi-story mall, similar to CocoWalk, with only an embarrassing 124 seats in a tiny auditorium—smaller than our neighborhood elementary, middle and high school auditoriums. A far cry from our internationally renowned, prestigious, legendary historically designated 1,100-seat LORT theater, aka “the Broadway of the South.” There will also be a tiny practice room with a mere 85 seats.
The real project will include six-stories of commercial retail, offices and condos that we don’t need— the opposite of what we voted to spend our tax dollars on. This is why Arquitectonica has not presented their plans to the Planning and Zoning or Historic and Environmental Preservation Boards, as required by law to obtain approvals and a Certificate of Appropriateness. This is also why there has not been a public master planning process, as there was with our waterfront.
They don’t want you to know that CocoWalk 2.0 on the Playhouse parcel is not actually a theater project at all. It’s designed to serve as an amenity to the new hotel that will sit behind the project on up-zoned historically designated Charles Avenue. Once again the County is beholden to their development partners rather than their constituents whom they are paid well to serve.
While the battle over the playhouse itself has been going on since 2005 (when the Historic and Environmental Preservation Board of which I was chair voted 8-0 to preserve “the entire exterior” of the structure), there has been near unanimous agreement about getting a new parking garage on the bulk of the state-owned site between the playhouse and the backside of Commodore Plaza. It’s missing one small corner where the old “Bicycle Shop” used to be. An extremely key corner as it has turned out. And it may not be too late to add it back in.
As I said at HEPB this Tuesday, everyone needs to remember that for over 50 years until just recently the playhouse property was segregated from the immediately joining Black residential neighborhood by a 6-foot barbed wire fence along the entire perimeter — all while use of barbed wired was prohibited in the city zoning code! The barbed wire is down but the county plan has access to the garage from Main Highway and also to/from Charles, William and Thomas Avenues, residential streets in what is now designated as “Little Bahamas.”
How can we now make some lemonade from such historically bitter fruit? The County could buy the vacant bicycle shop lot and add it back onto the playhouse property as it used to be. That would allow the “in and out” to the parking garage to be entirely from Main Highway while still allowing access to the existing private parking garages fronting Commodore Plaza. Then there’d be only limited access from Charles Avenue, and none at all from William and Thomas Avenues.
After all the decades of in-fighting and vitriol, just this one addition to the county plan would partially right an historic wrong while making the entire playhouse project better. It’s not too late.
The 2nd photo in your Garage story caught my eye. That photo was of a model done maybe a dozen years ago, before either the Arquitectonica Plan (“County Plan”) or the Heisenbottle Plan (“Save the Playhouse” Plan). The model maker was a distinguished architect named Nick Gelpi who, I believe, had been hired by Mike Eidson, Esq.
The interesting thing is that the model shows the vacant lot formerly known as the Bicycle Building (see my earlier letter to the Spotlight) as already having been acquired by the County. To my knowledge, this is not the case. And it’s crucial that it should be, because without it, the alley that will run the whole length of the proposed new garage will be too narrow to allow two-way in/out traffic, which means that Playhouse traffic will have to access William and Thomas Avenues. Those are 100% residential streets in a 100% single-family residential neighborhood.
I’m also wondering what the County was thinking by sending to the Spotlight a privately owned photo that doesn’t even accurately reflect what it is planning for the Parking Authority to construct. It’s why we have the HEP Board requesting the County Plan come back for review. The Mayor, the City Commission and City Manager should all insist that the Board’s request is honored, for the good of all concerned.
Regarding the proposed playhouse garage, since the Spotlight published my previous two comments above, I’ve been sent yet another “view” of what may or may not actually get built. This one shows the Bicycle Building (now a vacant lot) as still standing at the Main Highway end of the alley behind Commodore Plaza.
The alley is named “Thomas Avenue,” I’m guessing because it’s been “extended” via a dog leg from the current Thomas Avenue, that is now entirely for residential use, not for Uber and delivery trucks or tourist buses.
It also shows a large two-way entrance into the garage from Main Highway. But there are no “stacking” lanes which are required even of a Starbucks. What’s going to happen when there’s a performance at even a smaller theater? Has the Fire Marshall had a look at this scheme?
While some of these questions are “zoning” and “public works” issues, the overall plan for the redevelopment of the state-owned nationally-designated historic playhouse property should properly be reviewed in its final format by the Historic and Environmental Preservation Board (HEPB), comprised almost entirely of experienced architects. HEPB has requested to take a close look at whatever this final “county plan” is now, before construction gets under way.
This needs to happen even if the city risks being cited for “contempt of court” as HEPB was told this past week. It’s the HEP Board’s legitimate request that’s being treated with contempt.
The city manager must insist on that review, or we all may be very sorry he didn’t.
Thank you for at least mentioning that the parking problem was created by the MPA selling the existing public parking garage to Terra Group for their own private use.
Also, let’s be honest. This is not a theater project. This is a large, multi-use development using public funds made available by a bond that the voters passed in order to restore the Playhouse. So they’re preserving the front building, slapping the smallest theater they can get in there and accessing the land for their own profit. Let’s call a spade a spade, please.