Wynwood: The Art That Displaced a Neighborhood

Wynwood was a Puerto Rican working-class neighborhood before it was an art destination. The community had been there since the nineteen forties and fifties, when manufacturing jobs drew Puerto Rican families north of downtown Miami into a neighborhood of small houses and warehouse blocks. By the early two thousands, the manufacturing had left and the warehouses stood empty. The Puerto Rican community remained.

In two thousand nine, a New York developer named Tony Goldman began acquiring warehouse buildings along Northwest Second Avenue and commissioning murals on their blank exterior walls. He brought in internationally recognized artists, including Shepard Fairey and Futura Two Thousand, and the outdoor collection he assembled became the Wynwood Walls, the most visited outdoor art installation in the United States. The transformation was rapid and total. Within a decade, the neighborhood had restaurants with two-hour waits, boutique hotels with rooftop pools, and rents that had increased beyond anything the original residents could afford. The Puerto Rican community that had occupied Wynwood for generations was largely gone. The murals remained.

Wynwood is now both celebrated and studied, because it executed the classic formula of arts-led gentrification more visibly and more quickly than almost any urban neighborhood in American history. The art was real. The artists were real. The investment was real. So was the displacement. The five million annual visitors who come to see the walls are seeing one chapter of a story that started earlier and continues somewhere else, in whichever Miami neighborhood absorbed the families who could no longer afford the zip code that made them famous.