What is Factory Town?
Old industrial site promises a hip vibe for Hialeah
Wend your way through the ramshackle old warehouse district on Hialeah’s eastern edge, past the wrecked cars in the street awaiting repair, and you’ll arrive at a nondescript iron gate that slides open to reveal what seems, at first befuddling glance, a surreal ruined landscape.
It’s as if the Roman Forum was made up of industrial detritus and transplanted to east Hialeah, or something out of a dreamlike painting by Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico: A lofty, rescued kapok tree, sprouting its first leaves after being hauled by truck and crane from a south Miami-Dade property where it had been slated for destruction, stands like an impassive totem at the center of an industrial yard. Steel beams support streaked, bare concrete walls, open to the sky and garlanded by graffiti-style murals by Hialeah artists.
In a concrete shed with shattered glass windows and part of the roof missing, a hulking, well-used compressor sits like a sculpture on exhibition, which is what it will be once the space is turned into the Machine Bar. Piles of debris and salvaged Dade County pine beams from the partial demolition of crumbling warehouses lie scattered everywhere. An open path lined with tall, freshly transplanted royal palms leads to a vast open space with a miniature man-made cypress swamp at one end, and a small grove of mature, rescued native trees arrayed along another concrete enclosure.
Towering clouds roll across the enormous blue sky overhead. Periodically, the whole place shakes as a commuter train rushes by on its tracks just a few feet behind the back wall of the six-acre property.
Only a small sign high up on the front wall outside, so unobtrusive you might have missed it, provides a clue to what this place is: “Factory Town,” it reads, the name outlined in festive light bulbs.
It’s a little hard to explain Factory Town. It’s a ragged, unshorn spot, a former mattress factory so expansive it had streets connecting a
half-dozen buildings, the earliest dating to the 1940s.
And it’s now in the process of becoming something completely different — a permanent, ever-evolving creative and entertainment district just possibly big and robust enough to redefine the aging industrial corridor around it, and maybe even Hialeah itself.
At least that’s the outsize ambition laid out by developer Avra Jain and the city of Hialeah, which has embraced her still-evolving plan to turn the former factory’s six fractured acres into the cornerstone of a new, utterly un-Hialeah thing — a hip, youthful district with outdoor music, art, cool restaurants, bars and places to live.
It’s a tall order, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Jain. In an unconventional two-decade career in Miami development, Jain has shown an unusual knack for reinventing broken-down old places redolent of history and architectural zest that no one else would touch.
She’s best known for rescuing the jazzy, iconic Vagabond Motel on Biscayne Boulevard and helping remake the Miami Modern historic district that surrounds it by renovating a half-dozen other historic mid-20th century motels and converting them to other uses, like offices and cafes. Once a haunt for prostitutes and the street drug trade, the corridor is today a vibrant strip of restaurants, shops and offices in historic and new buildings alike that draws people from across Miami.
NO BLUEPRINT FOR REDEVELOPMENT
Factory Town, to be sure, is a different animal, self-contained and hemmed in by working warehouses and active industrial businesses. But city officials, who created a special zoning district to allow live outdoor entertainment on the site, think it can provide sufficient critical mass to draw crowds of young people and new investment to the neighborhood, a long-overlooked corner of Hialeah that happens to sit geographically at the heart of Miami-Dade. The city’s eastern boundary line is just outside the gate, running down the middle of Northwest 37th Avenue.
There is no blueprint, no master plan for Factory Town.
But think DJs and electronic dance music, bands, art installations, artists’ studios, cafes and bars, inexpensive working space for food startups, a spirits distillery, an ecological garden sprouting amid Hialeah’s concrete jungle. All are already on the table or in the works, backed by deep-pocketed investors and the seasoned music promoters behind Club Space and the III Points festival. There also could soon be a boutique hotel and an outdoor wellness spa. Ideas will spring up as they move forward, Jain and her partners say.
The buzz is already building. Since Jain and her partners quietly took over the property last year, after paying $10.5 million for it, Factory Town has, with minimal promotion, hosted thousands of people for limited music events. The events comprised a Halloween bash and several nights of music, food and exhibits of NFTs, the art world’s hottest craze, during Art Basel week in early December. Among the reported visitors during the latter: Tesla CEO and world’s richest person Elon Musk.
On March 26, Factory Town will hold perhaps its most high-profile date. The 24-hour Get Lost electronic music fest, previously held in other locations during its 15year history, will set up shop at the venue with a roster loaded with star DJs. It’s part of Miami Music Week, the umbrella for a series of electronic, hip-hop and other pop music events centered
‘‘ IT’S ABOUT SAVING THE RIGHT THINGS AND SAVING THE CONTEXT. BECAUSE IF WE LOSE THE CONTEXT, WE LOSE THE HERITAGE. Developer Avra Jain
around the three-day Ultra festival, which is returning to downtown Miami after a COVID-19 pandemic absence and years of battles over noise with local residents that now have been settled.
Unlike the dynamic in Wynwood, another industrial district turned entertainment zone, where warehouses are rapidly giving way to sleek new apartment buildings, Jain
intends to retain much of the raw, rundown magic of distressed concrete and industrial verve that defines Factory Town.
The walls and materials and the warehouses on the site that remain sound enough to be saved and repurposed, she said, have much to tell about the history of Hialeah and the people who made it.
Factory Town’s regeneration as a center for entertainment encapsulates Hialeah’s evolution from early suburb and tourism attraction to industrial, working-class city and magnet for Cuban refugees and immigrants, Jain and her partners say. And they’ve told the story in a digital, illustrated 35-page history of Hialeah and the mattress factory.
Without that concrete history visitors can touch and experience, she said, Factory Town would lose what sets it apart.
“We’re going to sort of let things organically happen. We wanted to save the look and feel of it. We’re trying to keep everything we can keep and have that juxtaposition of old and new, which I love,” Jain said. “Adaptive reuse is not easy. It’s much easier to just knock down. But that defeats the purpose.
“It’s about saving the right things and saving the context. Because if we lose the context, we lose the heritage. When people first walked in here, it was like, ‘Where am I?’ But we’re not Wynwood. We’re Hialeah.”
MUSIC AND ART WON’T BE DISPLACED
Given an off-the-beaten-path location and the size of Factory Town, Jain said, it’s also a place where music and art won’t get pushed out by upscale new development, as occurred in Wynwood and other gentrifying, resurgent neighborhoods — along with the buildings and landmarks that are too often erased in the process, wiping out swaths of Miami’s history.
In fact, the original impetus behind Factory Town arose from the need to find new venues for loud, outdoor music events that Miami has become famed for. Outdoor electronic dance music festivals and live music are getting pushed out of Miami Beach and even Wynwood and restricted sharply in downtown Miami, as their residential populations grow and people want a quiet night’s sleep.
“Where can we be in Miami where we can still make some noise?” Jain asked. “The same people who make neighborhoods are the people who get displaced out of those neighborhoods. It’s culture and entertainment that put Miami on the map. Losing that ability to have outdoor entertainment events would be a huge loss to the city.”
During Art Basel week, town officials in Miami Springs two miles away say booming bass emanating from Factory Town rattled windows and prompted dozens of noise complaints to local police. The town filed a lawsuit against Factory Town but withdrew it after Jain and her musical partners partners set up open-air sound systems as they would for live events, tested the result at several locations in the Springs and repositioned and recalibrated speakers to make sure no one in the town will be disturbed in the future. The tests prompted no complaints, Jain said.
When Jain first brought them to the Factory Town property, two of her musical partners said, they recognized the potential right away. David Sinopoli, one of three partners running III Points and Club Space and managing musical events at Factory Town, said the place and Jain’s vision reminded him of the earliest days of Wynwood’s resurgence.
“You felt you were at the beginning of something,” Sinopoli said. “Factory Town is super special. We saw a lot of aesthetic power in the distressed walls, the broken windows. When we saw this big metal door on wheels in one of the warehouse buildings, we thought, ‘Wow.’ Other venues pay to put these in. This is the real thing.”
A second musical partner, Coloma Kaboomsky — the name used professionally by Jose Coloma Cano — noted the site feels like another world, even though it’s just a short ride by car, Uber or transit — Tri-Rail and Metrorail stations are nearby — from Miami.
From a business standpoint, he and Sinopoli said, it offers both a convenient location and the flexibility to help fill gaps in the number and size of venues for music and entertainment venues across greater Miami as the city continues to grow exponentially — especially those that can accommodate events for 1,500 people or 7,000 to
10,000 people.
“It’s not in Miami, but it’s as close as you can get to Miami,” Kaboomsky said. “So it speaks to the growth of Miami.”
Sinopoli and Kaboomsky, whose third partner is Davide Danese, say they initially expect to hold six to seven music events at Factory Town every year while other plans for it gel.
“Avra and us, we think we’re pretty aligned,” Sinopoli said. “She works as hard as we do, as hard as anyone I’ve ever known. It’s going to take some time. We like things to progress naturally. We need to establish the bones of it first.”
NEW LIFE AT DORMANT SITE
Those bones, for now, are pretty bare. Stages and sound systems must be brought in and installed for every event. Jain just got water service, power and working bathrooms restored. Two structurally unstable warehouses have been taken down, and only some walls and striking steel skeletons or bits of factory mechanisms and machinery left in place. Cargo containers were brought in and modified to serve food and drinks. Tons of trash and debris have been removed.
Jain is also reintroducing the flora that once grew plentifully in the area, a flooded prairie drained and reclaimed from the Everglades by Hialeah’s developers, aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss and cattleman James Bright.
She has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to transport and replant some 50 royal palms, oaks and other species of mature trees rescued by her arborist, Ian Wogan of Tree Resources, from development sites around
South Florida. Wogan designed, dug and planted a miniature cypress dome that emulates the tree islands of the Big Cypress swamp. He used another row of native trees to create a bioswale that collects and absorbs runoff water, which is then purified as it filters through limestone bedrock into the Floridan aquifer below.
Jain said she’s also in talks to bring in arts nonprofits to provide working and exhibition space for artists, a craft spirits distiller looking to expand, and food startups in need of inexpensive space. That’s something she said Factory Town can amply provide at rents far more favorable for small and creative entrepreneurs than Wynwood or Little River can offer.
All that would fit in existing warehouse space. Next would come new construction, ideally a hotel and an indoor music venue, maybe more office space if demand warrants. She said key financial backers, including wealthy investor and entrepreneur Chris Burch, who helped launch the Tory Burch fashion label, are all in. She said she couldn’t provide a budget because there isn’t one.
“There is no lid on this. This is not a spreadsheet development,” Jain said. “I look at this as an opportunity. You never know what you’re going to be when you grow up.”
MATTRESS FACTORY SITE A TOUGH SELL
When she first came across the property, though, it was a tough sell to find partners willing to invest. The Dixie Bedding mattress factory, started at 4800 NW 37th Ave. in 1946 by Harold Beck, was once the largest in the Southeast. It employed 200 people and provided cots and bedding to American soldiers in World War II and the Vietnam War. It kept growing through the 1970s, when its newest, hardiest structures were built. But the business declined as manufacturing moved offshore.
By the time it ceased operations and was put up for sale, some of the factory buildings were on the verge of collapse. Mountains of trash had piled up. And the place seemed so out of the way that even some prominent developers and investors with experience in the revitalization of Wynwood and other urban districts didn’t get what Jain saw in it, she said.
But Burch did. As a young man, he bought and renovated a warehouse in an old mill town outside Philadelphia for his first business, an apparel company. He also backed designer Alan Faena’s plan to convert an abandoned warehouse on Buenos Aires’ desolate docklands into a luxury hotel, helping turn Puerto Madero into one of the city’s hottest districts. And with another partner he turned a rustic surfers’ lodge on an Indonesian island into one of the best hotels in the world, the luxurious but laid-back Nihi.
Shortly after he was introduced to Jain by a mutual friend, Burch said, he toured the site, saw just what she did in the place, and agreed to back Factory
Town and her vision for it.
“You could just tell she’s full of creation and vigor and passion and integrity and hard work,” Burch said. “She understands budgets and collaboration. I looked at that Factory Town and thought that could be the start of something very unusual. I can feel the energy of it, the way it’s constructed, the people and the location. I don’t know of another place that’s quite like it.
“When you walk into Factory Town, it feels like you’re taking a bit of a journey. When you walk through those gates and half the buildings are half torn down, you are going through a piece of Hialeah’s history and you feel those walls.”
SUPPORT FROM HIALEAH LEADERS
Jain said support from city planning and elected officials in Hialeah was also critical. For the city, Factory Town has become an integral piece in a broader strategy, years in the making, to create new urban districts that mix living, work and recreation around a pair of transit stations, one a Tri-Rail stop and another a combined Metrorail and Tri-Rail station, incorporating the rising new Leah Arts District in between.
Newly elected Mayor Esteban “Steve” Bovo, who campaigned in part on a promise to bring in new development and retain the city’s young people, seized on Factory Town as a golden opportunity and eagerly backed the site’s special zoning. So did then-councilman Oscar de la Rosa, Bovo’s stepson, who said his peers in Hialeah desperately want places like Factory Town.
“We don’t have an entertainment district, anywhere where young people can gather and go on a weekend,” said de la Rosa, who stepped down from the council to avoid potential conflicts of interest arising from his family relationship with Bovo. “This is our new downtown Hialeah. It’s what we aspire to.”
Already, he said, the momentum created by Factory Town has brought “tons” of inquiries for space in the neighborhood by restaurant and bar operators from Wynwood and other hot neighborhoods where rents, costs and competition are rising fast.
“In 24 months, you will see new bars and venues in this area,” de la Rosa predicted. “You will see an evolution of new residential buildings, new office buildings.”
Jain said she’s already seen the interest, suggesting she has already fielded at least one offer for the Factory Town property, at a significant premium over what her group paid. But she said neither she nor her like-minded partners are interested in selling. They’re all in it for as long as it takes, she said.
Jain acknowledges that the task she’s taken on in Factory Town may strike some as “crazy.” But she said she’s not much daunted by it, and that’s thanks to the diverse and high-powered cast of backers and collaborators she’s managed to assemble for the project.
“When I first brought people here, they said, ‘Who’s going to come here?’ I’ve developed the confidence to take on this risk, but it takes partners. I stretch the canvas, and I let others do the painting.”
She paused. At 60, and a high point in her realestate career, Jain said, she can’t imagine doing anything else.
“You know, this is so much fun,” she said with a laugh. “This is something I have to do.”