Developer created a luxury mall from a POW camp

Stanley Whitman’s vision led to the Bal Harbour Shops.

S t a n l e y Whit man, t h e visionary who built an openair mall on the site of a former German World War II prisoner-of-war camp in Bal Harbour when nearly everyone told him he was crazy, lived to see his grand idea become one of the country’s most successful luxury shopping centers.

More than 60 years after his folly led to the Bal Harbour Shops, Whitman also lived long enough to see his family’s long fight for a $400 million expansion win approval by the Village Council last week.

Whitman died Wednesday morning at his Miami Shores home, the same three-bedroom house he built in 1949. He was 98.

“He was the Walt Disney of the shopping center industry,” said his longtime marketing director and friend Cheryl Stephenson. “He saw this salty parcel of 16 acres of land and envisioned magic and made it happen.”

Whitman’s powers of persuasion proved so infectious he managed to convince Stanley Marcus, the late colorful chief executive of Neiman Marcus, to open its first branch outside of Texas in 1971.

Whitman, one of the original 25 who in 1946 pushed to incorporate what became the Village of Bal Harbour, believed so strongly in his concept for a high-end, openair mall in steamy South Florida, he flflouted convention. The Duke University graduate bought half of the land on the north side of 96th Street and Collins Avenue for $500,000 from developer Robert C. Graham in 1956.

A year later, when Graham, who envisioned a mixeduse propert y on the site, opted not to partner with Whitman, he spent another $750,000 to secure the rest of the land.

Whitman’s mother, Leona, and Dorothy, his late wife, believed in him. Everyone else, not so much.

So Whitman, a retired Navy lieutenant commander, took to the road, armed primarily with charm, a fifierce competitiveness and some know-how.

Whitman was in the last graduating class at Ida M. Fisher High School in South Beach in 1936 before the s c h o o l r e l o c a t e d t o t h e north and became Miami Beach Senior High. His family, which included his late brothers William and Dudley, owned retail space on Lincoln Road Mall.

He had made money flflipping oceanfront properties along Miami-Dade’s coastline. And he saw a void as luxury retailers such as Saks and Bonwits flfled Lincoln Road.

On the road, Whitman visited luxury retailers from New York to Los Angeles. When the execs wouldn’t see him, he hung out in lobbies, fifiguring if he could corner them, he could make his case.

It was nothing to go and spend a half a day waiting for a big shot to come out,” Whitman told the Miami Herald in 2013. “I was about as welcome as a skunk at a picnic. I got thrown out of more stores than anyone that ever lived.”

Whitman, who grew up in a single-family home on the ocean, was unfazed.

It took the Evanston, Ill.born Whitman several years to line up tenants, secure f i n a n c i n g a n d b u i l d h i s $3.5- million project. He’d spent t o o much fo r t hat L-shaped plot of land — $2 a foot, at the time a record price for retail property.

He fifired the fifirst two architects who advocated for an enclosed, air-conditioned mall. He ultimately hired the Miami fifirm Herbert Johnson.

Finally, in 1965, Bal Harbour Shops opened with tenants including the toy store FAO Schwarz, the men’s clothier Maus & Hoffffman and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Neiman Marcus opened in 1971 and Saks Fifth Avenue in 1976.

“I broke all the shopping center rules,” Whitman told Women’s Wear Daily in 2015.