Recent changes put Coral Gables ‘on steroids’

Will it remain the City Beautiful with high-rise building boom?

Just five years short of a century ago, developer George Merrick conjured up a Mediterranean fantasyland on his family’s holdings of scrub pine and avocado groves just outside the backwater city of Miami.

He called it Coral Gables, and it was good.

The city beautiful that Merrick romantically baptized “Miami Riviera” would have it all: Charming Spanish-style homes and gracious Italian villas masterfully laid out amid gardens, lush boulevards and golf courses; imposing formal entrances; “Tales of the Alhambra”.

Merrick’s vision, and the master plan and strict controls he drew up to realize it, have endured through boom and bust, firmly establishing Coral Gables as one of the most desirable, stable and envied communities in Florida.

Now it’s gone on steroids. Enthusiastic backers of a new wave of high-rise, mixed-use development, including city leaders, say it’s re-invigorating the city, enhancing Merrick’s vision and turning its once-stodgy downtown into a lively urban neighborhood. But some residents fear that what’s made the Gables special could be obliterated in a rush to build big.

Large-scale projects

No visitor to the Gables can miss its redrawn face. The city’s downtown and commercial corridors of South Dixie Highway and LeJeune Road bristle with construction cranes erecting Mediterranean-inspired buildings of a scale and density Merrick could not have foreseen.

A dozen large-scale projects recently inaugurated, nearing completion or just now under construction are delivering around 2,000 condos and apartments, hundreds of hotel rooms and hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail, restaurants and offices to the Gables a university and a thriving business district. In promotional brochures, its crown jewel, the Biltmore

in the span of a few years. It’s a surge likely not rivaled since Merrick began building his city in earnest in 1924.

The biggest by far, Agave Ponce group’s massive, $600 million The Plaza Coral Gables, will spread across seven acres and three city blocks on Ponce de Leon Boulevard, just south of the recently revamped Miracle Mile. The project, the largest in Coral Gables history, will encompass 242 hotel rooms, 164 apartments and lofts, 160,000 square feet of retail, 445,000 square feet of office space and 2,000 parking spaces.

And that’s after city planners and commissioners scaled back an initial Hotel and its 300-foot tower, rose out of the humid mist like a mirage in Washington Irving’s

plan during three years of stringent review — and after the developers trimmed it again, redesigning and renaming the former Mediterranean Village project, in response to changing market conditions following approval in 2015. Agave finally began construction on the first of two phases last year, with completion expected in May 2020.

The tweaks include less retail space and more office, reflecting a downturn in the fortunes of brickand-mortar retail and unflagging demand for workspace in downtown Coral Gables. Agave also

scaled down a hotel tower that would have exceeded the usually strictly observed height cap of 190 feet for usable space in the city, not including spires and cupolas.

The Agave project’s shifted footprint now places the bulk of construction around a one-acre plaza with a historic building — the turreted, three-story studio of Merrick’s noted city designers, architect Phineas Paist and artist Denman Fink — at its center. The new plaza opens up to Ponce Circle Park. Agave executive Gregory Schwartz boasts the project, designed by the international firm CallisonRTKL, is so consequential it will shift the center of downtown south.

“It’s going to open right up to the park, shift the center of gravity towards the park, and create the new social, civic center for the city,” Schwartz said. “The plaza embodies the spirit of the project.”

A few blocks west, a new mid-rise Aloft hotel introduces a sense of walkable urbanism to the traffic-choked gash of LeJeune Road, with arcades along the ground floor, a garage that’s concealed within the building and a street-facing restaurant and outdoor cafe.

The change in scale and approach that it represents is abundantly clear. The Aloft building comes right up to the sidewalk and goes straight up to create an arcaded street wall, an approach that planners say creates a welcoming, sheltered space for pedestrians. The hotel’s suburban-style neighbors, by contrast, are set back, often behind a parking lot and a fringe of scraggly greenery — an approach that planners say is less inviting.

“In the next six months, it’s going to be a very different feel here, a more energetic one,” Brown said. “You’re going to see more and younger people out and about. There’s going to be buzz and you’re going to see people coming in from other areas who would not have made the drive before. People want walkability and all the Gables has to offer.”