The Miami Herald looks at the fate of Wynwood after the Art Basel crowds disperse. The Goldman family who were at the center of New York’s Soho and Miami’s South Beach have made a $35 million investment led by Joey Goldman:

He and his father, legendary South Beach pioneer Tony Goldman, spent three years during South Florida’s real estate boom buying up $35 million worth of property in Wynwood, Miami’s budding gallery district.

Now mostly warehouses and industrial lots, the district seems ripe for the Goldman strategy of reaping profits from a neighborhood in transition from gritty to trendy.

But it also will test the Goldmans’ famously long view on real estate, as economic conditions strain their timetable in Wynwood and put pressure on their holdings.

”I think they paid a fair price and they had decent timing,” said Tony Cho, a commercial real estate agent active in Wynwood and president of Metro 1 Properties in Wynwood. The neighborhood is loosely defined as between 37th and 20th streets, with a railroad and I-95 forming the eastern and western boundaries .

”The question is how do they carry those properties through the difficult times?” Cho said. “It could be five, seven, 10 years [before Wynwood’s real estate market recovers]. We don’t know.” [ . . . ] County property records show the Goldmans borrowed about 70 percent of the cash used for the Wynwood acquisitions. That could leave the Goldmans waiting for a major economic improvement before Wynwood falls in line with company doctrine. [ . . . ]

That’s a key condition for the Goldman strategy, which calls for reviving foot traffic around their holdings by engineering the first retail tenants to open up in the neighborhood.

In South Beach, that included opening and running the Lucky’s restaurant in the Park Central, followed by Mark Soyka’s News Cafe in the ground floor of a Goldman building on the corner of Eighth and Ocean in 1988 and targeting trendy boutiques and modeling agencies to rent space nearby.

”We buy in critical mass. Then we are the users of our own real estate,” Jessica Goldman-Srebnick said. “So we can effectuate what the vibe is going to be.”

The influx of local trend-setters and attractive workers helped set a fashionable vibe on that stretch of Ocean Drive, boosting the cachet of Goldman’s first hotel, the Park Central. Goldman Properties also owns The Hotel — formerly the Tiffany — which opened 10 years ago two blocks from the Park Central.

”That’s the whole thing — control the street life,” Tony Goldman said. “Ocean Drive gives me a thrill every time I’m there.”

Goldman Family Bets on a Wynwood Revival (Miami Herald)