Sunny Isles
Sunny Isles Beach is now transforming itself into a city of mega high-rises with a soaring tax base and a new influx of younger, far more affluent residents.
The scene is changing in the Sunny Isles, Florida resort area. The atmosphere in Sunny Isles is still casual but the funky 50’s motels and small beachfront hotels are giving way to luxury apartment towers and hotels. Little has changed on the Newport Fishing Pier, where you can drop a line and fish from shore or for real deep-sea fishing, head to the charter boats docked on the Intracoastal Waterway at Haulover Beach Park. Ocean breezes cool the nine-hole Par 3 golf course and tennis courts, and make the park a mecca for kite flying in Sunny Isles, Florida. Across the way, a one-mile stretch of white sand and open ocean surf invites sunbathing and swimming.
The redevelopment of Sunny Isles Beach in the last few years has been nothing short of extraordinary. The result is that, despite the density of the individual towers, there is more access to the sea, both on foot and visually. The buildings themselves are also being developed with highly affluent residents in mind, many of them foreigners who will be staying there only part-time.
From the sleepy mote row of just a few years back, Sunny Isles Beach is now transforming itself into a city of mega high-rises with a soaring tax base and a new influx of younger, far more affluent residents. The sky’s the limit.
One reason developers have become so fond of the city is that their oceanfront buildings can rise up to 55 stories, higher than anywhere else on the beach in South Florida.
Few people have done more to carry out the city’s vision than architects Charles Seiger and Kobi Karp. Seiger Suarez Architectural Partnership, designed some of the earliest towers, including the Pinnacle and Ocean I, II, and III, as well as several now under construction, including Ocean IV and Sayan.
“Every one of these projects is different, reflecting the developer’s preferences, our creative ideas, and the constant changes in the marketplace.”
Back in the 1980s, a trip to Sunny Isles Beach was like a journey to the past. A string of colorful, but decaying hotels from the 1950s and 1960s lined the oceanfront. Along “motel row,” properties like the Castaways, Thunderbird, Marco Polo and Sahara offered whimsical design twists to passing motorists (you can still see the camels in front of the Sahara) and bargain- priced rooms inside.
At one point the row of hotels were considered quite glamorous, so much so that they were featured in the Frank Sinatra movie” Hole in the Head,” when old blue eyes takes his date out for a night on the town in Miami. But in recent years, most visitors were middle-class families, flying in form Canada or driving here for a Miami beach vacation that might cost a mere $39 or $49 a night.
Sunny Isles Beach hotelier also began to cultivate the European market, according to Bill lone, owner of the lone Groups Advertising firm, who serves as executive director of the Sunny Isles Beach Resort Association.
That European exposure helped attract a German investment firm, which purchased the Castaways in the mid 1980s, demolished the signature, sprawling low-rise hotel, and began building Oceania, a luxury high –rise residential development that now consists of five residential towers.
Suddenly, the stars over the Sunny Isles Beach came into alignments and the race was on to create a new city of towers. Although the city’s total area is just 1.0 square miles, it has two miles of beaches on the Atlantic Ocean. Halfway between South Florida’[s two biggest cities, Sunny Isles Beach attracts air travelers from both Miami and Fort Lauderdale international airports.City and state dollars went into renourishing the Atlantic beach, refurbishing Collins Avenue, rejuvenating the shopping centers and building new sidewalks, water and sewer lines.
Sunny Isles Beach is a major center of South Florida’s Russian community, with a plethora of Russian stores lining Collins Avenue, the main thoroughfare through the city. The city is sometimes referred to as Little Moscow because of its many Russian and Russian-descended residents. It also has a large Turkish community. It is a booming resort area and developers such as Donald Trump have invested heavily in construction of high-rise hotels and condominiums.