Wynwood Walls: A gallery for urban street art in midtown Miami

MIAMI - Beyond this gateway city's endless stretch of beachfront condos and restaurant-lined avenues, in what was once a desolate warehouse district, street art and graffiti have been elevated to a new level in a park named Wynwood Walls.

Often called the Museum of the Streets, this urban gallery featuring murals by renowned artists from all over the world has no admission fee.

Its creator, real estate maven Tony Goldman, had an epiphany after visiting midtown Miami's Wynwood neighborhood with his son, Joey, in 2005. Back then, it was dotted with windowless warehouses, loading docks, and vacant lots.

Goldman had already established a reputation for targeting depressed urban areas - diamonds in the rough - and changing them. He had a hand in the transformation of the Upper West Side, the Wall Street Financial District, and Soho - all in New York - as well as Center City in Philadelphia and South Beach in Miami Beach.

Wynwood presented another opportunity.

"My vision was to basically create a new paradigm for public art," Goldman said. "Street art is the telegraph of the streets. It presents to the eyes the artists, the culture of the community."

His mission: Take an underappreciated genre - graffiti and street art - and elevate it to a new art form for the public to enjoy for free, year-round.

"These boxes are not warehouses," he said. "They are canvases. The big picture with Wynwood Walls is that of a town center that over time has become filled with great murals."

I met Goldman for lunch earlier this month at one of two restaurants at Wynwood Walls, Joey's Italian Cafe, owned by his son.

Opening restaurants next to and within Wynwood Walls was no accident.

It's been Goldman's modus operandi for four decades through his family-run company, Goldman Properties (Joey and daughter Jessica are also principals). He created chic restaurants and cafes in New York's Soho, Center City Philadelphia, and the other neighborhoods he had been in to help create pedestrian traffic and buzz around his developments.

Wynwood Walls debuted during Art Basel 2009 - Miami's premier arts festival - as a collaboration between Goldman and his friend Jeffrey Deitch, now director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. That year, it unveiled a dozen murals. It now has 34 murals by such international luminaries as Kenny Scharf (U.S.), Nunca (Brazil), Shepard Fairey (U.S.), Aiko (Japan), Ryan McGinness (U.S.), and Stelios Faitakis (Greece).