What is happening to Shops at Sunset Place? Future of South Miami mall takes new path

It’s déjà vu for a South Miami landmark on the verge of disappearing and turned into the next big thing.

We’ve seen this a few times before on the 10-acre property at Red Road, Sunset Drive and U.S. 1. First, a beloved bakery plant, where Holsum doughnuts and bread sent up the most heavenly of scents, cleared the way for a mixed-use center called Bakery Centre.

Then, about 25 years ago, Bakery Centre gave way to a mall called Shops at Sunset Place.

Now, the moribund mall will be knocked down to make way for a multi-building complex with apartments, a hotel, a theater, restaurants and offices.

The city of South Miami has blessed plans to demolish and redevelop Shops at Sunset Place, an often deserted center with vacant storefronts and dwindling foot traffic over the past decade. After other failed attempts to revive the community’s centerpiece and eyesore, leaders are placing their hopes for the future on the mall’s latest owner.

In September, the city of South Miami’s planning board unanimously voted in favor and recommended approval of a master development by Midtown Opportunities to demolish the shopping center at 5701 Sunset Dr. and replace it with a mixed-use venture designed by award-winning London-based Heatherwick Studio.

Simply called Sunset Place, the plans have drawn both a mix of support and criticism.

The proposal will transform the South Miami location into seven buildings, 12 stories to 33 stories. The buildings would house 1,513 residences, from studios to three bedrooms, and include a 287-room hotel, 1,300-seat movie theater, nearly 150,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, and more than 50,000 square feet of workspace.

“One of the things we struggle with is we have the bones of a town center but we don’t have the people to support the kind of town center we want,” said Javier Fernández, South Miami’s mayor and a reelection candidate in the upcoming November city vote. “This would be a big driver.”

The South Miami City Commission is expected to review and vote on the development agreement in October. Four of the five members must vote in favor of the plan for it to pass. If it does, a second review of the development agreement and a site plan approval return to the City Commission in November for a final vote.

“Our shared vision with the city of South Miami and Heatherwick Studio was to transform a closed-off regional mall into an integral part of the overall community. With a focus on energizing the ground level, our aim is to seamlessly integrate with the existing neighborhood grid, enriching the area with curated retail, open spaces, and community-building activation at the street level,” said Alex Vadia, a principal at Midtown Development, an arm of the mall’s owner, Midtown Opportunities.

Sunset Place would be redeveloped in phases, with the first — the streets, condo and hotel — proposed to be built within five years. According to Fernández, lease termination agreements are already in place for all of the current tenants.

How tall with the buildings be?

The entire development would have to be completed within 20 years. That’s down from the typical 30-year development plan, Fernández said, with the purpose of bringing on this new chapter for Sunset Place and South Miami sooner rather than later.

In addition, Fernández said, he wants to push for Midtown Opportunities to adhere to building out the phases within certain timelines. In exchange, Midtown Opportunities would get the higher buildings that the firm wants. If they fail to meet the deadlines, the firm could be limited to building up to only 17 floors.

The height remains the biggest concern for the mayor and locals like Joanna Lombard, an urban planning expert and professor at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture.

“I guess the question is where does South Miami see itself in 15 years? For those of us who say they love what’s there,” Lombard said, highlighting independently owned chocolate store Garcia Nevett Chocolatier de Miami and the French restaurant Café Panisse, “it would be nice to keep the small town feel and keep the small town vitality that they need.”

But the height and density come with big financial payoffs.

“From just a general taxation perspective of $2.6 billion, the redevelopment of the mall alone would double our tax base over its full life cycle. What we have been thinking about is how to direct those future revenues,” Fernández said.

From cow pasture to mall

The Sunset Place site was once a cow pasture. But old-timers remember it as Holsum Bakery, the longest-lasting and sweetest neighbor in this space.

After the bakery plant moved, the site was cleared for the ill-fated Bakery Centre. That mall monolith gave way to the somewhat sturdier Shops at Sunset Place that has survived for 25 years on the site bounded by U.S. 1, Red Road, Sunset Drive and Southwest 58th Avenue on the border of Coral Gables.

Midtown Opportunities, in partnership with designers at Heatherwick Studio, started eyeballing that space that has been fading in appeal for years when the real estate investment firm bought Shops at Sunset Place from its previous owners for $65.5 million at the end of 2020.

“When you ask people whether they like the old part of a city more or the new part of a city more, in general, people always say they like the old part. Why is that? I think that’s because the old parts have more variety, more texture, more human scale and more fascination for you,” London designer Thomas Heatherwick said in a video that details why his firm wants to redesign the streetscape.

“Now more than ever, we hanker for in this digital era, for physical places that bring us together,” Heatherwick said. “And in South Miami, Sunset Place has been a place that brought people together. And for quarter of a century, it was where people have fond memories of maybe their first ever date going to the cinema.

“But in some senses, it was despite the architecture. As COVID happened and the digital world came more strongly at us, it really hasn’t worked.”

History of the South Miami site

If you ventured to South Miami for some 50 years between the 1930s and the early 1980s, you probably can still smell the smell .

A tantalizing aroma of warm, heady baking bread drifted sensually through the streets into upturned noses for miles along U.S. 1 within walking distance of the University of Miami.

This was the Holsum Bakery Company.

READ MORE: How this block went from cow field to famous bakery to mall after mall

Charles Fuchs Jr. founded the Homestead Bakery in 1912 in Homestead and it was such a hit that his baked goods business needed more room. The South Miami site gave him that land and he felt it deserved a new name.

In 1934, Fuchs opened what he called Holsum Bakery. His aromatic ovens and gaily decorated high beam building became a holiday delight when decorated. School groups got tours for years.

One of these students grew up in Coral Gables and likened the old Holsum Bakery to another Florida landmark.

“As a kid, I remember driving down U.S. 1 and seeing the building; it almost looked like a stage, completely decorated with characters and lights — it almost looked like Disney World,” Gigi Turkel told the Miami Herald in 2002.

By 1983, Holsum outgrew that space and moved to a modern plant in Medley where it baked goods until the plant closed in 2005.

But the name, and its telltale smell, was too good to waste. That’s why the mall that replaced it was called the Bakery Centre when it opened in 1986.

“By any banker’s measure, Bakery Centre will succeed; it will probably be a popular and profitable place. But it will always be an inward-turning island within a city, not an integral, vital part of a city,” the Miami Herald’s architecture critic, Beth Dunlop, wrote soon after the mall opened.

She was half right. Perhaps fittingly, given its mix of high-brow and fast-fading fortunes, one of the hit movies screening on opening day of its seven screen AMC multiplex theater in February 1986 was Disney’s first R-rated comedy, the Bette Midler-Nick Nolte vehicle, “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

Developer and art collector Martin Margulies’ wanted Bakery Centre to be opulent. In addition to the movie theater and Parallel Bar, a rather lively nightclub that hosted a non-alcoholic teen night weekly, the inward-facing mall tried for a mix of luxury and every day. Inside its pink and gray stucco walls you’d find pieces from Margulies’ collection and a branch of a SoHo art gallery, a then-trendy health club that fit the aerobics-fueled ‘80s aesthetic, a jazz bar, offices.

To access the mall visitors had to wend their way from the main entrance that bled broad stairs off the sidewalk on the Red Road side upward. You’d pass by a 24-foot-high, rusted steel sculpture at the corner of Red and Sunset called Hammering Man. Shoppers had to navigate the murals and other artwork before getting to any of the businesses.

Most of the stores wouldn’t last for long. The movie theaters — much like the successor at Sunset Place today — were the primary draw.

“Few retail projects failed as badly as the Bakery Centre, a luxury shopping mall that opened 10 years ago at one of Greater Miami’s busiest commercial crossroads,” The New York Times wrote in December 1996 when construction of Shops at Sunset Place began in its place.

In December 1998, The Shops at Sunset Place debuted. Celebrities bookended the mall’s glory days to its decline.

Cher was one of the first big names to pop over to Shops at Sunset Place in January 1999. The superstar was in South Florida to promote her hit album, “Believe,” at Richard Branson’s Virgin Megastore that sat on the South Dixie side of the mall. After signing copies of “Believe” for fans and chit-chatting with Branson, Cher sang the national anthem that weekend at Super Bowl 33 in Miami Gardens.

Nearly a quarter century later, one of Cher’s brief dalliances, Tom Cruise, used Sunset Place’s AMC 24 movie theater to pump fans up for his action film, “Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1.” Cruise showed up at the South Miami mall on a Tuesday night in July 2023, shocking fans who did not expect to see Tom Cruise at the Sunset Place AMC 24 at a screening of his movie.

Tom Cruise just popped in to this movie theater in Miami — and people freaked out

In between those glittery events, Shops at Sunset Place once boasted the first IMAX movie theater in Miami-Dade, joining its Broward County counterpart that had opened a giant screen in 1992 at the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale. The South Miami IMAX screen was tucked away in a dark corner of the mall inside a winding parking garage on the South Dixie side. It closed in 2003 to become an LA Fitness gym.

Born and raised in Miami, the 29-year-old Victoria Cela Goudie remembers visiting the movie theater throughout her childhood to catch movies like Disney’s “Mulan” in 1998 and Universal Pictures “The Mummy Returns” in 2001.

“In middle school, we would do the teenage thing. You would always run into people from different schools. Parents would drop us off or have dinner and we’d walk around. That’s when they had Urban Outfitters and Nike. It was nice growing up with it,” Cela Goudie said. “You could go and parents were OK going there.”

The bedrocks of Sunset Place are the existing AMC theaters; an LA Fitness; a towering, sprawling Barnes & Noble on the corner of Sunset and Red Road; and a GameTime.

One of the few remaining shops to draw business to the ground level, adjacent to the central concrete stairs, is Tea & Poets. The Area Stage Theatre and Conservatory has a space inside Shops at Sunset Place, too, having moved from its nearby home at the Riviera Plaza a couple of blocks north. That Riviera strip shopping center was demolished in 2021 and a prototype Publix is under construction.

For older residents, however, the smell of baking bread lingers like a phantom over these grounds.

“The question is, ‘Is it doable?’” said Holly Cohen, of the Holly Cohen Retail Advisory Services and president-elect of the Miami chapter of the professional commercial real estate organization Commercial Real Estate Women Network.

She referred to the prior attempt to demolish and revitalize Sunset Place .

“They couldn’t it make it happen,” she said of the then developers. “The whole thing has to be blown up and redone. The movie theater has to be a primary target. I think for someone to take it on again great, good luck.”

The new owners hope the memories and new ideas convert into the sweet smell of success.

“As people are social beings, drawn to places where other people gather, our idea is to get rid of the sterile atmosphere of the previous shopping mall and bring back streets,” Heatherwick, the project’s designer, said in a statement. “Influenced by the human scale and charm of Sunset Drive, the plan is to extend the existing street grid into the site to create continuous routes and a village of smaller, more intimate urban spaces, framed in an extraordinary way by apartments above. It’s exciting to imagine each area having a distinct focus, from main streets lined with outdoor markets, and independent shops, to boutique zones, cultural and entertainment areas, restaurants and bars, plus spaces for hotels.”

Cela Goudie embraces the new chapter. Today, she works as a public relations professional with Schwartz Media Strategies and owns a house with her husband in South Miami, a 15-minute walk from the mall.

“I can’t wait when I have my own children to bring them back and say, ‘I used to come here. It didn’t use to look like this,’ ” she said. “It’ll be the grown-up version of the Sunset Place we used to know.”

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