Wynwood street art: from warehouses to murals to new towers

We walked Wynwood with a camera. This is the story the walls tell: a garment district that emptied, the artists who painted it, the murals that made its name, and the developers now building among them. We observe the change and take no side.

Warehouses

Wynwood began as a working district. In the decades after the Second World War its low warehouses formed one of the largest garment districts in the United States. In the early 1990s the work moved offshore, the factories closed, and the windowless walls were left blank.

The artists arrive

In the early 2000s galleries moved into the empty buildings, the Second Saturday Art Walk drew people in, and Art Basel Miami Beach, from 2002, brought collectors from around the world. In 2009 the Wynwood Walls, at 2516 NW 2nd Avenue, turned a cluster of warehouses into an open-air museum of street art.

The murals today

The Wynwood Business Improvement District now counts more than 200 murals across some 50 city blocks. Along NW 2nd Avenue whole buildings are painted from pavement to parapet: vast portraits in grey and rose, space-age comic strips, a martian with a ray gun above a shop door.

Off the avenue, shopfronts disappear under layers of paint and paste-ups, shutters become canvases, and the blank flank of a new tower carries a shark several storeys high. Murals here are repainted often, so the photos on this page show Wynwood as we found it.

Around the corner from the Walls, the Museum of Graffiti at 276 NW 26th Street tells the story of the art form, with eleven murals on its own walls.

Collections nearby

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse shows large contemporary works in Wynwood, and the Rubell Museum, in six former warehouses in neighbouring Allapattah, opened in December 2019.

The developers arrive

The art that filled the empty warehouses has also drawn developers, and Wynwood is now growing upwards. Low painted buildings stand beside new apartment blocks, and some of the newest walls are on the towers themselves.

NoMad Residences Wynwood, at 2700 NW 2nd Avenue, opened in 2026: a nine-storey building of 329 homes by Related Group and Tricap with Sydell Group, designed by Arquitectonica, with Casa Tua Cucina on the ground floor.

Frida Kahlo Wynwood Residences, by Property Markets Group at 119 NW 29th Street, will hold 244 homes designed by Carlos Ott with CUBE 3, some with their own office suite; it is now selling.

We take no side in how the district changes. We will keep walking these streets and recording what we find, as the warehouses, the murals and the new buildings settle into the next chapter of Wynwood.

Our advice: walk early, while the light is soft and the pavements are quiet, and come back on the second Saturday of the month for the Art Walk, when galleries stay open into the evening.