A tiny cottage that stood in the way of Ken Griffin's grand plans for an entire city block in Miami's Brickell financial district will no longer be an obstacle for the billionaire CEO of hedge fund Citadel.
The city of Miami approved the sale of the historic house at 190 SE 12th Terrace that served as the home and office of the city's first physician to an affiliate of Griffin for $2.98 million. The sale is part of a deal where he will also pay for the structure to be preserved and relocated to the Coconut Grove neighborhood, about four miles south.
The acquisition seemingly completes Griffin’s buying spree of the block around 1201 Brickell Bay Drive where Citadel’s planned 52-story headquarters office tower is expected to rise.
The 1,550 square-foot home was originally built in 1905 by Dr. James Jackson and his wife Edith at a different location near the site of the present-day Olympia Theater downtown. The white neo-classical house served as both a surgery suite and home for the couple before it sold in 1916.
But when Jackson at that time realized the new owner planned to demolish the home, he decided to keep the structure and move it to Miami Beach where he owned land, said Christine Rupp, executive director of the Dade Heritage Trust, the city’s largest historic preservation organization, in an email to CoStar News.
While the home and office were sitting on barges waiting to be moved, a "gentleman by the name of Whaler purchased them" and relocated the structure to its current location in 1917 in what has since become Miami's financial district, Rupp said.
Heritage Trust ownership
The city of Miami acquired the historic house in the 1970s and has leased it ever since to the Dade Heritage Trust. Once the building is relocated to Coconut Grove, one of Miami’s oldest neighborhoods, it will serve as Dade Heritage Trust's first permanent, wholly owned headquarters.
“The Dr. Jackson Medical Office is a tangible link to Miami’s earliest days as a growing city with a frontier spirit. We are proud to help secure its future in Coconut Grove, where it can continue to connect new generations with the people, places, and stories that helped shape Miami,” a spokesperson for Citadel told CoStar News in an email.
With the upcoming move to Coconut Grove, Dade Heritage Trust no longer has to worry about dealing with negotiations with the city every time its lease is up for renewal. In one instance five years ago, city commissioners suggested turning the site into a dog park.
The organization has found "a long-term solution to preserve our 121-year-old historic headquarters building, which was moved to its current location in 1917,” said Rupp, executive director of Dade Heritage Trust, in a statement.
“We are grateful to Ken Griffin for his generosity and the opportunity to establish the Dade Heritage Trust on its own property for the first time in our history, ensuring we can continue our stewardship and community engagement well into the future,” Rupp added in the statement.
The property's new address in Coconut Grove has yet to be announced. The neighborhood is one of Miami's oldest and most expensive, and home to multiple historic sites such as the Coconut Grove Playhouse and the former home of industrialist James Deering at the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.
Griffin's grand plans
Griffin has been investing in South Florida since relocating Citadel's headquarters to the region from Chicago in 2022. Griffin acquired the site for Citadel's new headquarters at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive for $363 million in 2022, a record land price at the time.
Site work for the new headquarters is already underway, with Related Cos. serving as Citadel's development partner on the tower. Plans for the Foster + Partners-designed tower originally called for a 1,049-foot supertall, or building above 984 feet, with a 212-room rooftop hotel and 1.2 million square feet of office space.
Plans were revised following a public spat between Griffin and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after the mayor announced a pied-a-terre tax in a viral video identifying the Citadel CEO's New York condominium.
Griffin, who has cited public safety as a significant issue in his decision to relocate the $67 billion hedge fund, responded publicly, with the Citadel CEO saying, "we need to double down on our bet in Miami," earlier this year.
That bet includes updated plans for what's expected to be a $2.5 billion tower. Current filings show the hotel component has been eliminated and swapped with additional office space, which now totals 1.64 million square feet of office while reducing the tower's height to 958 feet.
Despite the revisions, Griffin is still looking to build a hotel near the office in a separate development and is planning an additional 300 apartments at the site of the Solaris condominiums at 1155 Brickell Bay Drive. Affiliates of Griffin bought all the Solaris condo units for an undisclosed sum.
Supporting those future ambitions is 1221 Brickell Ave., a 27-story office that Griffin acquired for $286.5 million in 2023 on the same city block. There, the building's existing 912-spot parking garage will be updated with a new 1,420-space garage.