WGM Weekender: Interview Joe Furst of Nora District, Downtown Culture in West Palm Beach
+ One of the Most Important Cultural projects in the United States is Hitting it's Stride
Good Company Interview with Joe Furst on building the Nora District, Wynwood, and Bringing Downtown Culture to West Palm Beach
I don’t hand out the “most important cultural project in Florida” label lightly. But that’s what Joe Furst is building in West Palm Beach, and after walking the Nora District with him and sitting down for an hour after, I’m more convinced than I was before I got there.
The Wynwood Pedigree
Furst is Miami born and raised. Ransom School. Hamilton College. A law degree he never wanted, used as a ticket into Goldman Properties, where he spent ten years under Tony Goldman building Wynwood from a wholesale garment district into the arts neighborhood the world came to copy. He signed leases at $4 a square foot to wholesalers who’d never heard of a gallery. He helped capitalize Panther Coffee and put Zach the Baker into business. He watched the first Wynwood Walls go up in 2009 and turn street art into museum art overnight. That’s not resume padding. That’s the actual blueprint for how a neighborhood gets built from nothing, and Furst was in the room writing it, landlord as content curator, four walls as a platform, everything else as programming around it.
He’ll also tell you Wynwood got away from itself. Peak Wynwood, KYU, Zach the Baker, Panther Coffee, the Walls before they became a photo backdrop instead of a gallery, ran roughly 2013 to 2015. Then the Business Improvement District pushed an upzoning overlay, land speculation took over, and a wave of investors with no relationship to the original vision started building whatever they wanted i.e. Frida Kahlo apartments. Goldman owned less than 20% of the neighborhood the whole time. Everyone assumed Goldman controlled it. They didn’t. That’s the lesson he carried out the door in 2018 when he left with no plan at all, no big idea, no next thing lined up, just ten years of pattern recognition and a law degree he still wasn’t using.
How Nora Happened
Six months after he left, a call came about two buildings under contract on a forgotten street in West Palm Beach called North Royal Avenue. Furst’s partner Richard Born described the first time he saw it as walking onto a movie set, vacant, bizarre, frozen in time, like someone could flip a switch and the whole block would come alive. Furst flipped the switch. Working with partners at NDT and Wheelock Street Capital, he systematically assembled over 90 parcels through the middle of Covid, when West Palm was still a tertiary market that nobody outside of Related and Steve Ross was paying attention to.
What he did next is the part that separates Nora from every other “up and coming neighborhood” story you’ve heard.
