WGM Weekly: Brickell’s "Animal House", Medium Cool Closing, Bibi's Burgers, & Lebron Watch

+ Fall Restaurant Openings & Miami Beats New York, Again

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WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 7.20.26

• ON MY MIND: Will Creative Agencies Exist In An AI World?

  AI is a tool. A better paintbrush doesn’t make the painting less the painter’s.

Beach Business

• “Animal House”: Brickell’s Most Notorious Building

  Police reports describe drunk guests passed out in the lobby, porn shoots on the balconies, sex in the jacuzzi, and a permanent haze of weed smoke.

• Miami Passed New York. Sort Of. If You Live in the Bronx.

  This is metro-versus-metro, not Miami versus Manhattan. Once you know what’s actually being measured, the story changes.

• LeBron Watch: Pat Riley Just Told Everyone How He Really Feels

  Twelve years later, and Riley’s still calling it what it was. Not a business decision. A dynasty that got interrupted.

Hospitality Local Insider

• Medium Cool Is Closing. It’s Not Dying, Its Home Is.

  Medium Cool didn’t get out-competed. It got out-leased. The brand survives, the room doesn’t.

• What’s Going To Be Good: Bibi’s Burgers, Surfside

  Come for the wagyu. Stay for the hospitality. Bibi’s is not a restaurant to miss.

• With All The Closings, We Thought It Would Be Exciting To Talk About Some Openings

  There are never a shortage of new operators looking to open in Miami, because Miami is always a good idea.

ON MY MIND: Will Creative Agencies Exist In An AI World?

AI is getting good. Genuinely good. Ai graphic design that was mediocre a year ago is now ten times better. Video is closing the gap fast. Web development that used to require a team now happens in a prompt. And the question that’s actually worth asking isn’t whether AI can be creative it’s what happens to the people and companies who used to sell creativity as a service.

Here’s what I know for certain: AI is a tool. A better paintbrush doesn’t make the painting less the painter’s. AI has gotten extraordinary at execution and still has almost no ability to do the thing that actually matters, be tasteful. Creative direction. Style. Knowing what’s good before it exists. That’s not a software problem. That’s a human one, and it’s the one thing AI hasn’t touched.

But here’s the part that should scare a lot of people in this industry: AI didn’t just replace the software. It replaced the person who ran the software. The graphic designer who knew Photoshop, the editor who knew Premiere, that skill set is evaporating. And that means the only people left standing are the ones who actually have taste, who can creative direct, who know what “good” looks like before AI shows it to them.

Here’s the problem, though: a lot of the people with the taste the ones who should be creative directing right now aren’t used to working. They’re not used to sitting down and doing the work themselves. They’ve spent their whole careers relying on someone else to know the tool, to run the software, to translate their vision into the file.

Right now, everyone’s calling AI output “slop.” Fine. Say that today. But that judgment is temporary, and it’s aimed at the wrong target. It’s like calling a music slop because it was made with a mixer or soundboard. The creative is still doing the creating. The instrument just stopped being the bottleneck. The people clinging to “AI work is worse” aren’t making an aesthetic argument they’re making a eulogy for their own relevance, and they don’t know it yet.

The Real Real: I don’t need to convince the people who think this way that they’re wrong. The market will do it for us. The creative directors too lazy to learn to creative direct AI themselves are going to feel like the human version of a BlackBerry, perfectly fine, perfectly confident, right up until the moment everyone else used the iPhone.

BEACH BUSINESS

“Animal House”: Brickell’s Most Notorious Building Has A Name Now

The Club at Brickell Bay used to be exactly what its name promised, a quiet, 43-story residential condo in the financial district, 643 units, the kind of building where you knew the doorman and nobody photographed your hallway.

Now it’s a crime blotter. Police reports describe drunk guests passed out in the lobby, porn shoots on the balconies, sex in the jacuzzi, and a permanent haze of weed smoke. The building’s own residents have started calling it Animal House. One owner who’s lived there since 2004 told the Herald she feels like a prisoner in her own home.

Here’s how it happened: the HOA is run by five board members, none of whom actually live in the building. Last month’s board election was allegedly marred by forged ballots. The former property manager is awaiting trial for grand theft and fraud. And when homeowners complained about the illegal short-term rentals overrunning their floors, they didn’t get help they got cease-and-desist letters from their own HOA’s attorney.

The math explains the madness. Miami bans short-term rentals in multifamily residential buildings. The Club is doing it anyway, because one investor - a former board president runs six Airbnbs in the building himself and says a single unit clears $50,000 a year. Code inspectors rarely write citations, and the ones they do write get quietly dismissed. When the person enforcing the rules is profiting from breaking them, the rules stop existing.

Miami Passed New York. Sort Of. If You Live in the Bronx.

Miami’s cost of living has technically surpassed New York’s for the first time on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Here’s what’s getting buried under that headline: this is metro-versus-metro, not Miami versus Manhattan. Once you know what’s actually being measured, the story changes.