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SoBe Business Exiles Make Miami’s Bourgeoning Upper Eastside Home

By Mitchell Pellecchia
Staff Writer

There’s pop art everywhere, but Hannah Lansky’s corner of the barber shop is decorated only with her original paintings, all of which, she said, “are reflections of a moment.”

“A lot of my paintings have people I know in them,” said cosmetologist-painter-poet Hannah Lasky.

Lasky is upstairs at Primal, a hip, Upper Eastside hair art studio on the S.W. corner of 73rd and Biscayne Boulevard, a “groovy” bungalow where seasoned stylists work their craft as independents, but under the same roof.

She transplanted from St. Louis, Missouri to Miami Beach in 1987 and into the famed Clevelander Hotel on Ocean Drive (via a 10 month detour to the Big Apple) with “two crazy Russians and a crazy Italian girl.” In 1989 she started making people beautiful in the basement of the Leslie Hotel – her first hair gig.

Lasky recollects Miami Beach as a haven for entrepreneurs. “The Beach was wide open back then for any person to start any business they wanted to,” she said, reminiscing about her first day on South Beach. The modest beatnik beautician started her salon “ten grand in the hole,” she said, but by 1993 she had a shop on Lincoln Road next to the New World Symphony. “All these people wanted to work for me and I said ‘you do?’” remembered the pioneer.

Lasky, who wouldn’t hesitate to shave drunken heads at a bar if it meant raising money for kids with cancer, moved to Biscayne Boulevard after years on Lincoln Road. She recalls her rent skyrocketing and the stress of the “big guys” [large retailers] pushing out the mom and pop type shops. “I would have liked it if it stayed funky,” Lasky told SunPost.

And her new landlord agrees.

“South Beach was becoming very Disneyland,” said Donna Ashby-Clark, a 1990’s Miami Beach real-estate executive who converted a “crack-house” into a business enclave on Biscayne’s 7000 block a little over four years ago. “I was on South Beach when nobody was down there,” she said. “People told me I was crazy for buying on the Boulevard but I told them, ‘I was over real estate and I wanted a store.’”

South Beach has changed quite a bit in recent years. “You got Gap and Banana Republic, Victoria Secrets and Armani…It’s just not fuzzy anymore,” she said.

Ashby-Clark’s store downstairs from Primal is “Divine Trash,” a place for found objects, vintage furniture and art.

“It’s becoming more high-end vintage as of late,” she said.

Also in the building with Primal and Divine Trash is a small café called Nectar of Life, a pottery shop and garden center. In December there will be a shop specializing in vintage designer clothing operating in the building. And on the side of Ashby-Clark’s 1940s two-story street corner village is a gated garden where on any given day friends can be found sharing conversation and sipping wine. “It’s much more personal than what South Beach has become,” Ashley-Clark said.

Doing business down the street is the 55th Street Station, another enclave that was renovated by South Beach restaurateur Mark Soyka of Van Dyke and News Café Miami Beach fame). Besides Soyka’s own Soyka’s Restaurant, other Miami Beach transplants operate at “the Station” at 5582 N.E. 4th Court like Idols Gym, Sushi Siam and Bettcher Gallery. Add to that neighborhood a dash of high-end housing like Kubik, the 14-story mixed-use luxury condominium a la street-level shopping already approved to break ground and the result: a straight-up recipe for Upper Eastside economic prosperity. “Everyone on the Beach is trying to get on the Boulevard now,” Ashby-Clark said.

Cora Bettcher, owner of Bettcher Art Gallery, said if you look at all “the real players you’ll see a common denominator,” she told SunPost. “We all started on the Beach,” said Bettcher, flying south from New York. She refers to her tenure on Lincoln Road, however, as “two years of total misery.” During the mid-1990s, Lincoln Road was undergoing extensive renovation and at her 900-block address, constant construction, 10-foot trenches and scaffolding discourages people from browsing her gallery. “You only knew I was there if you knew,” she said.

What really excites Bettcher about being on the Eastside is it’s “a work in progress,” she said, where she has developed another demographic that she didn’t have on South Beach, a place where “I made less than one percent of my sales.” The gallery owner said local collectors more often frequent the Eastside, whereas most business she did on South Beach was international. She credits the Eastside as being a cultural segue between Miami Beach and the Magic City and said she and others not too long ago followed their gut to Biscayne Boulevard.

As successful entrepreneurs slowly but surely migrate to Miami’s Upper Eastside and as high-end high-rises grow from Morningside to Miami Shores, Biscayne Boulevard is becoming central to upscale dining, fashion and the eclectic. “What better exposure could you have?” asked Ashby-Clark.