The Rubells: Art collectors with edge make D.C. their own

MIAMI — The part of Miami where Mera and Donald Rubell put their museum and home was a dangerous, ramshackle section of abandoned warehouses and rundown residences, with buildings still scarred by the 1980 race riots and streets that even the police were wary of entering.

The Rubells hit Miami 19 years ago. Today, their Wynwood neighborhood is ablaze with color, with murals, art galleries, cafes and top-shelf eateries luring hipsters and big spenders alike. The Rubells’ family museum — housed in a former Drug Enforcement Agency warehouse where the cocaine, cash and Kalashnikovs that spelled Miami Vice were once stored — was a major catalyst of the makeover.

The part of Washington where Mera and Donald Rubell intend to put their second contemporary art museum and a new residential-retail complex was a dangerous, ramshackle area where 1960s urban renewal had left a strange jumble of industrial buildings, public housing projects and apartments cut off from the rest of the city by an elevated highway.

Walk along some of Southwest’s scruffiest streets with Rubell, and she sees beauty and possibility in the same apartment buildings that many D.C. residents dismiss as barren. Here’s one designed by Morris Lapidus, the Miami architect most famous for his beach-kitsch Fontainebleau Hotel. Turns out he also drew the Skyline. And here’s a building with swooping aluminum roofs and doors: “Amazing,” Mera says. “If people only knew what was here. . . .”

What’s here on I Street SW is the city’s old Randall Junior High School, which closed in 1978 and later became a homeless shelter and studio space for artists. It has been boarded up since 2006, when the Corcoran Gallery of Art bought it from the District for $6.2 million. The museum planned to move its College of Art into the building, but the economy went south. Last year, when the Rubells offered to make the Corcoran whole, the museum grabbed the deal.

The Rubells are 50-50 partners with Telesis, a D.C. developer that builds mixed-income and subsidized housing such as the Ellen Wilson homes on Capitol Hill and Paradise at Parkside in Northeast. They plan to put the Rubell museum in the old schoolhouse, restaurants in the school’s gym, and apartments and perhaps a hotel in new structures. Their architect is Bing Thom, the Canadian who designed Arena Stage’s iconic new setting.

“We want to create a lot of life here,” Mera says. “We want to make an important place. This city does a crappy job of selling itself. It’s amazing that people come here because the promotion is so awful. They just show men in suits in front of marble buildings. This could be the social hearth of the country. It’s enticing to come to a desert and do something big.”

A desert. Washington.

Donald hears about that and says, “Mera, watch what you say.”

Artists in Washington hear it and say: Who is this person? Who does she think she is?

Made in Miami