Skift Take
Maybe a silver lining to Zika's toll on Wynwood is that the district is getting a huge amount of global press that could pay off when everything is back to normal.
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“It’s like a natural disaster,” a bartender in Wynwood, Miami told me last Thursday night.
He was speaking about the economic impact of the Zika virus on small businesses in Florida’s most creative and trendy neighborhood.
Located just north of downtown Miami, and directly west across Biscayne Bay from South Beach, the Wynwood Arts District typically attracts both locals and tourists throughout the week.
Wynwood is spread across a few square miles of old textile warehouses that have been converted into art galleries and an eclectic gauntlet of restaurants, bars, and shops (see our previous feature about the neighborhood here). Hundreds of exterior walls are brightly covered in brazen, professionally-painted graffiti that gives Wynwood its signature, tropical hipster image.
This is the year that Wynwood really came into its own. The recent opening of more daytime restaurants and retail have long been needed to complement the robust evening bar business.
That all went sideways on July 29 when the Florida Department of Health (FDH) identified Wynwood specifically as one of the source locations for the first cases of Zika in the continental U.S. determined to be locally transmitted by the aedes aegypti strain of mosquitos.
On August 1, The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) issued a travel advisory warning pregnant women to avoid the
