He calls it the Kush corner.
It’s a construction site where crews are renovating the historic building at the corner of North Miami Avenue and NE 20th Street in Wynwood. That’s where Matt Kuscher is rebuilding Kush restaurant, which closed a couple of years ago, and to literally top it off, he’s creating 10 studio apartments upstairs. They will be affordable housing units reserved for hospitality industry workers.
The Omni Community Redevelopment Agency played an integral role in getting the plan off the ground. The CRA invested in the project, and in return, Kuscher signed a contract to keep Kush there and to keep the apartments affordable for the next 50 years.
“So the building was set to be demolished and the reality is, I’m a romantic at heart and I wanted to keep the soul of Wynwood, that building has so much history, it’s a hundred years old, Whitey Bulger used to live up there,” Kuscher explained. “It was a brothel for 30 years where you just buy your drink here and go upstairs to the apartments where they were so a little Miami culture, a little magic city.”