Billionaire Miami newcomer Ken Griffin, who has received an effusive welcome from local politicians as he moves his Citadel financial empire to the Magic City from Chicago, wants them to do something for him: Take one of the city’s most significant historic homes off his hands.
In September, Griffin bought the expansive bayfront estate of banker and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht near the Vizcaya Museum for a record $106 million. The estate includes Villa Serena, the stately Mediterranean home of one of Miami’s and America’s most eminent historic figures, Progressive-era politician and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The private home, protected as a historic site under city preservation law and meticulously restored by Arsht, has stood imposingly for 109 years on a limestone ridge overlooking Biscayne Bay.
In an unusual bid that a leading Miami preservation architect called “a shock,” a Griffin representative got a city agency set up to fight poverty in Overtown and the old Omni district north of downtown Miami to begin exploring taking Villa Serena as a “donation” and moving it somewhere else.
