Bal HarbourCity Guide

Bal Harbour is a 0.64-square-mile village at the northern tip of the Miami Beach barrier island, bordered by Biscayne Bay to the west, the Atlantic to the east, Surfside to the south, and Haulover Inlet to the north. It was incorporated on August 14, 1946 by Detroit industrialist Robert C. Graham and 25 fellow registered voters. The name itself is a contraction — the b from bay, the a and l from Atlantic — invented to describe a village that runs ocean to bay across a single planned grid.

Roughly 3,100 permanent residents live here, but the village's footprint is far larger than its population suggests. Four resorts — the St. Regis, the Ritz-Carlton, the Beach Haus, and the Sea View — together hold 656 hotel rooms. The for-sale inventory is almost entirely high-rise condos along Collins Avenue, with a small pool of bayside units on the west side of the island.

A village built around a shopping center

Most of what gives Bal Harbour its identity traces back to one decision. In 1965, on the site of a former WWII army barracks, Stanley Whitman opened Bal Harbour Shops as America's first all-luxury, open-air fashion center. He persuaded Neiman Marcus in 1971 to open its first specialty store outside of Texas, then added Saks Fifth Avenue as a second anchor in 1976. A 100,000-square-foot second level was added in 1982. By 2012 the Shops topped the world's rankings for sales per square foot — a title it has continued to defend.

The village around the Shops developed accordingly: utilities buried underground (a Florida first), a dedicated police force for a population most cities would treat as a single precinct beat, and a near-private mile of beach reached almost entirely through resort and condo lobbies.

Bal Harbour is what happens when a single shopping center is allowed, for sixty years, to set the tone of the village around it.