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 Adrienne Arsht
Fairy Godmother
Just as things couldn’t look bleaker for the beleaguered
Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, philanthropist Adrienne
Arsht vowed in January to dispense $30 million to the venue in the
next three years — financial fairy dust to erase the center’s
growing debt and guarantee a stable future.
Miami-Dade
County commissioners, still smarting over being saddled with $7
million extra in unplanned debt, stopped their regularly scheduled
meeting to hear the grand announcement at the performing arts
center, which was subsequently renamed the Adrienne Arsht Center
for the Performing Arts.
Arsht, appropriately dressed in an angelic white suit, waved a
wandful of bounty from her $300 million sale of TotalBank to
rescue the struggling venue with its biggest gift to date.
Commissioners fell under her spell and praised Arsht for her
generosity; two even offered marriage proposals.
“This is my home,” she said of
Miami. “Bloom where you are planted.”
That’s exactly what Arsht has done.
Arsht, who was born in
Delaware and earned her law degree at
Villanova
University in Pennsylvania, worked at TWA in New York. In 1980,
she moved to
Washington,
D.C.,
where she lived for 16 years and married TotalBank owner Myer
“Mike” Feldman, who died in March. Feldman, former counsel to
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, appointed Arsht
chairman of the board of TotalBank; she moved to Miami in 1996.
In 2004, Arsht became the first woman to join the Million Dollar
Roundtable of the
United Way
of Miami-Dade. She also recently gave million-dollar gifts to the
Concert Association of Florida and to the
University
of Miami, and serves on many national boards, including American
Ballet Theatre, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and Best Buddies
International.
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