By: Cindy Rodriquez-Pereira and Arlena Amaro

Ciudad Doral Newspaper/ April 21-May 12, 2004 / www.ciudaddoral.com

Former Custom Copy & Printing president Jorge Quadreny.

A veteran of the printing industry, who has worked in Doral for over 23 years, tells the story of the city and the beginnings of commercialization, when only a few warehouses and farms occupied the area. Today Doral is a commercial and residential epicenter of extraordinary prosperity.

Jorge Quadreny is probably one of the oldest merchants in the City of Doral. As a worker of the Xerox printing company, during the early 1980s, Quadreny was sent to work in an area that was mainly made up of farms and a couple of warehouses. The mostly-green and isolated region, that some used to call Airport West or West Airport, started to develop slowly for about a decade until it came to be known as Doral–a great commercial and residential epicenter of extraordinary prosperity in the middle of Miami Dade County.

 “At the time, Xerox had an office in Biscayne Boulevard and decided to move over here, because they wanted to expand their business,” said Quadreny, who probably didn’t imagine, back then, that the printing business would become a vital part of his life forever. “Everyone told them they were crazy because there was nothing out here then, but they had a vision, and decided to open right across from the Palmetto.”

Quadreny used to work in Doral when all its well-known avenues and streets did not yet exist, at least not in the way we’ve come to know them today. The face that 87th Avenue and 25th Street were, both, two-lane roads could prove to be an incomprehensible fact for the thousands of drivers who suffer the traffic congestions now considered the norm rather than the exception in Doral. More than 80 percent of the city that is now inhabited was then classified as agricultural zone or exclusively reserved for cattle. The only other businesses close to the building in which Xerox operated were a few warehouses and the transportation company Ryder. The closest residential community was Fontainebleau, said Quadreny. However, Xerox officials were convinced that the situation wouldn’t last much longer because the big home builders could not get space for new communities by expanding the west of the county. And that’s exactly how it happened.

After working for Xerox for about a decade, Quadreny quit and founded his own company. A man with a vision and full of aspirations, Quadreny opened the doors for his own business on Northwest 78th Avenue and 12th Street. He had wanted to stay in the area that was already starting to flourish. A few years later, Quadreny found office space on Northwest 87th Avenue and 22nd Street, where his business, Custom Copy & Printing [presently Quadco Printing & Signs], is still operating today. “I always wanted to have my office on 87th Avenue, ever since I worked for Xerox and started thinking about opening my own company,” said Quadreny. “I would basically pass the area ever day because I saw they were building new structures.”

One lucky day, Quadreny saw a sign that announced the construction of a new building on 87th Avenue. Immediately, he went in to give a deposit and reserved his space. “I knew the heart of this area was going to be on 87th Avenue.” Nowadays, and just as he had predicted, his office is centrally located in an area that is visited by thousands of people everyday. Custom Copy & Printing’s [Quadco Printing & Signs’] specializations range from the reproduction and binding of proposals, to the replication of posters [a much wider range of services are now available]. Quadreny’s clients come in all shapes and sizes, and they also come from every corner of the county. Among his most important customers are the School Board and Miami Dade County. Quadreny’s company had the job of producing the Miami proposal to house the headquarters of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). 

Quadreny can be considered fortunate because he is one of the few people that have been able to see the birth and growth of this city throughout the last 30 years. Quadreny has perceived the drastic changes that seem to occur overnight in Doral; nowadays a dynamic city that bustles with urban life. In the 1990s, the majority of Quadreny’s clients were Cubans and Americans. “Those were the only ones that passed by.” But today the variation in demographics reflects the changes and expansion that the city has experienced. The arrival of more Venezuelans and Colombians to the area could in a way be held responsible for the prosperity of this young city. Quadreny said Doral is a city largely made up of foreign investments. 

There’s no doubt that the construction and opening of new buildings and companies has had a great impact on this city. According to Quadreny’s observations, the prediction of Doral’s growth created a construction boom during the 1990s. Businessmen had predicted that just as Miami, Doral would experience meteoric growth because the only room available for expansion was here, in the west of the county. Today, some people say that city was developed overnight. 

The heart of Doral, full of life and popularity, is located between Northwest 87th and 107th Avenues. These avenues are filled with an incessant blast of new businesses and activity, nothing similar to what these were like 30 years ago. The recently build city, not yet finished, seems to be extremely dynamic in every way. The fact that the population is increasing and guarantees a lucrative potential for local and foreign businesses and investments. According to Quadreny, the constant dynamism and the promising potential in the City of Doral make it a unique place to work and live. Everything in the city is entirely new because it is constantly growing and changing. Doral is something new that reinvents itself, changes and grows everyday. 

Nowadays, Doral is a renowned name in Miami-Dade County. Now Quadreny no longer needs to explain to his customers that his office is located just west of the airport because the name Doral speaks for itself. It is fair to say, that the modern Doral preserves few vestiges of its agricultural past, with the exception of the anachronistic cows that shepherd lazily the land located new Northwest 107th Avenue and 41st Street. A complete industrialization, without any vestiges from the past, is evident is a near future. Nevertheless, those pioneers who once had a vision and believed that the area would become a very important one for the county, will always be the pillars of the dynamic city known today as Doral, which many people call “the premiere place to live, play and work.”