It's a Friday night in January 2011, and a cold front has swept through the city, plunging temperatures to a crisp 51 degrees. On North Miami Avenue, near the corner of 29th Street in Wynwood, a red and green neon sign entices passersby with the promise of "Bar Open Liquor." The arrow on the sign points down to an unassuming door where a young woman collects the cover charge and a bouncer keeps watch.

At this point, the Electric Pickle has barely been open for two years — but the small nightclub is already proving it can punch well above its weight. Tonight the club has booked Little Dragon, an up-and-coming Swedish electropop quartet about to release its third album, Ritual Union. The band's North American tour has taken it to some of the nation's premier live music venues, including Crowbar in Tampa and Brooklyn's Music Hall of Williamsburg. But this night in Wynwood, the stage is no more than a makeshift half-pipe set up in the Electric Pickle's parking lot. When the band members ask for the green room, the club's co-owner Will Renuart says they can hang out on the roof.

At five past midnight, the band takes the stage. Lead singer Yukumi Nagano tells the crowd it's been a "lo-o-ong time" since the band has performed outside. It's unclear if the comment is a reference to the band's midwinter tour dates or a subtle complaint that Little Dragon has moved on from performing at DIY spaces.

The show is the band's South Florida debut, and the members seem a little befuddled that the Electric Pickle is the place where this occasion is happening. The music — a set that switches from rock to psychedelia to pop — bounces off the nearby buildings, including a low-rise apartment directly behind the Pickle's parking lot. It's 1:12 a.m. when Nagano, preparing for a three-song encore, asks if the crowd is ready for more. But after the first encore song, "Constant Surprises," the band announces the show is over.

The impromptu end of Little Dragon's debut that night was blamed on a noise curfew — even New Times reported as much in a review of the show — but eight years later, the club's co-owner Tomas Ceddia admits that wasn't true. Ceddia says when Little Dragon began to play its encore, the fire marshal showed up and shut the place down.

"We probably had 1,000 people in the parking lot and the entire club full," Ceddia says. "We got fined for being 14 times over our legal capacity."

EXPAND See more photos from the past ten years at the Electric Pickle here. Yukumi Nagano of Little Dragon performing at the Pickle in January 2011. Photo by Ian Witlen

Nights like that one, Ceddia laments, would be impossible at the Pickle now. That's because in the ten years since the club opened, the area has exploded with massive development, bringing in restaurants lit with Edison bulbs, residential towers touting "live/work" lifestyles, and Instagram-worthy ice-cream parlors that make the neighborhood feel more like a family-friendly tourist destination than a nightclub district.

"When we opened, we were really the only game in town in Wynwood," Renuart says. "There weren't even any other businesses really, except for a thrift shop."

The same wave of gentrification is also forcing the Pickle's closure: The celebrated dance music venue announced last summer it will close for good this June when its ten-year lease is up. According to Renuart, even if the club could score a new lease, any kind of rent increase would make running the Pickle financially unfeasible.

That the Electric Pickle survived for ten years is nothing short of a miracle. Facebook

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The closure of Wynwood's longest-running nightclub marks the end of an era for the neighborhood's nightlife scene. During its decade-long existence, the Pickle has been recognized globally by publications such as DJ Mag and Rolling Stone , both of which ranked it among the world's best dance clubs. DJs and artists have clamored to perform there, and on several occasions, it has facilitated Miami's introduction to acts including Blood Orange, Seth Troxler, and Maceo Plex, who would go on to become some of music's biggest DJs and indie acts. Along the way, however, the club faced many obstacles, including repeated visits by code enforcement, a dispute over its 5 a.m. liquor license, and an influx of neighbors who saw the club as more of a nuisance than the cultural icon it had quickly become.

Despite its imminent closure, the fact that the Electric Pickle survived for ten years is nothing short of a miracle. While hundreds of music venues and dance clubs have opened and closed in the face of waning popularity and shifting trends, Renuart and Ceddia have done what's nearly impossible in Miami's boom-and-bust nightlife biz: They've kept the Electric Pickle relevant all this time. But with its doors about to close for good, the club's owners say quirky, homegrown establishments like the Pickle are becoming an endangered species thanks to the city's increasing unaffordability and overdevelopment.

"You couldn't get me to move out of [Wynwood] any faster," Renuart says. "Tourists are being dropped off by the busload. We are kind of out of our element now. They are squeezing every cool and independent business out."

See more photos from the past ten years at the Electric Pickle here. Pickle co-owner Will Renuart in January 2011. Photo by Ciara Osorio

It's a warm spring day, and Will Renuart is drinking Veuve Clicquot by the pool at his mother's Coral Gables home not far from the University of Miami campus. He's living in the pool house while he gets ready to close the Pickle. His wife of one and half years, Sino, sits nearby, quietly looking at her phone, occasionally glancing up to crack a smile at the ramblings of her husband.

Renuart's childhood home played an important role in the Electric Pickle's existence. In 2008, after another club vacated the Wynwood building, Renuart — then a 35-year-old professional party boy and budding DJ — jumped at the opportunity to open his own. But without any collateral, no bank was willing to sign a loan. To afford the lease, Renuart asked his mother, Melinda, to take out a loan on her home.