The Half-Mile Brickell Residents Call "The Underline" Is About to Become Something Else Entirely
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Ask anyone who lives near the Brickell Metrorail station what The Underline is, and you'll get a confident, half-right answer: it's the park under the train tracks with the basketball court, the sculpture garden, and the Saturday market. That description is accurate. It's also describing about five percent of the project.
The first phase of The Underline, called the Brickell Backyard, runs a half-mile from the Miami River to SW 13th Street in the Brickell area, and opened on February 26, 2021. Most Brickell residents have treated that half-mile as the finished product because, functionally, it has been. For five years, it's where you go for a run, a pickup game, or a Saturday morning errand. What's changing this year isn't another ribbon-cutting on a segment nobody uses. It's the completion of the piece that turns that dead-end backyard into the entrance of a ten-mile corridor. The mechanism worth understanding: the park you already know isn't getting nicer. It's getting a destination.
The Brickell Backyard includes the Typoe Sculpture Garden, a sound stage plaza, an Urban Gym with a basketball court, workout stations, and a running track, along with butterfly gardens surrounding gathering spaces. That's Phase 1, and it's the part baked into most people's mental map of the neighborhood.
Phase 2 is where the gap in local knowledge usually shows up. Phase 2 of The Underline opened to the public on April 24, 2024, connecting SW 13th Street to SW 19th Avenue and linking Phase 1 from the Miami River to the historic Roads, Shenandoah, and Silver Bluff neighborhoods in the City of Miami. That segment did more than extend the path. It rehabilitated over 100,000 native plants and trees and added the Hammock Playground, Vizcaya Station Plaza, and a Rain Garden. It also runs directly alongside Simpson Park Hammock, one of the few remaining pieces of the area's native tropical hardwood hammock along the Miami Rock Ridge, which means the stretch south of the Backyard isn't just more trail. It's a walk through the last visible fragment of what this part of Miami looked like before any of it was Brickell.
If you haven't walked that far south, you're not alone, and that's precisely the point. The Underline has been expanding for two years right past the edge of what most residents consider "the park."
Here's the part that changes the math. On September 12, 2023, The Underline reached a major milestone when ground was broken to begin construction on the final 7.36-mile segment, connecting SW 19th Avenue near the Vizcaya Metrorail station to the Dadeland South Metrorail station. Miami-Dade County awarded the construction contract for that phase to NV2A Central Joint Venture on October 18, 2022, and the county's own tracking page still lists the target as expected completion in 2026. SOMI Magazine puts a finer point on it, reporting the corridor is expected to be complete in fall 2026, as part of a $120 million project. The two sources agree on the year and diverge only on the season, which for a Brickell resident planning a longer ride this winter is a useful bit of imprecision to know about rather than a contradiction to worry over.
Once that segment closes, the corridor stops being a Brickell-only amenity. The Underline begins at the Miami River in Brickell, where it connects with the Miami River Greenway, then runs south beneath the Metrorail through Brickell, Coral Gables, and Kendall, terminating at Dadeland South station. From there, it's planned to connect with the proposed Ludlam Trail and already links to the 22-mile South Dade Trail along the former Florida East Coast Railway corridor to Florida City, forming a continuous 32-mile off-road path for pedestrians and cyclists. That's the difference between a neighborhood park and a spine. Today, a Brickell resident who bikes south hits a project boundary near Vizcaya. By the end of this year, the same ride could plausibly continue into Coral Gables, through South Miami, and eventually connect toward Kendall and beyond without ever merging into traffic.
You don't have to wait for the ribbon-cutting to feel the difference. In 2025, a free bicycle sharing program began operating along The Underline corridor, introducing a network of bike stations developed in partnership with The Underline and Miami-Dade County to promote active transportation along the trail. That's a meaningfully different experience than the one most residents remember from a year ago, when the trail was something you walked to and from, not something you picked up a bike from midway through.
The programming has also outgrown its early identity as an occasional pop-up. A weekly Saturday market runs through October 10, 2026, bringing fresh produce, prepared foods, and artisan goods from local vendors together beneath The Underline in Brickell. If you haven't made it yet, that's a two-month window, not an open-ended one. Separately, a free weekly yoga class runs on Saturdays through December 18, 2027, bringing movement and mindfulness to The Underline's Inter Stage in Brickell, and those sessions are powered by Baptist Health, with classes held Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings. A hospital system underwriting recreational programming on a public trail says something about how the project has moved from parks-department curiosity to institutional fixture.
The leadership behind it has shifted too, in a way that signals the project is entering an operations phase rather than a construction one. The founding vision for the project came from Meg Daly, who for over a decade served as the volunteer CEO of The Friends of the Underline. In January 2025, after an extensive search, Eulois Cleckley was introduced as the new CEO of The Friends of the Underline, bringing 20 years of transportation leadership after previously serving as director and CEO of the Miami-Dade Department of Transportation & Public Works. Bringing in the county's own former transportation chief to run the nonprofit is the kind of hire you make when the job shifts from building something to running it at scale.
The Underline isn't the only thing that changed this year on the Brickell peninsula. For a stretch of 2025, Brickell Key's dinner options thinned out considerably. Local coverage noted that after La Mar's owner began a major renovation of the Mandarin Oriental Miami in May 2025, the island lost its most obvious dinner destination, leaving residents to cross the bridge into Brickell proper for most evenings out.
That gap closed in April 2026. The Mexican, a contemporary Mexican restaurant blending refined cuisine with waterfront design, officially opened to the public on April 9, 2026, in Brickell Key. The space, at 601 Brickell Key Drive, spans more than 10,000 square feet and accommodates approximately 330 guests across multiple dining rooms, private spaces, and outdoor terraces overlooking Biscayne Bay. It's just across the bridge from the Brickell Backyard, which makes it the kind of place you end up at after a run rather than one you plan a special trip around, and that's exactly the register a neighborhood restaurant needs to hit to actually get used.
The story most people tell about The Underline is that Brickell got a nice park a few years ago. The more accurate version is that Brickell got the entrance to a corridor that's still under construction three neighborhoods away, and that entrance is about to start meaning something. If your running route, your bike commute, or your Saturday errands have stayed within that original half-mile, this is the year that calculation changes. The market ends in October. The yoga sessions run into 2027. The trail south of Vizcaya is scheduled to open sometime this fall. None of those dates are interchangeable, and knowing which one applies to your plans is the difference between waiting for something that already happened and missing something that's about to.
If you're the kind of person who tracks details like a phase completion date or a CEO hire at a nonprofit trail organization, you're probably also the kind of person other people in this neighborhood ask when they're thinking about buying or selling nearby. When that conversation comes up, the team at Golan Group Miami is a reasonable person to loop in, whether the question is about a unit two blocks from the trail or a property in one of the corridor's other neighborhoods entirely.
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