On a recent Saturday afternoon under the Metrorail tracks near Brickell Station, a woman filling a canvas bag with produce turned to her friend and said something like, "It'll be nice once they finish the Underline." She was standing on it. The market stalls, the shade structure, the stretch of path beneath her feet, all of it had been open for years. She wasn't wrong that construction is still happening somewhere along the corridor. She was wrong about where.
That mix-up is worth pausing on, because it says something true about how Brickell residents talk about their own neighborhood. The Underline has become shorthand for a project that's always almost done, always a headline away from finally arriving. Meanwhile the segment sitting directly inside Brickell's borders has been running its own calendar of programming for more than five years, and most people who live within walking distance of it still describe it in the future tense.
The Segment With the Ribbon Cutting Nobody Remembers
The Underline is being built in three phases, and only one of them touches Brickell directly. That piece, known as Brickell Backyard, runs a half mile from the Miami River to Southwest 13th Street, right next to Brickell Station. It opened to the public on February 26, 2021.
Phase 2 came next, a 2.14-mile stretch that opened April 24, 2024, extending the trail through The Roads, Shenandoah, and Silver Bluff to Southwest 19th Avenue. That's the piece most people mean when they mention the Hammock Playground or the Rain Garden.
Phase 3 is the one still under construction: a 7.36-mile segment running from Southwest 19th Avenue near the Vizcaya Metrorail station all the way to Dadeland South, connecting through Coral Gables and Kendall. Miami-Dade County has that segment slated for completion sometime in 2026, and it's the piece generating the "Underline is almost done" coverage that keeps circulating.
Here's the part that gets lost. That headline is about Kendall and Coral Gables, not about Brickell. The piece with your zip code on it finished construction back when a half mile of new pathway next to a Metrorail station was still novel enough to warrant a ribbon cutting. It has had more than five years to become something other than news. It became routine instead, which is a different kind of achievement, just a quieter one.
What's Actually Running Under the Tracks This Fall
Routine, in this case, means a standing weekly schedule that functions less like a park amenity and more like neighborhood infrastructure you can set a clock by. As of this fall, that includes:
- A Saturday farmers market beneath the Underline, running through October 10, 2026, with produce, prepared foods, and goods from local vendors
- A free weekly yoga class at the Underline's Inter Stage, held every Saturday
- A free community fitness class combining strength training with a guided group run, offered on select days through October 18, 2026
- A monthly community run on the third Wednesday of the month, open to runners, joggers, and walkers moving through Brickell together
- A free bike-share program along the corridor, launched in 2025 in partnership with Miami-Dade County, giving residents a way to cover the trail's length without owning a bike
None of this reads like a pilot program or a one-off activation. It reads like a park that expects the same people to show up next Saturday, and the Saturday after that. A farmers market with a defined end date and a recurring yoga class with a fixed weekly slot are the kind of commitments an organization only makes when attendance has already proven it's worth the effort.
Half a Mile Away, an Older Kind of Green Space
Walk a few blocks off South Miami Avenue and the trail's manicured plantings give way to something considerably older. Simpson Park sits on 7.8 acres between Brickell and The Roads, and it holds one of the last surviving fragments of the Brickell Hammock, a tropical hardwood forest that once stretched continuously from the Miami River down to Coconut Grove. Only two other pieces of that original hammock still exist, one at Alice Wainwright Park and a small remnant on Virginia Key.
The park's history predates the neighborhood's current skyline by more than a century. A group of local preservationists set the land aside in 1913 under the name Jungle Park. It was renamed in 1927 to honor Charles Torrey Simpson, a botanist who first arrived in Miami in 1881 to study the region's native plant life. Today the park protects more than 160 plant species, including 15 endangered and 9 threatened species, growing beneath a canopy of live oaks, strangler figs, and gumbo limbo trees that have never been cleared for development.
Simpson Park offers free naturalist-guided walks on weekends, a detail that turns a quiet stroll into something closer to a standing invitation to actually learn what's growing around you. And its location isn't incidental to the trail system next door. The park sits directly along the stretch of the Underline's second phase that includes the Hammock Playground, meaning the newest piece of Brickell's public realm was built to run right past the oldest one.
The Loop That Doesn't Require a Bridge
Ask most Brickell residents where to go outside on a Saturday and the answer usually involves crossing a bridge. Bayfront Park sits across the water in Downtown. The beach means a causeway drive. Both are fine options, but neither one is actually in the neighborhood, and treating them as the default outdoor plan means overlooking what's already sitting inside walking distance.
The market, the yoga class, the fitness session, and Simpson Park's naturalist walks all fall within about a half mile of each other, connected by a trail that requires no car and no bridge crossing. That's not a future amenity waiting on Phase 3 to unlock it. It's available this weekend, the way it's been available most weekends since Brickell Backyard opened.
Phase 3 finishing in 2026 will matter enormously for Kendall and Coral Gables, extending a continuous trail more than seven miles further south and eventually linking to the Ludlam Trail. It's a genuinely significant piece of regional infrastructure. But treating it as the thing that will finally make the Underline real for Brickell gets the story backwards. Brickell already got its finished product. It just arrived quietly enough, and long enough ago, that most people stopped noticing it as new.
The next time someone mentions waiting for the Underline to be finished while standing under the Metrorail tracks on a Saturday afternoon, it's worth pointing out gently that they're already there.
If you're thinking about what life actually looks like day to day in Brickell, or in any of the neighborhoods across Pinecrest, Palmetto Bay, and Coral Gables, the team at Elena Kemper Group spends its time paying attention to exactly this kind of detail. Contact Us to talk through what a neighborhood really offers before you decide where to put down roots.
