The Underline’s first section is open in Brickell. It has butterflies and 30K plants.
The moment the construction fence around The Underline’s first finished segment in Brickell came down earlier this week, the people it’s meant for found it, and they took to the new “linear park” like fish to water.
Within minutes, Underline originator Meg Daly said, she could see through her office window as locals began strolling, jogging, scootering, dog-walking, cycling and lollygagging all along the alluring, garden-like urban trail beneath the Metrorail line, as naturally as if they’d been doing so for years. That’s even though the half-mile Brickell Backyard section — and its 30,000 native plants and trees — won’t formally open until Friday, and there was no sign directing them to it.
“That’s good design,” a proud and ebullient Daly said. “I think we nailed it.”
Daly happily greeted the first basketball player to appear on the multi-sport “flex court” that’s part of the Brickell Backyard’s Urban Gym. The lanky man dribbled, laughed and joked: “I think I just scored the first basket, but nobody saw it!”
Now even doubters can see, and touch, what the Underline fuss was all about for all these years. And there’s much more of it coming soon.
Friday’s official ribbon-cutting for the seven-block-long Brickell segment will signal not just the debut of the first realized section, but also mark an accelerating pace of work on The Underline. With full construction funding of $140 million secured, the ambitious project is set to soon stretch for 10 miles from the Miami River to Downtown Dadeland.
Under the terms of a $22 million federal grant the project received in 2019, the entire 10-mile length must be finished by 2025, Daly said. Opening of the Brickell section was delayed six months because the coronavirus pandemic sickened workers and interrupted supply chains. Still, it was completed on budget for $16 million, a figure that includes the cost of the unexpected delays.
A second phase, extending south for two-and-a-half miles from the Brickell section’s terminus at Coral Way, is now in design under a contract with Lead Engineering, a Miami firm that will also build that segment. It should break ground later this year, with expected completion in 2023, Daly said.
The final seven miles will be designed and built in one swoop, she said. That last piece includes a three-mile segment through the city of Coral Gables and along the front of the University of Miami campus.
The project demands complex engineering, design and construction work. The M-Path — a narrow tarmac strip beneath the Metrorail — had no lighting and no source of electrical power, for instance. Tons of topsoil must be spread through the linear park to support extensive planting.
All greenery is drought-resistant, and ground contours are designed to direct rain water to plants and trees because the new trail will have no irrigation system. The existing paths must be fully replaced because their winding turns create poor visibility around Metrorail columns.
On Tuesday morning, out for an inspection of the new Brickell segment after a short downpour, Daly chatted with a woman walking her two leashed French bulldogs, curiously sniffing out their new front yard. She pointed out extensive butterfly gardens where colorful monarchs, yellow sulphurs and endangered, black-winged iridescent atalas flitted about amid Brickell’s concrete forest of high-rises and Metrorail support columns. Caterpillars and cocoons promised more to come.
At bright-green game tables where Daly expects to soon see domino and chess players, people sat waiting in the shade for the Metrobus as, periodically, trains whooshed and rattled by overhead. Nearby, at a long, still-damp outdoor dining table with seating for 52, including spots for people in wheelchairs, someone sat eating a takeout lunch.
“I want to get the message across that everyone is welcome here,” Daly said. “That’s why there’s something for everyone.”
While “long-awaited” applies to many a promised urban amenity in Miami, the phrase seems especially apt for The Underline. It’s been eight years since Daly, a marketing executive with no relevant experience, dreamed up a concept for 10 miles of lushly landscaped, continuous bike and foot paths in place of the scruffy, mostly unused corridor underneath Metrorail’s elevated tracks. There, running from the Miami River south to Downtown Dadeland through dense city neighborhoods and suburbs, sat 120 acres of sorely underused public land “in the middle of everything,” Daly realized.
Inspired by New York’s then-new but massively successful High Line, Daly began pushing relentlessly to make the inverted Miami version happen. At first, she worked as a volunteer armed only with an idea and a handful of key supporters, including her father, lawyer and Arsht Center founder Parker Thomson, who died in 2017.
What seemed like pie-in-the-sky soon captured the imagination of elected officials, bureaucrats, corporate sponsors and the general public. With seed money from Miami, Coral Gables, South Miami and the Knight Foundation, among others, the High Line’s co-designers, James Corner Field Operations, were brought in to develop a master plan for the Underline. The concept turned into an unusually collaborative, monumental undertaking that’s only now reaching a crescendo.
Field Operations also designed the Brickell Backyard section, built by contractor Central Pedrail.
Miami-Dade County, which embraced the plan early on and is overseeing its construction, has rounded up about $140 million in grants, public earmarks and other commitments to fund construction of the full Underline. The money will come from county, state and federal governments, from developers with projects along the path and from the municipalities through which the Underline will pass — Miami, the Gables and South Miami.
The construction cost has risen by some $20 million because areas of contamination that require remediation were discovered along the route, Daly said.
OPERATING FUNDS NEEDED
Daly’s nonprofit, Friends of The Underline, is responsible for raising $3 million a year to maintain and manage the trail. A separate conservancy will run it.
The group has also raised an initial $1 million for temporary and permanent public art installations along the Underline. Friends also just named an advisory council of leading art world figures, including High Line art director Cecilia Alemani, and led by Miami curator Ximena Caminos, to help select artists and works.
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, an early supporter of The Underline as a commissioner, called the project “transformational” for the county as she stopped by the Brickell section to speak to a reporter. She credited Daly’s unflappable, cheerful persistence and record of steady progress.
Levine Cava and Daly note the project represents a hybrid of recreation and transportation that will connect neighborhoods and make it pleasant, easy and much safer for people to walk and cycle to Metrorail, Metromover and bus stations, and even to work, to shop or to dine. The trail also runs by parks, schools and alongside dense new mixed-use developments sprouting up at and near Metrorail stations on South Dixie Highway. That’s one reason the project has drawn consistent, unanimous support on the often-fractious county commission.
“The pent-up demand for this kind of green space in our city is palpable,” Levine Cava said, standing at the north end of The Underline, where it meets a short stretch of the still-in-progress Miami Riverwalk. “It takes a special sense of creativity and perseverance to pull something like this off, and that I attribute to Meg. Having this kind of collaboration requires a force of nature.”
To enhance safety and security, The Underline has its own dedicated security team. Now-perilous street crossings are already being redesigned with bright new markings and new pavement.
Signs are going up prohibiting right turns on red for motorists crossing the Underline route along South Dixie Highway to prevent collisions when cyclists and pedestrians have the right of way. Elevated bridge crossings are possible at some major intersections, including LeJeune Road, but that has not been decided.
Eventually, The Underline could be a key piece of the contemplated Miami Loop, a pedestrian and cycling circuit that would include the Riverwalk and the also long-awaited Ludlam Trail. That last project, which is just getting underway, will convert a disused rail corridor running from the Dadeland South Metrorail station to the edge of Miami International Airport and the Miami River.
A HIGH BAR
The Brickell Backyard segment sets a high-bar template for the rest of The Underline.
Its seven blocks have been transformed from wasted, threadbare space to verdant landscape, with plenty of people-pleasing features, lots of places to sit, and significantly enhanced street crossings, including new traffic signals at some intersections. A new element is lighting, something the old path it replaces lacked entirely. Another first: it boasts free Wi-Fi from Hotwire.com.
Along most of its length, as space permits, paved paths for people on foot and people riding bikes are separated for safety. Wide new sidewalks run along both sides at the Brickell Metrorail station, in part the result of putting Southwest First Avenue on a “road diet” by eliminating a lane of auto traffic. That strategy also slows motorists down, making the environment safer and more pleasant for Underline users.
The half-mile section is divided into four quadrants. At the north end is the River Room, with an expansive view of the Miami River and a dog park. Next comes the Urban Gym and its flex court, a running track and exercise equipment.
The Promenade features the game and dining tables as well as a plaza and sound stage whose maintenance and operation will be underwritten by FPL. In the coming weeks, the plaza will be the site of yoga, meditation and tai-chi classes for up to 100 people, as well as performances by Miami City Ballet and the O, Miami poetry festival. All are free.
At the south end, the Oolite room is lined by natural limestone outcroppings and butterfly gardens.
The trail will also connect to the abutting Simpson Park, now a fenced-off green space that will be dramatically refurbished and opened up under an agreement between the city and a developer building a tower next to it.
That “something for everyone” approach was honed in dozens of public meetings and online sessions that generated ideas for what people wanted on the Underline, Daly and Friends of The Underline vice president Kieran Bowers noted.
The result was a design that reclaims public space with a swagger and “really puts people first,” said Bowers, president of Swire Properties, developers of Brickell Key and Brickell City Centre and among the first corporate Underline supporters.
The Underline, he said, could put Miami on a par with cities able to boast about singular, defining civic projects that enhance livability for their citizens while burnishing their reps. Those include the High Line and the outdoor escalators built to connect neighborhoods on steep hills in Hong Kong that have generated new urban life.
“It’s been so well thought out,” Bowers said of The Underline. “It should be the envy of other cities.”
This story was originally published February 26, 2021 at 7:00 AM.