For five years, walking south on The Underline out of Brickell has meant walking to an end. Half a mile of park, then a fence, then a plan. That changes this year.
When Phase 3 opens, the Brickell Backyard stops being a destination and becomes an on-ramp. The same trail you use to walk the dog before work will run, uninterrupted, from the Miami River to Dadeland South, and from there onto the South Dade Trail for a continuous 32-mile off-road corridor. If you live in a Brickell tower and have been treating the Underline as a nice amenity around SW 8th Street, the geography of your summer is about to widen considerably.
What Actually Changes in 2026
Phase 1, the half-mile Brickell Backyard from the Miami River to SW 13th Street, opened on February 26, 2021. Phase 2 added 2.14 miles through the Roads, Shenandoah, and Silver Bluff neighborhoods to SW 19th Avenue just south of Vizcaya station, opening on April 24, 2024. Both are already yours.
The final piece is the long one. Phase 3 runs 7.36 miles from SW 19th Avenue near the Vizcaya Metrorail station to the Dadeland South Metrorail station, with construction awarded to NV2A Central Joint Venture in October 2022 and completion expected in 2026. Total construction costs for Phase 3 are expected to exceed $92 million, drawn from a mix of federal, state, and local funds.
The build isn't a paved path with a few benches. The county says the final segment will add about 1,800 trees and roughly 350,000 native plants, along with bioswales, Dark Sky-compliant LED lighting, hydration stations, and upgrades to intersections intended to improve safety and drainage. For a Brickell resident, the practical effect is that the trail south finally becomes usable in July heat: shade, water, and lit crossings, not sun-blasted swales.
The Brickell Backyard, Reintroduced
If you moved into a Brickell tower during construction, you may have written off the Backyard as landscape. It is a fully programmed park, and most residents underuse it.
The Brickell Backyard section includes the Typoe Sculpture Garden, a sound stage plaza, an Urban Gym with basketball court, workout stations, and a running track, plus butterfly gardens with native plants around the gathering spaces. The stage itself is 700 square feet, with a 2,300-square-foot plaza where audiences can sit for yoga classes or small concerts. At the north end, the River Room is a communal space with a dog walk and native vegetation directly on the Miami River.
Programming has become the point. A partial calendar for a Brickell resident who wants to actually use the park this summer:
Series | Where | Runs Through |
|---|---|---|
Weekly Saturday yoga | Inter Stage, Brickell Backyard | Dec 18, 2027 |
Weekly Thursday yoga | Vizcaya Station Plaza | Feb 11, 2027 |
Free community fitness class | Along The Underline | Oct 18, 2026 |
Those are free, weekly, and quietly under-attended. If you have been paying a boutique studio for what an outdoor class at the Inter Stage delivers, the math is worth revisiting.
Who Paid For the Programming, and Why That Matters
A trail with no host slowly becomes a trail with no maintenance. The Underline solved that early. The Underline's exclusive Lifestyle Sponsor Inter&Co kicked off on December 10, 2024, sponsoring three amenity areas, three Inter&Co Cafes, an Inter&Co BikeShare fleet of more than 100 ebikes, and the Brickell Stage Community Screen.
Two things follow from that. First, the espresso stop at the north end of your run is now a fixture, not a pop-up. Second, the ebike fleet means the Coconut Grove and Coral Gables sections of the trail are reachable without owning a bike or hauling one down the tower elevator. When Phase 3 opens, that fleet becomes the fastest way for a Brickell resident to get to Vizcaya, Dadeland, or the South Dade Trail without a car.
Local reporting notes that the 2026 Sneaker Ball raised more than $1 million for programming, while recent openings have added dog-friendly play areas and free fitness classes that keep the corridor busy from early morning into the evening. The Friends of The Underline, founded by Meg Daly, remains the operating organization, and Daly teamed up with James Corner Field Operations, the project lead for New York City's High Line, to design the park; her Friends of The Underline organization continues working to make the vision a reality. That design lineage is why the Brickell section feels calibrated rather than municipal.
A Weekend Loop That Only Makes Sense After Phase 3
The Brickell park inventory has always been fragmented: a historic mausoleum here, a Tequesta site there, a bay-facing lawn a mile south. Phase 3 stitches those into a single walkable morning.
A loop worth building into your summer routine, in order:
- Start at the River Room at the north end of the Brickell Backyard, coffee in hand from one of the Inter&Co Cafes.
- Walk south through the Typoe Sculpture Garden and the Urban Gym plaza to SW 13th Street.
- Cut east one block to Brickell Park at 501 Brickell Avenue, where pre-Columbian sand mounds and intact midden deposits associated with the Tequesta occupation sit alongside the Brickell family mausoleum, the only surviving structure associated with one of Miami's most important families, listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.
- Continue south to Simpson Park Hammock, one of the last remnants of the Miami Rock Ridge tropical hardwood hammock that used to cover this ground.
- From SW 19th Avenue, pick up an Inter&Co ebike and continue south on the newly opened Phase 3 through the Rain Garden and Hammock Playground toward Vizcaya Station Plaza.
- Return via Metrorail from Vizcaya to Brickell station, which drops you back at the Backyard.
Before this year, that sequence broke at step 4. After Phase 3 opens, it doesn't.
The Number Worth Reading Twice
The Underline is a 10-mile linear park and urban trail that runs from Brickell to Dadeland and now draws nearly 3 million visits a year. That figure predates Phase 3.
For context on what completion means: the 10-mile-long Underline will stretch from Downtown Miami to the Dadeland South Metrorail Station near Dadeland Mall in Kendall, passing through Coconut Grove, Coral Gables and other communities and creating a total of 120 acres of tropical gardens and outdoor recreation space. And at Dadeland South, the Underline connects with the proposed Ludlam Trail linear park and with the 22-mile South Dade Trail, which follows the former Florida East Coast Railway right-of-way to Florida City, together forming a continuous 32-mile off-road corridor for pedestrians and cyclists.
Read that sentence as a Brickell resident. Your building's front door is, functionally, the north trailhead of a 32-mile car-free path that ends in Florida City. That is not the amenity the Backyard was sold as in 2021.
What This Doesn't Change
The Brickell Backyard is not becoming a different park. Same butterfly gardens, same dog walk, same sound stage, same shade under the Metrorail guideway at 3 p.m. What changes is the meaning of a Saturday morning walk that decides to keep going.
For anyone who has been in Brickell long enough to remember when the M-Path was the only route south, the completion year is worth marking on the calendar. The Underline converts a pre-existing bicycle and pedestrian path known as the MetroPath or M-Path; the first phase in Brickell was completed on February 26, 2021, the second phase opened on April 24, 2024, and the third and final phase is scheduled for completion in 2026. Fifteen years of planning, three ribbon-cuttings, one continuous trail.
If your Brickell mornings have narrowed to the same three-block loop, this is the summer to lengthen them.
The Paulie Group advises buyers and sellers across Brickell's waterfront towers and branded residences, and we spend as much time on the trail as we do in the buildings. If you'd like a considered read on how neighborhood infrastructure is reshaping value in specific Brickell addresses, or a quiet conversation about your own position in the market, contact us.
