Brickell Pocket Parks and the Stories Behind Their Survival

Why is there a marble tomb sitting on the front lawn of a condo tower on Brickell Avenue?

The Icon Brickell valet stand is close enough that guests waiting for their car can read the plaque. The structure belongs to William and Mary Brickell, the couple whose trading post at the mouth of the Miami River gave the neighborhood its name. Their bodies were moved out in 1946, relocated by their daughter Maud Brickell to what is now Caballero Rivero Woodlawn North Park Cemetery. The empty mausoleum stayed. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989, which means it legally cannot be removed. Every building permit near it has had to design around a monument to two people who are no longer inside it.

That one fact is a decent enough curiosity for a slow afternoon. It also points to one reason some of Brickell's open land stayed undeveloped: archaeological discoveries made development a legal problem.

The deal that fell apart in the city's favor

The mausoleum sits inside Mary Brickell Park, a 2.5-acre parcel at 501 Brickell Avenue that the Brickell family donated to the city in 1921 specifically to protect the tomb. For most of the 20th century, that was the whole story. Then, in 1989, the city and the Brickell family struck an agreement: the parcel would revert to the family for development, and in exchange the family would acquire a separate piece of land at Brickell Point that would become a public park. Nobody involved in that negotiation knew what was actually sitting in that separate parcel.

In 1998, during demolition monitoring for the Brickell Apartments about 1,000 feet north of the mausoleum, crews uncovered the Miami Circle: a 38-foot ring of holes and basins cut directly into the limestone bedrock, the footprint of a pre-Columbian structure that archaeologists believe may have been a Tequesta capital, dated to somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 years old. The discovery revealed that the land at the center of the swap held a nationally significant archaeological site, rather than being a blank development parcel. The city had already sued in 1994 to force the family to honor the original swap.

The mausoleum's park almost went the same way the family's land didn't. In 1999, the City of Miami voted to sell Brickell Park outright, splitting the proceeds with the Brickell family. Before that sale closed, archaeologists doing due diligence on the parcel found something the 1989 agreement never accounted for: a Tequesta cemetery, likely dating from 500 BC to AD 750, with burial density high enough that researchers concluded the site had been deliberately chosen as a graveyard. The sale stopped. According to the city's own historic designation report, the discovery of those human remains is the specific reason the park has remained undeveloped since.

Put plainly, Brickell's open parcels have several histories: some reflect deliberate preservation, land donations or public acquisition; others were protected after archaeological discoveries.

What's actually still in the ground

The Miami Circle site sits within what researchers call the Brickell Point site and Miami Midden 2, part of a Tequesta village and political center that once extended from the Florida Keys north to the current Broward-Palm Beach county line. The midden layers there contain food remains, pottery, and imported items like basaltic celts and galena, evidence of trade networks reaching well beyond South Florida.

Mary Brickell Park's cemetery is a separate find from the Circle, located about 1,000 feet south. Test excavations at the Circle itself turned up only a few bone and tooth fragments, which is part of why archaeologists concluded the main burial ground was actually under what is now the park. Rumors persist, according to the same designation report, that at least one historic Brickell family grave may still be located somewhere within the park boundaries, separate from the marble mausoleum everyone can see.

A short comparison of what's actually sitting on Brickell's handful of open parcels:

Simpson Park is a particularly striking example of deliberate preservation on this list, and it's worth sitting with why.

The hammock that outlasted everything around it

Before Brickell was a skyline, the whole area from the Miami River south to Coconut Grove was covered by a tropical hardwood hammock. Almost none of it is left. Simpson Park Hammock, a 7.8-acre preserve between Brickell and the Roads, is one of only three surviving fragments, alongside Alice Wainwright Park and a small remnant on Virginia Key.

Unlike the archaeological parks, this one was saved on purpose. A group of local preservationists set aside 5.5 acres in 1913 under the name Jungle Park, and the city renamed it in 1927 to honor Charles Torrey Simpson, the naturalist who had been documenting South Florida's plant life since arriving in 1881. It now holds over 160 plant species, with at least 96 of them native and several classified as threatened or endangered, and it has been recognized by the Old-Growth Forest Network for the section of canopy that predates the park itself.

A tropical hardwood hammock that once ran the length of the neighborhood now survives on 7.8 acres, wedged between towers that didn't exist when the trees did.

Recent visitor accounts describe a koi pond, a visitor center housed in an old stone building, and naturalist-led walks now offered on weekends, though the park keeps limited hours, so a morning visit before the heat sets in tends to work better than an afternoon one.

A newer name on an older lawn

Not every park on this list is old. A small pocket park just south of Immanuel Lutheran Church on Brickell Avenue was dedicated in 2012 as 1814 Brickell Park, built around a 9/11 memorial that includes an actual steel beam recovered from the World Trade Center. In May 2023, the city renamed it Tibor Hollo Park. It's easy to walk past without noticing either the memorial or the name change, since the space itself is modest, a median-width strip more than a destination.

None of these parks were built to be attractions. They exist for different reasons, including archaeological discoveries, deliberate preservation, land donations and public acquisition.

How the pieces connect on foot

Nothing here requires a car, and the distances are short enough to link into one walk:

• Start at Mary Brickell Park on Brickell Avenue to see the mausoleum and read the historical marker describing the Tequesta village that once ran along both sides of the river.
• Walk north about 1,000 feet toward Icon Brickell for the Miami Circle site itself.
• Cut west a few blocks to Simpson Park Hammock for the koi pond and the old-growth canopy, timing it for a weekend morning if the naturalist walk is a draw.
• Continue south past Tibor Hollo Park on Brickell Avenue for the 9/11 memorial.
• For those with more time, Alice Wainwright Park sits across the Rickenbacker Causeway side, offering the same hammock lineage on a bayfront setting with room to sit.

None of these stops will show up on a map labeled as Brickell's park system, because there isn't one in the conventional sense. There's a mausoleum that can't be moved, a cemetery that stopped a land sale, a circle that stopped a swap deal, and a hammock that a handful of people decided to protect before anyone thought to ask permission. The towers grew up around all of it.

If any of this history has you looking differently at what's underfoot in Brickell, or wondering what it means for a specific address, The DeFortuna Group is glad to talk through it. Schedule a private consultation.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.