The Underline Already Runs a Full Week in Brickell. Phase 3 Is Still Catching Up.

Saturday morning at Brickell City Centre Plaza starts the same way it has for a while now: folding tables going up under the Metromover track by nine, a bread vendor unpacking loaves before the coffee line forms, someone tuning a guitar for the live set that always seems to start around eleven. A few blocks south, mats are already unrolling at the Inter Stage for the free weekly yoga class. By Sunday, a different crowd shows up for Flow Farmers Market, trading the corporate plaza for a looser, dog-friendly gathering built around local makers and a DJ.

None of this is new. It has been happening, in some form, for years. What is easy to miss if you only think about The Underline as a headline project is that the half-mile stretch running this calendar, called Brickell Backyard, has been open and operating since February 2021. The 10-mile corridor everyone talks about as a future amenity already has a present-tense version, and it is running a fuller week than most people give it credit for.

The Half-Mile That's Already Finished

Brickell Backyard sits between the Miami River and SW 13th Street, right next to the Brickell Metrorail station, and it was designed as a sequence of distinct zones rather than one continuous path. The River Room, the Gym, the Promenade, and the Oolite Room each do something different: the Gym section between SW 7th and 8th Streets holds an outdoor half-court, a mini soccer pitch, and fitness equipment along a running track, while the Promenade between SW 8th Street and the Brickell Metrorail station carries the sound stage and plaza where the health and wellness programming happens.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A trail is a single thing you walk. A sequence of rooms is a set of reasons to come back on different days for different purposes, which is closer to how Brickell Backyard is actually used. The same half-mile that hosts a Saturday morning crowd shopping for produce also hosts a Wednesday evening group run and a weekday lunch break for someone working nearby who just needs fifteen minutes outside.

The programming has held up for years now, not months. The Saturday market beneath the Underline is scheduled to run weekly through October 10, 2026. A free community fitness class combining strength training with a guided group run continues through October 18, 2026. A monthly gathering for runners, joggers, and walkers moves through the corridor on the third Wednesday of the month through September 16, 2026. The yoga class at the Inter Stage is booked out through December 2027. This is not a pop-up calendar. It is closer to a fixture.

Three Markets, Three Different Moods

The part that surprises people who assume Brickell has one farmers market is that it actually has three, each with a different character, all within easy walking distance of each other.

Two of the three land on Saturday, but they are not the same Saturday. One sits under the Metromover at Brickell City Centre with a retail polish and a regular live set. The other sets up a few blocks over, directly beneath the Metrorail tracks, with a rougher, vendor-first feel. Sunday belongs entirely to Flow, which trades both of those for a dog-friendly, workshop-heavy gathering. Most Miami neighborhoods have one market and a fixed rhythm around it. Brickell has built three overlapping ones into a half-mile radius, which changes the weekend calculation from "is there a market today" to "which one fits today."

The Quiet Half of the Loop

Just south of Brickell Backyard, tucked against South Miami Avenue, sits a piece of Brickell that predates all of this by more than a century and asks for none of the same energy. Simpson Park is a 7.8-acre tropical hardwood hammock, one of the last remaining fragments of the Brickell Hammock that once stretched from the Miami River down to Coconut Grove. It was established in 1913 by a group of local preservationists and named for Charles Torrey Simpson, a botanist who first came to Miami in 1881 to study the region's native flora and fauna.

Where the trail's rooms are built around programming, Simpson Park is built around the absence of it. Live oaks, strangler figs, Jamaica dogwoods, silver palms, and gumbo limbo trees form a closed canopy over pathways that see free nature walk tours on weekends but otherwise stay quiet. More than 160 plant species live inside its boundary, some of them rare or threatened. It is the kind of place that exists specifically because someone decided over a hundred years ago that Brickell should keep at least one piece of what it looked like before any of the towers went up.

The pairing is what makes this stretch of the neighborhood distinctive. Within a few blocks, a resident can choose between a Saturday built entirely around scheduled activity and an hour spent under a canopy that has nothing scheduled at all. Few sections of Brickell offer both options this close together.

What Phase 3 Actually Changes

The reason The Underline still reads as unfinished to a lot of people is that, technically, it is. Phase 2 opened in April 2024, extending the corridor 2.14 miles from SW 13th Street through the historic Roads, Shenandoah, and Silver Bluff neighborhoods to SW 19th Avenue, just south of the Vizcaya Metrorail station. That segment rehabilitated more than 100,000 native plants and trees and added the Hammock Playground, the Vizcaya Station Plaza, and a rain garden, sitting directly adjacent to Simpson Park Hammock itself.

Phase 3 is the big one: a 7.36-mile segment connecting SW 19th Avenue near Vizcaya station all the way to Dadeland South, awarded to a construction joint venture in October 2022 and targeted for completion sometime in 2026. Once finished, it will link Brickell to Coral Gables and Kendall along a continuous corridor, eventually connecting to the planned Ludlam Trail and the existing 22-mile South Dade Trail.

For a Brickell resident, that completion date matters less for daily life than it might seem. The stretch you actually use, the half-mile with the markets and the yoga and the group runs, has been open and evolving since 2021. The one change worth tracking now is the bike-share network Inter launched along the corridor in 2025, which put stations across the built sections of the trail and made it realistic to treat The Underline as a way to get somewhere rather than just a place to stop. That, more than a ribbon-cutting still to come, is what's likely to change how the trail fits into a normal week.

Living With the Part That's Already Built

The instinct with a project this size is to wait for the finished version before deciding it matters. Brickell Backyard argues against that instinct. Five years of continuous programming, three separate markets, a bike-share network, and a nature preserve older than the Metrorail itself are already sitting in a half-mile radius, running a fuller calendar than most finished parks manage. The other nine and a half miles will matter when they arrive. What's already here has mattered for a while.

If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this means for your own plans, whether you already call Brickell home or you're thinking about what comes next, The DeFortuna Group can walk you through it with the same level of detail. Schedule a private consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.