Saturday morning under the tracks at Brickell Backyard looks the same way it has for years. Vendors set up folding tables at the Inter Stage for the weekly market, laying out produce and prepared foods while joggers cut past on the paved loop. A few dogs drag their owners toward the River Room at the park's northern edge, where the shade holds until almost ten. Somebody is always shooting free throws at the flex court between SW 7th and 8th Streets.
None of that is new. What is new, and what most people walking through it on a Saturday have not fully registered yet, is what happens at the other end of the line. For five years, this half-mile has been a very good, very self-contained backyard. By the time 2026 closes out, it stops being self-contained.
Five Years of a Very Good Half-Mile
Brickell Backyard opened to the public on February 26, 2021, running a half-mile from the Miami River to SW 13th Street, right alongside the Brickell Metrorail station. It was the first built piece of The Underline, the linear park a Miami nonprofit has spent more than a decade turning into a ten-mile trail beneath the Metrorail guideway. The idea started small and personal: Friends of The Underline founder Meg Daly began walking the space under the tracks in 2013 while she recovered from a double arm fracture, and the empty land she noticed on those walks became the seed for the whole project.
What residents actually got out of that first half-mile is a set of specific, named rooms rather than one generic strip of green:
- The River Room at the northern terminus, a dog walk and native-plant garden right on the Miami River
- The Urban Gym, between SW 7th and 8th Streets, with a flex court for basketball and soccer plus outdoor fitness equipment and a running track
- The Promenade, stretching to the Brickell Metrorail entrance, with a sound stage and plaza used for yoga classes and small concerts
- The Typoe Sculpture Garden, one of the park's public art stops
That mix is why the space gets used the way it does. It is not a park you visit. It is a park you route through on the way to something else, which is exactly the behavior Miami-Dade officials say they were designing for when they built it: a piece of infrastructure disguised as a backyard.
The Fence at SW 19th Avenue
Here is the part that changes the math for anyone who lives near it. Right now, if you follow The Underline south past Brickell Backyard, you reach Phase 2, which opened April 24, 2024 and covers 2.14 miles connecting SW 13th Street through the Roads, Shenandoah, and Silver Bluff neighborhoods to a plaza near the Vizcaya Metrorail station. Along the way you pass the Hammock Playground at SW 15th Road and SW 1st Avenue, a rain garden at US 1 and SW 17th Avenue, and a small meditation labyrinth. It is a genuinely pleasant 2.7 miles of trail.
Then it stops. Phase 3, the 7.36-mile stretch that would carry the trail from SW 19th Avenue near Vizcaya all the way to the Dadeland South Metrorail station, has been under construction since a September 2023 groundbreaking and is not yet finished.
| Phase | Status as of September 2026 | Length | Connects |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 1, Brickell Backyard | Open since Feb. 2021 | 0.5 miles | Miami River to SW 13th St. |
| Phase 2, Hammock Trail | Open since April 2024 | 2.14 miles | SW 13th St. to Vizcaya station |
| Phase 3 | Under construction, targeted for completion this year | 7.36 miles | Vizcaya station to Dadeland South, through Coral Gables and South Miami |
For anyone who has tried to bike or walk from Brickell toward Coral Gables or South Miami, that gap is the whole story. The trail has been a strong 2.7-mile amenity with a fence at the end of it. Once Phase 3 closes, according to Miami-Dade County's own project page, it becomes a continuous ten-mile corridor linking eight Metrorail stations and putting an estimated 107,000 residents within a ten-minute walk of it.
What the Extra 7.36 Miles Actually Buys You
The $109 million Phase 3 build is not just more of the same pavement. County planners describe twelve distinct amenity areas along the stretch, including a bark park, basketball and pickleball courts, curated food and beverage concessions, and micro-forests planted with species from the Pine Rockland, Hardwood Hammock, and Wet Prairie ecosystems that once covered the area. The build calls for 1,800 new trees and palms and 350,000 additional native plants, along with bioswales for stormwater and Dark Sky-compliant lighting, the kind of detail that matters if you are the one running the loop at 6 a.m. before the heat sets in.
The practical shift for someone living near the Brickell Metrorail station is this: the same paved surface you already use for a dog walk or a Saturday errand becomes, once Phase 3 closes the gap, an actual way to get somewhere. Not a scenic loop back to where you started, but a route that ends in Coral Gables or South Miami if you keep going.
Residents Already Rehearsing the Route
That shift in use is already showing up before construction even wraps. Local reporting this spring found residents treating finished sections of the corridor like ordinary streets: walking dogs, running errands, and commuting by bike instead of driving, according to interviews conducted for a March 2026 report on the project. The same reporting put current annual visits to the corridor at nearly 3 million, a figure that will only grow once the missing 7.36 miles are stitched in.
The nonprofit behind the park has been raising money to match that growth. This year's Sneaker Ball, one of Friends of The Underline's signature fundraisers, brought in more than $1 million for ongoing programming, on top of corporate grants that have already funded the corridor's first micro-forests. None of that money builds Phase 3 itself, which is a county capital project, but it is what pays for the free fitness classes and cultural programming that keep the built sections busy from early morning into the evening.
The Market Under the Tracks Keeps Running Either Way
None of the Phase 3 construction touches what already works in Brickell. The Saturday market at the Inter Stage, with its rotating lineup of produce, prepared foods, and artisan vendors, is scheduled to keep running weekly through October 10, 2026, regardless of what is happening seven miles south near Dadeland.
It is worth keeping that market in context with the rest of the neighborhood's outdoor routine, because The Underline is not the only paved loop residents use. Brickell Key, the separate island just offshore, has its own 1.2-mile perimeter path that has nothing to do with the Metrorail trail and existed on the island long before The Underline broke ground. Closer to the mainland, 1814 Brickell Park offers a fenced dog run under Banyan trees, Alice Wainwright Park spans 28 acres along the bay shared with Coconut Grove, and Jose Marti Park sits directly on the waterfront a few blocks south. Brickell residents were never short on places to walk. What they were short on was a single corridor that could carry them somewhere new without getting in a car, and that is the specific gap Phase 3 is built to close.
What to Watch For
The headline most people will read when Phase 3 finally opens will be about the ten-mile milestone, the ribbon cutting, the county officials posing at Dadeland South. The more useful thing to watch, if you already live here, is smaller: the first weekend the fence at SW 19th Avenue actually comes down and the market crowd at the Inter Stage realizes they could keep walking all the way to Coral Gables if they wanted to.
Brickell has had a very good half-mile for five years. This is the year it gets the other nine and a half.
If the way Brickell moves and gathers has you thinking differently about your own address here, or about what a Brickell Key view or a Brickell Backyard walk to work is actually worth right now, the team at Dora Puig knows these blocks well. Let's Connect.
