The Underline's Finished Two Miles Already Run on a Weekly Calendar of Their Own
Every Saturday morning, vendors set up under the Metrorail tracks in Brickell selling produce, prepared food and handmade goods while musicians and cooks turn a strip of pavement that used to be dead space into a neighborhood gathering spot. A few miles south in Coconut Grove, a bocce court that didn't exist last fall now sits next to a bike-share rack charging $8.50 an hour, underneath a mural eight Metrorail columns wide. Neither of these things required Phase 3 of The Underline to finish. Both are running right now, on segments that have been open for years.
That's the part of the story most coverage skips. The Underline gets written about as a single ten-mile project that will be "done" in 2026, as if nothing useful exists until the ribbon gets cut on the last mile. In practice, the two miles that opened in 2021 and 2024 already carry a full weekly schedule of free programming, and the newest addition in the Grove shows a different park is emerging segment by segment, shaped by what each neighborhood specifically asked for rather than a single design dropped on the whole corridor at once.
The first half mile, called Brickell Backyard, opened in February 2021 between the Miami River and SW 13th Street. The second stretch, the 2.14-mile Hammock Trail connecting the Roads, Shenandoah, Silver Bluff and Vizcaya neighborhoods, opened in April 2024. Together those two finished segments are where the actual weekly activity lives, and the current calendar is more crowded than most residents realize.
Right now, that calendar includes a Saturday farmers market beneath the Metrorail in Brickell running through October 10, a Thursday yoga class at Vizcaya Station Plaza that continues through February 2027, a Saturday yoga session at Brickell's Inter Stage, a community fitness and group-run session on select days through October 18, a monthly group run on the third Wednesday of the month through September 16, and a new community dog-walking series that started August 26 and runs through December 17.
That's not a once-a-year festival schedule. It's a recurring weekly rhythm that residents near Brickell and the Roads can build a Tuesday or Saturday around without ever thinking about the seven miles still under construction to the south.
A Miami Times opinion piece from Friends of the Underline put a number on the scale of this: more than 200 free programs run along the corridor each year, most of them on the segments that have been finished for two to five years already.
The newest activation makes the case even more directly, and it comes from the unfinished side of the project. Last October, Friends of the Underline opened Inter Grove Gallery, a roughly 150,000-square-foot amenity space built as part of the still-under-construction Phase 3 corridor, well before the rest of that 7.36-mile stretch is anywhere near finished. It includes a bike-share station, a bocce ball court, green seating areas and a new mural called "Milagros at the Temple of Abundance," painted across eight Metrorail columns by artist Alexandre Arrechea. County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, Miami commissioners Damian Pardo and Ralph Rosado, and county commissioners Raquel Regalado and Eileen Higgins all showed up for the opening, alongside Friends of the Underline CEO Eulois Cleckley.
What's notable isn't the ribbon-cutting. It's what shaped the space before anyone cut anything. Jake Moskowitz, the nonprofit's chief innovation officer, said the events that have been running at Inter Grove Gallery since October 2025 came directly from requests by Coconut Grove and Silver Bluff residents who wanted food trucks, marketplaces and vintage pop-ups they could walk to. Clarice Cooper, president of the Coconut Grove Village West Homeowners and Tenants Association, called it a version of New York's High Line that will knit the different parts of the Grove together, and LnS Gallery, which has operated at 2610 SW 28th Lane for eight years, has already seen a foot-traffic bump since the new gallery space opened next to one of its entrances.
That's a piece of the unfinished half already delivering the same kind of weekly activity Brickell has had for years, built around a different neighborhood's specific ask rather than a copy of what already exists to the north.
| Segment | Length | Opened | Communities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 1: Brickell Backyard | 0.5 miles | Feb. 2021 | Brickell |
| Phase 2: Hammock Trail | 2.14 miles | Apr. 2024 | Roads, Shenandoah, Silver Bluff, Vizcaya |
| Phase 3: final stretch | 7.36 miles | Under construction, targeted 2026 | City of Miami, Coral Gables, South Miami, unincorporated Miami-Dade |
While the first two segments run their weekly calendar without incident, the longest and most expensive stretch is having a harder year. In July 2026, Miami-Dade commissioners approved a $2.25 million increase to the contract covering construction inspection and engineering for Phase 3, pushing the deal with engineering firm Calvin, Giordano & Associates to $8.25 million and extending it another 270 days. Commissioner Oliver Gilbert, who has repeatedly pushed back on Underline cost increases, voted against it along with two colleagues.
"I understand it needs to pass," Gilbert said, "but fundamentally understand what we are doing. We're giving money to complete an asset that we're going to build that's going to be managed by someone else."
That 270-day extension matters more than it sounds. The county's own project page still lists 2026 as the target completion year, but a contract extension of that length granted this summer means the finish line has effectively moved even though no one has announced a new date. For a project whose total cost has already climbed from an original 2016 estimate of $100 million to a fully-funded figure of $140 million in 2022, with cost-to-date figures no longer being stated publicly, a 270-day extension approved this recently is the clearest signal available that the seven-mile Coral Gables and South Miami stretch won't be running its own Saturday market or yoga class on the timeline residents were originally told.
If you're in Brickell, the Roads, Shenandoah, Silver Bluff or Vizcaya, the park outside your door is finished and already has a schedule worth checking before you plan a weekend. The farmers market, the yoga sessions, the group runs and the new dog walks are real, recurring and free, and none of them are waiting on anything else to open.
If you're closer to the Grove, Coral Gables or South Miami, what you're watching is two different things happening at once. Inter Grove Gallery shows how quickly a segment can go from construction fencing to a functioning gathering space once it opens, complete with amenities the neighborhood specifically requested. Meanwhile, the seven miles still connecting toward Dadeland are moving through the same kind of commission votes and contract extensions that just added most of a year to the current work order. Moskowitz has noted the corridor holds roughly 1,200 Metrorail columns total, and many still carry only corporate sponsor recognition rather than art, which gives a sense of how much of this park's character is still being decided one segment at a time rather than laid out in a single master plan.
The honest read is that The Underline isn't a countdown to a single opening day. It's a rolling series of neighborhood-specific insertions, and the ones already open are carrying most of the weekly activity the whole project promised, while the priciest remaining stretch works through the kind of budget friction that tends to stretch timelines rather than shrink them.
For residents weighing how a finished amenity like this affects daily life in a specific pocket of Miami-Dade, or for anyone comparing what a neighborhood near a completed Underline segment offers against one still waiting on Phase 3, the Ben Moss Group works these corridors block by block. If you want a clearer read on how a specific stretch of this park fits into your search or your next move, schedule a private consultation.
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