Bay Harbor Islands

Bay Harbor Islands is two islands rather than one — originally Broadview and Bay Harbor, now simply the West and East Islands — joined as a single town near the northern end of Biscayne Bay. The town was founded by Shepard Broad in 1947, and the Broad Causeway that bears his name carries the road west across the bay to North Miami; Kane Concourse runs east over Indian Creek to Bal Harbour and the ocean.

The town recorded 5,922 residents at the 2020 census on four-tenths of a square mile. North Miami sits on the mainland side of the causeway, Bal Harbour and Surfside lie to the east, and the private village of Indian Creek to the south. Miami International Airport is roughly twenty-five minutes away by car, with Aventura to the north and Miami Beach to the south.

Scale is the town's defining quality. The West Island is single-family houses; the East Island holds the business district, the school and the apartment buildings, most of them between two and twelve floors — at one time one of the largest concentrations of mid-century Miami Modern architecture anywhere. The wave of new construction after 2013 kept to that pattern, seven to nine floors and twenty to fifty residences apiece, while older post-war co-ops and walk-ups remain throughout, and the East and West Bay Harbor Drive addresses face the water directly.