Brickell

Brickell sits directly south of the Miami River and of Miami's historic central business district, and functions as the financial center of the city and of South Florida: Brickell Avenue holds the largest concentration of international banks in the United States. The Tequesta lived on this ground for two thousand years before European settlement; the modern neighborhood dates to 1871, when William and Mary Brickell arrived from Cleveland and opened a trading post on the river's south bank. By the early twentieth century Brickell Avenue was Millionaire's Row, lined with mansions. Almost none of that survives.

The replacement began in the 1970s, when office towers, hotels and apartment buildings started taking the mansion sites one by one. The neighborhood has since outgrown the older downtown core to become one of the country's largest financial districts, and the residential towers followed the banks, first along Brickell Avenue and Brickell Bay Drive, later inland toward South Miami Avenue and the river. Brickell City Centre, opened in late 2016, put a department store, a hotel and offices in the middle of it, and five Metromover stations on the Brickell Loop tie the whole district to downtown.

What that leaves is a compressed, vertical neighborhood (about 40,000 residents on the ground between I-95 and the bay) with an unusual range of stock. Early-1980s buildings on the water hold sixty to three hundred large residences apiece; the towers built after 2015 hold four hundred to eight hundred smaller ones and stack retail, offices and hotel floors beneath. Brickell Key, the island cluster off the avenue, holds its own group of towers on Brickell Key Drive and Boulevard.