Downtown Miami

Downtown is where South Florida concentrates its commerce, its banking and much of its cultural life. Settlement on the river reaches back to the 1830s; the city itself dates from 1896, when Henry Flagler brought the Florida East Coast Railway south at Julia Tuttle's urging, and Flagler Street is still the main east-west line. The oldest buildings in Miami sit a block or two from towers finished in the last decade — the Pérez Art Museum and the Frost Science Museum, the Adrienne Arsht Center, the Kaseya Center, Bayfront Park, the 1925 county courthouse and the government offices of Greater Downtown are packed into a small footprint.

It is also the fastest-growing part of the city by a wide margin. Greater Downtown — the 3.8 square miles east of I-95 between the Rickenbacker and Julia Tuttle causeways — went from 66,769 residents at the 2010 census to 110,006 in 2020, a rise of nearly two-thirds in a decade, carried by a long run of high-rise construction. The residential spine follows Biscayne Boulevard north from Bayfront Park, past the museums and the arena, into the Park West blocks; a second cluster sits on and behind Biscayne Boulevard Way at the southern end, and the free Metromover's 22 stations tie it all together.

The buildings themselves record the shift. Loft conversions and early-2000s towers gave way to the 2007-2009 wave — Marina Blue, 900 Biscayne, Epic, Marquis — and then to the sculptural work of the 2010s. Floor counts run from the mid-thirties to the high sixties, and residence counts from two hundred to more than eight hundred, so the character of a building depends heavily on which of those two numbers you weight.