North Bay Village

North Bay Village is three islands in Biscayne Bay strung along the 79th Street Causeway between Miami and Miami Beach — Harbor Island, North Bay Island and Treasure Island — and almost all of it is made ground. Before 1940 most of the village lay under the bay; North Bay Island was dredged into being that year, and Harbor and Treasure Islands followed in the mid-1940s. The village incorporated in 1945, annexed Harbor and Treasure Islands a few years later, and added Broadcast Key, also called Cameo Island, in 1963 — the site of the pioneer radio station WIOD from 1926 and still home to WSVN television. In its early years it was a place people came to for the winter.

Its reputation was built on nightlife. The village's restaurants and clubs drew Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland; Dean Martin ran Dean Martin's Pub here in the late 1960s and early 1970s, next door to Jilly's South, where interiors for the film Porky's were later shot. It still holds several well-known restaurants alongside its apartment buildings, condominiums and single-family streets. What has changed is occupancy: most residents now live here year-round — 8,159 of them at the 2020 census, on less than a square mile.

The scale is small and the water is everywhere — the islands are narrow enough that a great many residences look across the bay to either the Miami skyline or Miami Beach. Buildings range from 1950s and 1960s low-rises to a handful of taller towers built since 2005, and the village remains one of the few places in the county where a bayfront address is not automatically a resort address.