Brickell's Half-Mile of the Underline Is Becoming the Top of a Ten-Mile Trail

At the north end of the Underline, where the Metrorail tracks run toward the Miami River, there is a strip of native grasses and pollinator plantings that Miami-Dade County calls the River Room. The county's description makes it an informal place for dogs and people to rest and play. For more than five years, that patch of green has been the top of a short, self-contained park. The Brickell Backyard opened on Feb. 26, 2021, and runs half a mile from the river to SW 13th Street.

It is also the oldest finished piece of what is about to be a continuous 10-mile linear park running south to the Dadeland South Metrorail station. Construction on the rest of the trail is expected to wrap up by December, according to the Miami Herald. That changes what the Brickell Backyard is. It has worked as a neighborhood park with a fixed end, and it is becoming the trailhead of a corridor. Who pays to keep the corridor running is a question the cities along the route are now answering with their own budgets.

The rooms of the Brickell Backyard

The county planned the Brickell segment as a run of "rooms," each with its own job, as laid out on the county's Phase 1 page.

Read from north to south, the half-mile moves from river edge to sports court to social table to garden. All of it fits in one walk at lunch. That compactness is why the segment has worked so well as a backyard. It is also why it feels different once the path keeps going past Coral Way for another nine and a half miles.

A free November, built around the Urban Gym and Inter Stage

Most of the programming in the Brickell Backyard is free and runs on a weekly rhythm. These are the sessions on the Underline events calendar for the rest of November:

• Underline Moves, the free, family-friendly dance series: Friday, Nov. 13, and Friday, Nov. 20, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
• UYoga: Saturdays, 9 to 10 a.m., free, held in the Brickell Backyard. Details and reservations are on the UYoga event page.
• HIIT & RUN: Sunday, Nov. 15, 10:30 to 11:30 a.m., free, at the Urban Gym. The session listing puts it on the first and third Sundays of each month.
• UPilates with LitPilates: Wednesday, Nov. 18, 6 to 7 p.m., free, at Inter Stage. This mat fusion class has appeared on consecutive Wednesdays this month.

The Urban Gym has a running track, and HIIT & RUN is built around it. The Promenade has game tables and a communal dining table, and Inter Stage sits right among them. The programs follow the design. The county laid out a small park with distinct rooms, and the classes landed in the rooms built for them.

The trail south is already open in pieces

The Brickell Backyard stopped being the whole Underline a while ago. The second phase, 2.14 miles ending at SW 19th Avenue, opened on April 24, 2024. Farther along, the trail now reaches places that used to mean a drive from Brickell:

1. Inter Grove Gallery, between SW 24th and SW 27th Avenues, where the free Roll Skate Club meets on some weeknights.
2. Chewy Bark Park, next to the LifeTime building in Coral Gables. The Miami Herald called it instantly popular when the stretch north of LeJeune Road to SW 27th Avenue opened earlier this year. That stretch already connects all the way to the river.
3. The South Miami section, connecting to the edge of Coral Gables. In July the Herald reported it virtually finished, with the construction fencing gone and people already using it.
4. The southern end, 1.2 miles from SW 80th Street to the Dadeland South Metrorail station. Its north entry is marked by Mariposa Gardens and a "village" of Underline-green birdhouses. Micro-forests near the butterfly garden and just past SW 70th Avenue are compact plantings of native trees and shrubs meant to grow quickly into dense green.

In the Herald's July account, the one piece left was in Coral Gables along the University of Miami. That section is set to hold some of the Underline's most elaborate features. Herald photographers caught crews working on the Coral Gables section on Sept. 14. The county still lists the full project for completion in 2026.

Anyone planning a long ride from Brickell should know about the transit stations. As of the Herald's July report, both Dadeland Metrorail stations and the Douglas Road station were under extensive renovation, expansion or redevelopment, and the trail connections through them were sketchy or missing. At Dadeland North, signs told cyclists to dismount and walk the tenth of a mile through the station.

Ten miles of trail cost more to keep up than half a mile

The half-mile in Brickell was a contained maintenance job. A continuous trail through several cities is a different one. Annual operating costs for the full Underline are expected to total about $9.5 million once it is finished, according to the Miami Herald's October report. The paper also reported that construction ran years ahead of schedule thanks to a substantial federal grant, so the full operating bill arrived sooner than supporters expected.

The arrangement taking shape has several layers:

• Friends of the Underline, the nonprofit's fundraising arm, aims to cover 60% of estimated operating costs next year through private donors and sponsorships.
• Miami-Dade County has agreed to provide several million dollars a year to the Underline Conservancy for three years, tapering annually.
• At its fall budget hearing, the Coral Gables City Commission unanimously approved redirecting $500,000 toward operations and maintenance for fiscal year 2027, along with $180,000 for fiscal year 2026. The deal also gives the city a seat on the Underline Conservancy board.
• The City of Miami, home to the Brickell segment, lists in its proposed FY2026–27 budget a $1.654 million General Fund contribution for Underline maintenance, described as payment two of five under the management agreement.

Set the Coral Gables figure against the total. Its $500,000 is half of the $1 million Underline leaders requested from the city for fiscal 2027, and about one-nineteenth of the projected annual cost of the whole trail. The free Saturday yoga and the river-edge plantings in Brickell now belong to a budget shared across Miami, Coral Gables, South Miami, the county and private donors.

What changes at the river end

Once the corridor is continuous, the River Room, the Urban Gym and Inter Stage turn into the first stops on a long route. The half-mile that opened in 2021 as a finished park is becoming the north gate of a trail that, once the University of Miami section is done, will run 10 continuous miles from the Miami River to Dadeland. Saturday UYoga in the Brickell Backyard can now turn into a ride as far as Chewy Bark Park or Inter Grove Gallery, and soon past the UM section to Mariposa Gardens and the micro-forests at the southern end.

When a stretch of green under the tracks changes how a neighborhood lives day to day, it is worth knowing well before it shows up in a home search. If you'd like a closer look at the Brickell and Coconut Grove addresses with easy access to the Underline, Jessica Adams Luxury Real Estate would be glad to walk the route with you, one room at a time.