If you live in Shenandoah and you think of The Underline as a bike lane, you are underselling it considerably. Phase 2 of Miami's 10-mile linear park opened in April 2024, running 2.14 miles from SW 13th Street to SW 19th Avenue — directly through Shenandoah and Silver Bluff, connecting them to the Brickell Backyard that had been open since 2021. That makes Shenandoah one of only a handful of Miami neighborhoods with a fully built-out section of the corridor at its door. Most residents treat it as a pleasant path for an evening walk. What it actually is, and what it is about to become, is considerably more than that.
The thesis worth sitting with: The Underline is the most programmed stretch of public space Shenandoah has ever had, and the version arriving in Fall 2026 is a categorically different thing from what opened fourteen months ago.
What Phase 2 Already Put in the Neighborhood
The Phase 2 corridor is not just a widened M-Path. It brought three distinct amenity areas to the stretch between Brickell and Vizcaya.
The Hammock Playground at SW 15th Road and First Avenue sits adjacent to Simpson Park Hammock, one of the last remaining pieces of native tropical hardwood hammock along the Miami Rock Ridge. The art-infused playground, with murals commissioned through the Hearst Foundations and created by artists from Bakehouse Art Complex, turns what could have been a standard park installation into something specific to this place.
Vizcaya Station Plaza anchors the southern end of Phase 2, giving the Vizcaya Metrorail station a gathering space it never had.
The Rain Garden at SW 17th Avenue and US 1 is the infrastructure story most walkers miss entirely. Rather than underground drainage, this bioretention system — dry rock-lined swales that filter stormwater before it reaches the aquifer — is the kind of visible climate resilience work that usually happens underground. Here it is part of the path itself.
The corridor also introduced over 100,000 native plants and trees along the 2.14 miles, creating a pollinator corridor through the urban core. For a neighborhood whose residents consistently cite walkability and green space as the main reasons they stay, that is not a small addition.
The Programming Running Right Now
This is the piece most people miss. The Underline runs over 2,000 free programs each year. The recurring calendar along the corridor includes:
- Yoga at the Urban Gym — Every Saturday morning, 9–10 a.m., at the Brickell Backyard Sound Stage Plaza. Free, no registration required.
- Farmers Market at The Underline — Every second and fourth Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., at SW 8th Avenue and SW 1st Street. Seasonal produce, handmade crafts, local honey, artisanal cheeses, baked goods.
- PAWS Saturdays — First Saturday of each month, a programming series run in partnership with Miami-Dade County Animal Services and the Friends of Miami Animals Foundation. Pet training and vaccination services on-site.
- Family Days — First Saturday of each month, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Free art classes for children led by artists from Bakehouse, funded by the Frederick A. DeLuca Foundation.
Then there is the most recent addition to the calendar. In November 2025, Friends of The Underline announced a multi-year Levitt Foundation grant for the Levitt BLOC Miami Music Series — 10 free outdoor concerts in 2026, with continued support through 2028. The concerts will activate multiple locations along the 10-mile corridor, including the Inter Grove Gallery in Coconut Grove, one of the Phase 3 activation sites currently under development. The 2026 performance schedule will be announced by Friends of The Underline; the grant was selected in part through a public vote held in September 2025, in which Miami residents cast ballots for The Underline as the host site.
The Saturday farmers market and free concert series are not supplementary features. They are the difference between a trail people use twice a month and a trail people build a Saturday around.
What Arrives in Fall 2026
Phase 3 of The Underline is a 7.36-mile segment connecting SW 19th Avenue near Vizcaya to the Dadeland South Metrorail station. Construction began in late 2023. The total estimated construction cost is $109 million, and completion is expected Fall 2026.
The scale of what Phase 3 adds is worth stating plainly. Phase 2 brought 100,000 native plants to 2.14 miles. Phase 3 will introduce 1,800 new trees and palms and an additional 350,000 native plants — shrubs, grasses, perennials, and small palms — along 7.36 miles linking the City of Miami, Coral Gables, South Miami, and unincorporated Miami-Dade County. The bioswales, bioretention ponds, and green infrastructure throughout Phase 3 are designed to manage stormwater flooding in a corridor that runs through some of the region's most flood-prone surface streets.
When Phase 3 opens, the full 10-mile corridor will be within a 10-minute walk of more than 125,000 residents, according to a funding analysis considered by the Miami City Commission in April 2025. To put that another way: what is currently a 2.7-mile paved trail becomes a 10-mile connected mobility corridor, with eight Metrorail stations along its path, stretching from the Miami River to Kendall.
The $120 million total project — funded through Miami-Dade County, the Federal Transit Administration, the State of Florida, the cities of Miami, Coral Gables, and South Miami, the Knight Foundation, and private contributions — is already drawing the kind of sustained programming investment that signals permanence. The Levitt concerts, the CP Works Park Stewards workforce program launched in April 2025 through Chapman Partnership and funded in part by the Lennar Foundation, the free WiFi through Hotwire, the ongoing maintenance funding discussions at City Hall: these are not features added during a ribbon cutting. They are the infrastructure of a sustained public institution.
Why This Changes How Shenandoah Residents Actually Use the Neighborhood
There is a meaningful difference between a recreational trail and a mobility corridor, and that difference is about to become material for anyone living in Shenandoah.
Right now, a resident can walk or bike from Shenandoah to Brickell on a dedicated, off-road, LED-lit path without touching US-1. Come Fall 2026, that same resident will be able to continue south through Coral Gables and South Miami all the way to Dadeland South without leaving the trail. The path connects to eight Metrorail stations, meaning a bike-to-rail commute that bypasses the parking and traffic friction of surface streets becomes genuinely practical for the first time.
The neighborhoods The Underline links — Brickell, Shenandoah, Silver Bluff, Coral Gables, South Miami — are all places that already have density, amenities, and transit access. What they have lacked is safe, continuous, shaded connectivity between them. The Underline closes that gap. For a resident who currently drives between neighborhoods by default because the alternatives feel unreliable or unsafe, that is a change in daily behavior, not just a scenic route.
Shenandoah has always had the argument of location: minutes from Brickell, from Coconut Grove, from Coral Gables, from Downtown. The Underline is making that argument physical. A neighborhood that is already walkable and close to everything is gaining infrastructure that makes the closeness actually useful in a new way.
If you want to talk through what this kind of investment means for the neighborhood over time, or what it changes about how you're thinking about where to put down roots in Miami's urban core, Grace Blanco would be glad to have that conversation. Let's connect.
