/r9k/'s tour of Miami neighbourhoods

You don't live in Miami do you? You got the Cuban part right at least. Op if you're anything like the typical bot don't come here. There is a lot to do here and a niche for every imaginable activity but you have to kind of look for it and put yourself out there. By and large though this place is a normie Mecca ( one of the most popular nightclubs here is literally called Mecca), clubbing and house music and getting irresponsibly drunk is pretty much expected of everyone.being by the ocean is nice though. I know a spot in a mangrove forest which has a treehouse that overlooks the ocean far away from the city, it's really nice and quiet. There's even a tire swing that hangs over a small creek that empties into the sea. I've done a lot of mushrooms there.

http://i.imgur.com/NYkMItM.png

Alright, I'll start from the top and go on down.

I have attached here a map. All of the colored portions are neighborhoods within the city of Miami. Up through Miami shores and down to the South Miami area are the rough margins of the older parts of the city. By older, I mean built during the Florida land boom of the 1920s. You'll occasionally see some wooden Florida vernacular cottages and manses built in and around the Coconut Grove area from the late 1800s to the 1910s as well, which offer interesting architectural diversity and character.

The western portions of the metro area, shown in grey (with the exception of Coral Gables, South Miami, and Cocoplum which is a part of Coral Gables) are largely rundown industrial areas filled with warehouses, manufacturing facilities, or cheap housing--not to mention, Miami's fairly large airport. There's little pockets of gold to be found out there, but that, to me, is not truly "Miami".

The Shorecrest/Belle Mead/Little River/Bayside area just south of Miami shores is currently an area experiencing gentrification. Along Biscayne Boulevard AKA US1 there was a lot of circa 1930s-1950s commercial buildings and motels built that are being revamped to house independent boutiques, restaurants, coffee shops, and so on. It's a rather "hip" area, I'd say. I'm currently shopping for furniture and I've been making trips up there to visit the various stores that have a specialty in midcentury modern or early modern furniture that I'd like to have a few pieces of.

Little Haiti is filled with, of course, Haitians. Unlike a lot of the more affluent Cubans, while their area is filthy, at least they have not destroyed the old buildings in the area. Little Haiti was once a center for farming pineapples. Now, mostly there's black crime and such. There's a small area along the FEC railway that has some nice old flexspace (warehouses and offices together in a package) that artists and such are starting to use. Liberty City is rather rough. The streets are laid out nicely there though and I feel like somebody eventually is going to make a lot of money out there turning it back into a real neighborhood. There's some charming homes strewn throughout and nice trees, just bad characters everywhere.

Buena Vista/Morningside/Bay Point/Design District is the epicenter for high design and all that here in Miami. The reason for its location in particular is because up around Bal Harbor, which is a community north of Miami Beach, a sly Jewish man convinced all of his high end design tenants that rented in his mall that they couldn't open another branch of their shops within something like 25 or 30 miles--this was back in the 1960s when he made this arrangement. It has worked out well for him. You'll find boutiques that didn't take the devil's deal or that came later around the Design District. There's a few good restaurants, an art/architecture high school, and a few other interesting sights in that area. Buena Vista is a lovely neighborhood which also was about pineapples back in the 1920s. Morningside was formerly just another nice 1920s neighborhood but in the 1960s or 1970s various professionals from Miami Beach decided to organize it into a gated community with a club and everything. It's one of the very few truly walled and gated communities within Miami.

The Midtown/Wynwood/Edgewater area was once the original port of Miami (Edgewater) and the garment district (Midtown/Wynwood). You can still see various channels into the land that were made to accommodate sailing ships and ironsides. Of course, that has all been moved to that large hull-shaped island there in the middle of the bay. Now, all the old warehouses in Wynwood have been repurposed into artistic spaces, showrooms, clubs, and whatever else that can go into a large open space. You'll find a very unusual mix of characters that frequent there, from druggies to trust fund babies to artists to self-made millionaires/billionaires. Edgewater is now turning into downtown 3.0 (where Brickell is downtown 2.0, I'll explain shortly), there's several large condominium and office developments that have sprouted up there within this past decade, including some of Miami's tallest buildings. There's a lot in store there for the future. Miami has around 90 high rise (10 stories or more) buildings currently under construction or that have their permits issues and they're ready to go--boomtown as always.

Allapattah/Grapeland Heights//Flagami don't need much of an explanation, it's just badly managed urban sprawl that might eventually become something when developers turn their sights off the water.

Omni is named after the Omni hotel which used to be there but isn't no longer--it was named this in the 1930s or 1940s. Now, it's the fledgling arts/entertainment district, where one can see the ballet center, opera hall, and various other performance venues. There's a lot planned for that area, it has a lot of vacant land where warehouses and other commercial/industrial properties once were. It was also once the gateway to Miami Beach.

The Episcopal cathedral is located at the foot of the Venetian Causeway, which was at one time a very lovely place to be, though now it is dwarfed and overlooked by all of the condos around it, which depresses me considering I am an episcopalian. I wish they would move it somewhere better, though I can only dream.

Overtown/Park West is a historically black area. It was once much wealthier than it is, and better looking, but the neighborhood was destroyed by the construction of I-95 right on top of it. There was a small but thriving black upper and middle class local to that area. Tampa saw the same deal--they built an interstate right on their black neighborhood, which only makes the problems with the blacks worse. The 1960s/1970s saw some horrible civil planning maneuvers in the area. Anyway, Lummus Park is an often overlooked area that's very important to Miami's history--this is where Fort Dallas was, or I suppose parts of it are still there (I believe the barracks). The early Miami pioneers stayed in the fort barracks while they were settling here, including the Brickells--an important name here. Mary Brickell was key in bringing Henry Flagler, the railroad man, down here after a freeze killed lots of the farming (particularly citrus) north of Miami. Downtown 2.0 AKA Brickell is obviously named for her.

Downtown is, of course, downtown. It is composed mostly of old commercial buildings built from the early 1900s through the 1950s, with a peppering of some brand new and gleaming condo towers or offices. This is where the American Airlines area and the bayfront park is. You'd also drive through here to get to the port. Downtown and Brickell are divided by the Miami River, which was straightened and dredged by Flagler. The spoil material from the dredging became Brickell Key (which the Brickells hated since it was an ugly spit of land that happened to be directly behind their home there).

Brickell Key was undeveloped until around the 1970s, which is when they built some condos, offices, and the Mandarin Oriental hotel--my personal favorite for newly constructed hotels in Miami. The service is top notch and the view is killer. There's a lovely park in the middle of the island, too.

Brickell is filled with a variety of modern/post-modern glass and steel skyscrapers, including a mega-project (Brickell City Center) which was started in 2013 or 2014 and is nearing completion. It's an ambitious city within the city itself, and is a prelude to the soon-to-be-happening Miami World Center superproject which, I believe, is to be in the Downtown or Park West area. There's a variety of great restaurants in the bases of various skyscrapers around. Brickell Avenue is one of the more scenic roads through the city, it has lots of oak trees and other foliage in a nicely-sized median as well as wide sidewalks. Originally, Brickell was mostly houses and some low-scale commercial buildings which, personally, I believe it should have remained that way. You can see in the old picture I posted above that pretty much all the trees and such south of downtown is where Brickell is now--in the background there. Brickell proper stops around Broadway, which is where the Roads neighborhood begins.

The Roads is a lovely neighborhood platted by Mary Brickell and sold to the city around the 1910s. It has some nice medians, sidewalks, lovely trees, and traffic calming features like traffic circles and so on that help keep the peace in the area. You'll find lots of nice, quaint, small, old homes here. Coral Way, a scenic historical "highway" to Coral Gables, cuts through here and is the lifeline. Coral Way has lots of beautiful banyan trees, the Greek Orthodox cathedral, lots of restaurants, some Jewish establishments, and so on. It's just a pleasant road to be on.

Shenandoah is a neighborhood that was once one of the nicest places to live in all of Miami until blight, Hispanics, and so on totaled the area. You'll see some of the city's most beautiful homes here, though they're slowly rotting away. Somebody's going to make a lot of money, again, when the developers turn inwards. It's named Shenandoah because the two guys that developed it back in the 1920s were from Virginia. There's a rather pretty high school or some such there, architecturally speaking. It's starting to get fixed up some, so maybe it'll be different next year.

And now... Little Havana. Lots of bad is said about this place. Truthfully, it's a rather colorful part of town that actually does look and feel like Cuba. Everything is in Spanish, the Hispanics actually spend lots of their time out in the street or on the sidewalk so it feels like a real urban area, and there's lower crime than one would expect. They've painted their buildings all sorts of neat and charming pastel colors, which reminds me a lot of Barcelona. Of course, parts of it are awful, but not all of it is bad. I feel that the wealthy Cubans will eventually make this an area of town that they can take a ton of pride in.

Silver Bluff and Coral Gate are like Shenandoah-lite, it was just a bunch of homesteads that was gradually filled-in by mass home building in the 1950s and 1960s. Silver Bluff was once it's own little town, though I think all the traces of the old town are gone, which depresses me.

Before I get to Coconut Grove and Coral Gables, it's important to know that what divides Sliver Bluff and Coconut Grove is the rather important corridor of US-1. Alongside it is the metro-rail, which, I believe, has been a boon to Miami's commutes for those that live close to it. The US-1 corridor is starting to see a lot of change, with more medium-rise buildings being proposed or currently built alongside it.

There are some white areas left, and that's largely the Coral Gables/Coconut Grove area--sadly, that's as white as it gets, which I'd say is mostly white, with a sprinkling of the wealthier white-looking Hispanics.

Coconut Grove pre-dates the city of Miami by a few years. It was annexed into Miami as the city grew tremendously in the 1910s. The north end of the Grove starts with the James Deering Estate AKA Vizcaya, which is a marvelous Mediterranean-revival palace built on the bay, then there's the hospital built on some of the former grounds of the estate, and then you get to a hodge-podge of 1920s/1910s homes and awful stuff built in the 1980s. The road going through the north end, Bayshore Drive, originally marked where the beginning of the beach was--now there's no more beach, as it was all filled-in, sadly (though far before my time).

There's lots of large parks in Coconut Grove as well as its own little town center. The Grove is starting to develop a little skyline of its own. I don't mind existing tall and awful-looking buildings being torn down, though I dislike it when they build new ones. I believe the tall buildings have messed up the character of the neighborhood. I digress. One of the country's first airports (seaplanes) was here in the Dinner Key Marina, pictured in the foreground. Two Rem Koolhaas towers (the twisty ones) are rising there in the background. Far away, you can see Merrick Park Village, which was once the industrial area for Coconut Grove and Coral Gables where you'd get your automobile fixed, woodwork done for your house, or whatever else. It was placed next to the West Grove, which is black town (Bahamians that came over as a labor force in the late 1800s), so they could walk to work.

As others have said, the traffic is pretty bad, but it's to be expected from a large city. You need to time your egresses. I live across from two high schools and they can't get their shit together in the morning, which is a pain, but it's possible to get around without wasting too much time in traffic.

Coconut Grove attracted a lot of people in the counterculture movements in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s--like Joni Mitchell pre-fame and David Crosby. In the 1980s, big money came into the Grove. These people were chasing the cool the artists created and, considering the artists made very little money, they were soon priced-out of the area and I'd say half of the cool buildings were destroyed to make way for ugly pseudo-med townhomes and high rises. Too many people use Main Highway as a through thoroughfare in the mornings and evenings, which is a pain in the ass for the locals because of the road noise, unless you have impact glass (I don't, old circa 1930s windows, I can't get a good night of sleep, really). Lots of change is coming to the grove soon. Some ugly 1980s/1970s garbage is coming down to be replaced by what in twenty years I'll probably think is garbage again but at least it'll be slightly better. Such is the way of Miami. I don't think I need to go into Coral Gables, it's really a separate experience.

That's the tour of Miami's neighborhoods.