Miami's Underline Breaks Ground This Week

The Miami Herald is chronicling the beginning of construction on the Miami Underline, touting the project's catalytic potential on the model of New York City's High Line.

An article by Andres Viglucci describes the Underline as "a 10-mile-long park and walking and cycling trail that aims to regenerate an overlooked swath of Miami in the same way the heralded High Line did along lower Manhattan."

Viglucci explains more detail about the groundbreaking and initial work on the Underline:

On Thursday, a contractor is scheduled to break ground on the first phase of the much-anticipated Underline, which will eventually extend from downtown Miami to Dadeland under the Metrorail’s elevated tracks. That initial segment, in the booming Brickell district, is just seven blocks and a half-mile long.

But moving from conception to construction in five years is a flash for a civic project in Miami. At least two more segments, one along Miami’s The Roads section and another in Coral Gables, will follow in short order.

A lot of the article's focus is devoted to the advocacy work of Meg Daly and her father, the late Parker Thomson, in paving the way for the project. The article also notes that High Line designer James Corner Field Operations also completed the master plan for  the Underline, revealed in 2015.

A previous article by Douglas Hanks reported on the $14 million construction contract that cleared the way for construction to begin.

Building the entire 10-mile Underline park is expected to cost about $120 million, with another $3 million required to maintain it each year. The “Brickell Backyard” segment that was funded [in October] represents just 5 percent of the full Underline, but founder Meg Daly said she sees the launch of actual construction along the route as a larger milestone than the seven-block footprint between the river and Southwest Thirteenth Street suggests.