If you were lucky enough to enter Art Basel Miami Beach this year through the VIP entrance you got a little treat: a mini construction tour through the future grand lobby of the Miami Beach Convention Center. The whole thing, although not a very long tour, was pretty cool. It began in the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, crossed Meridian Avenue, which is closed to traffic and the public during construction, and then shot through one side of the lobby, down a back hallway, and into the convention center. Check out photos of the entire route here.
The removal of a former service yard (along with, sadly, the felling of a few majestic trees by Hurricane Irma) has expanded Flamingo Park in the heart of South Beach by quite a lot. Check out all this new green space! Now they just need to landscape it. What do you think about this new swath of green space in South Beach?
The newest additions to Mt. Sinai Medical Center, a new emergency department and surgical tower, are racing to completion. The ER (or, ahem, ED?) will be 40,000 square feet with over 50 private treatment rooms and the tower will have 12 state-of-the-art operating rooms and 154 private patient rooms with bay views.
The bridge connecting West Avenue south of the Collins Canal with the smaller section of the street that cuts through Sunset Harbour is finally done. The connection gives Sunset Harbour another link to the heart of South Beach, although it does add more concrete and asphalt to an area that already feels overwhelmed with roads.
The massive train station called MiamiCenral that will be the Downtown Miami terminus of the Florida East Coast Railway's Brightline (formerly known as All Aboard Florida) is taking shape on a long strand of city blocks stretching north from the Dade County Courthouse.
After who-the-hell-knows-how-long of nothing happening to the torn up Espanola Way, one of Miami Beach's most iconic architectural compositions, things have finally begun moving forward with its conversion to a completely pedestrian environment.
Miami Beach's quaint Espanola Way has been under renovation to become a permanently pedestrian street since significantly earlier than when I last wrote about it–October last year, "Espanola Way to be Permanently Pedestrianized"–and from the looks of things pretty much zero progress has been made since then. So, what's going on here?
