Things to Do in Miami: A Local’s Guide

Little Havana’s SW 8th Street runs from the Tower Theater east toward Brickell, and the stretch around Máximo Gómez Park is where the neighborhood’s identity concentrates into about one block. The domino games have been running there for decades and they are not a performance for tourists — they are a standing appointment. Viernes Culturales, the last-Friday art walk, takes over the corridor monthly. The Tower Theater itself dates to 1926 and spent the 1960s subtitling English-language films in Spanish for an arriving exile community, which is about as concise a summary of Miami as exists.

James Deering completed his bayfront winter estate in 1916 on Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove, and it is the reason Miami has a Gilded Age Italian villa at all. A National Historic Landmark, with formal gardens and the carved stone barge sitting out in the bay. It is also a working lesson in what this climate does to buildings — the estate has been fighting salt, storm surge, and humidity for over a century, and the ongoing restoration is essentially the same fight every property owner in this city is having on a smaller scale.

PAMM and the Frost Science Museum sit side by side on the downtown bayfront. The Pérez Art Museum Miami opened in 2013, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, with the hanging gardens on the terrace that everybody photographs and a structure explicitly engineered for storm surge. The Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science opened next door in 2017 with the Gulf Stream aquarium and the planetarium. Both are reachable on the free Metromover, which is the correct way to arrive.

Tony Goldman’s outdoor mural museum opened in 2009 in a warehouse district nobody visited, and within five years the neighborhood was an international destination. The Walls are the anchor but the murals run for blocks in every direction and they change constantly — the same wall is a different piece a year later. It is the clearest example in the city of art moving real estate rather than following it.

The downtown waterfront anchor. Bayfront Park was redesigned by Isamu Noguchi, which is a genuinely surprising fact about a park most people cross on the way to something else. Bayside opened in 1987 and remains the busiest tourist retail in the city, sitting on the boat basin with the port across the water.

Free, elevated, and the only genuinely pleasant way to move through Downtown and Brickell. It is also the fastest way to understand how the city is actually assembled — the loop shows you the river, the port, the arena, the financial district, and the Omni in about twenty minutes, and none of it makes sense from a car.

The path along the Miami River, which is not scenery — it is a working commercial waterway with cargo ships, boatyards, and drawbridges that open on the river’s schedule rather than the city’s. Those openings stop traffic on Brickell Avenue and SW 2nd Avenue without warning, which is a nuisance if you are driving and a fascinating thing to watch if you are not.

The oldest neighborhood in the city, settled in the 1870s before Miami existed as a municipality. The marinas, the sailing that has been happening off this shoreline for a century and a half, and an oak canopy that makes it about ten degrees more tolerable than anywhere else in August. CocoWalk anchors the commercial center.

The downtown bayfront arena opened in 1999 and on game nights the surrounding blocks belong entirely to the crowd. The building sits directly on the water between Bayfront Park and the Omni, which makes it one of the better-sited arenas in the country and one of the harder ones to park at.

Opened in 2006 on Biscayne Boulevard, one of the largest performing arts centers in the country — opera, ballet, Broadway, and concerts across two halls. Its event calendar effectively governs vendor and service access for the whole Omni district, which is a thing you only learn by trying to get a truck in there on a show night.

Marlins baseball in Little Havana under a retractable roof that exists entirely because of the rainy season — a fixed-roof or open stadium was never really an option in this city. It sits on the ground where the Orange Bowl stood, which locals will mention, and it opened in 2012.

Across the Rickenbacker Causeway. The Marine Stadium opened in 1963 as a waterfront venue for powerboat racing and concerts, closed after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and has been one of the most photographed ruins in Florida ever since. The key itself has beach, trails, and the best skyline view in the city.

On Watson Island between Downtown and Miami Beach, off the MacArthur Causeway — a park with a long and complicated history in this city, sitting on one of the most valuable pieces of land in it.

Luxury retail, galleries, and public art in the redeveloped furniture district north of Midtown. Worth walking for the architecture and the installations even if the retail is not the point.

Built in 1925 as the Miami News headquarters, modeled on the Giralda bell tower in Seville. From 1962 to 1974 it processed Cuban refugees arriving under the federal Cuban Refugee Program, which is why it is known as the Ellis Island of the South — for a large share of this city’s population, it is the building where their family’s American life began. Now a National Historic Landmark under Miami Dade College’s stewardship, and open as a museum and gallery.

Known universally as Domino Park, on Calle Ocho at SW 15th Avenue. The games run daily and have for decades, played by regulars who are there whether or not anyone is watching. It is one of the few genuinely unstaged pieces of public life left in an American city center, and the surrounding block — the cigar rollers, the fruit stands, the Tower Theater — has not been curated into a theme.

Ralph Munroe’s 1891 bayfront home in Coconut Grove, the oldest house in Miami-Dade County still standing on its original foundation. Built by a boat designer, elevated for storm surge, and vented for cross-breeze in an era before air conditioning existed — which makes it the single best physical argument for why building for this climate is different from building anywhere else.