Signature bridge downtown merits a signature park below

Two newly elected commissioners give Miami fresh views to seize multiple opportunities. One that flies under not only the radar but also the highway is the Underdeck, a 33-acre linear park that the city agreed to operate under I-395. After nearly five years, progress is minimal.

As we detailed last week, when a new expressway and signature bridge open, now expected in late 2027, old highway bridges cutting through the heart of downtown will be razed. The city has agreed with the Florida Department of Transportation to program the area below as an urban park.

The space is considerable, almost a fifth the size of the Melreese golf course that the city has leased for 99 years for a vast mixed-use development that includes a soccer stadium. The city so far has been mum on where it will find new land to meet its pledge of replacing the parkland it gave away.

While the current expressway is elevated by 800 columns, the new one will have only 200 columns and be much taller, opening the area below with room for far more green area and more sunlight penetration.

Discussions over the years have sketched that 33 acres to include a mile-long central promenade. In the most recent unofficial discussions, the area is to have three acres of lawns, 15 acres of urban gardens, 12 acres of pathways and plazas, 1,150 trees, a pedestrian bridge, a Heritage Trail from Biscayne Bay to Overtown and more.

What the program doesn’t have is the more than $56 million needed to make the plan a reality plus an operating budget of more than $6 million a year.

It also doesn’t have formal approval from the city, which received an advisory group’s 400-page report detailing current plans last December but never did anything about it, pro or con.

Also missing is a name for the project. The formal name that the state transportation folks branded it was “the I-395 Heritage Trail/Signature Bridge Underdeck project,” which doesn’t exactly roll smoothly off the tongue. In fact, it wouldn’t fit on a large directional sign.

The advisory group that a city memorandum of understanding commissioned for a year to lay out the framework for the project labeled the area “The Overtown Greenway, the heart of the city,” which might or might not fit on a sign but is also a mouthful to say.

Miami Today simply calls the project the Underdeck, on the grounds that at least it fits into a headline.

The issues of the funding, the planning and the naming now sit in the hands of the city, where a new team of commissioners has the chance to move the park forward. Only Commissioner Joe Carollo, in fact, remains from the day in February 2019 when the commission agreed with the state transportation department (FDOT) to take on the planning, management and activation of what is now a forbidding and sometimes drug-invested urban jungle that needs to take on new life.

That job by agreement is the city’s, not the state’s. “FDOT doesn’t do space activations,” former city commissioner Ken Russell explained to the Omni Community Redevelopment Agency in 2019. “We have to do something with it,” former commissioner Willy Gort told that meeting.

But those two commissioners are since gone, along with two more who agreed with the state to take on the urban park project. Now a group of mostly new faces needs to advance the project from theory to a Miami reality.

There is not going to be another chance to get 33 acres of public space together downtown, and the state transportation department has agreed in principle to put that land in shape to match the city’s plan for it – once the city agrees on a plan.

We haven’t seen the 400 pages of recommendations that the volunteer Underdeck Advisory Committee put together after surveying nearly 2,500 people, meeting 35 times, and holding 129 working group meetings with 124 community members serving. Certainly, the name that they recommended would not be at the top of our list, and other parts of the plan may not be realistic.

Still, the first thing that commissioners should do is to review that report and see if it’s a good starting point. It’s at best disrespectful to all those volunteers that the city 11 months later has yet to respond to the report in any way. At worst, it’s squandering the opportunity for a park that will fulfill the role that the city has demanded from the new bridge above – a signature park.