Brickell is Miami's answer to the question of whether a financial district can be a neighbourhood, and the answer is: almost. The glass towers that line Brickell Avenue house an international workforce that has made this corridor the centre of Latin American banking and investment in the United States. The Brickell City Centre mall provides the commercial infrastructure.
The Metromover connects the district to Downtown without requiring a car. The rooftop bars trade on skyline views and the professional energy of a neighbourhood where the happy hour is a business development exercise. But Brickell also has Blackbird Ordinary, a genuinely good bar; La Mar by Gaston Acurio on Brickell Key, a waterfront Peruvian restaurant that transcends its hotel setting; and The Underline, a linear park beneath the Metrorail that is slowly giving the neighbourhood the green space it lacked.
Brickell is not charming — it is vertical, ambitious, and new — but it is honest about what Miami is becoming, and the waterfront walk along Biscayne Bay at sunset, with the towers glittering overhead and the water stretching toward Key Biscayne, has its own severe beauty.