Miami's old port became its festival lawn, museum campus and occasional racetrack. Bicentennial Park at 1075 Biscayne Boulevard - renamed Maurice A. Ferre Park in 2019 for the six-term mayor - opened in 1976 on 30 bayfront acres that had served as the Port of Miami from the early 1900s until the docks moved to Dodge Island in the mid-1960s. Named for the national bicentennial, the park spent its early decades as downtown's troubled second green space before its event calendar and a museum-distri.....

Miami's grandest arts complex keeps its most flexible stage hidden inside the opera house. The Carnival Studio Theater is the black-box venue of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts at 1300 Biscayne Boulevard, the 570,000-square-foot Cesar Pelli-designed complex - conceived as Miami-Dade County's Lincoln Center - that opened in 2006 with the Ziff Ballet Opera House and Knight Concert Hall as its twin flagships. The Studio lives within the Ziff building, entered from Biscayne Bouleva.....

Before it was Churchill's Pub, Miami's punk headquarters traded under the name Churchill's Hideaway - and many of the city's musicians never stopped calling it that. The bar at 5501 NE Second Avenue in Little Haiti is the venue British expat Dave Daniels built after opening his first tiny pub on NW 54th Street on New Year's Day 1979; by late 1980 he had moved the operation to the Second Avenue building, a former old-timers' day bar dating to the 1940s, renamed it for Sir Winston Churchill, and h.....

The CBGB of the South is a British pub in Little Haiti with cheap beer, infamous bathrooms and 45 years of glorious noise. Churchill's Pub at 5501 NE Second Avenue in Miami traces to New Year's Day 1979, when Dave Daniels - a promoter from Leek, England who had booked Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton and Steppenwolf at British pop festivals before working Miami cruise ships - opened his first small pub near Overtown. By late 1980 he had moved into the Second Avenue building, a working-class day bar dat.....

The only club in America where the party legally never has to stop was built on two blocks of downtown Miami nobody else wanted. Club Space at 34 Northeast 11th Street opened in March 2000, the vision of Miami native Louis Puig, who spent three months lobbying city commissioners to designate a two-by-two block slice of the derelict Park West district as a 24-hour entertainment zone with round-the-clock liquor licences. New York legend Danny Tenaglia christened the decks at the original 142 NE 11.....

Miami's best-kept nightlife secret hides inside its most famous club. Floyd, at 34 Northeast 11th Street in downtown Miami, occupies an intimate room within the Club Space building - a 21st-century speakeasy bathed in red light, with the DJ booth planted in the middle of the floor and no stage at all: acts perform at eye level, surrounded by the crowd. The room emerged in the mid-2010s as the Space and Link Miami Rebels team - the operators who turned the 24-hour district around Northeast 11th .....

Perched on Watson Island between downtown Miami and the causeway to Miami Beach, Jungle Island is an eco-adventure park with surprisingly deep roots. Its lineage stretches back to 1936, when a Florida pioneer opened Parrot Jungle south of the city as a place where tropical birds flew freely among the foliage. After decades at its original site, the attraction relocated to its current island setting in 2003 and was reborn under its present name. The park blends a lush botanical setting with an a.....

Rising along the downtown waterfront beside Biscayne Bay, the Kaseya Center is the premier indoor arena of Miami and the home of the city's professional basketball team. Opened on the final day of 1999, it replaced an older downtown arena and has anchored the bayfront entertainment district ever since, its sleek profile and bayside setting making it one of the more striking sports venues in the country. Over the years it has carried several corporate names before its current one. With a basketb.....

Eighty-four doors, each weighing between 4 and 11 tons, swing open and shut around the room to tune it like an instrument. The John S. and James L. Knight Concert Hall, the 2,200-seat music hall of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts at 1300 Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami, may be the most complete acoustic vision the legendary Russell Johnson ever realised. The hall opened with the Center on 5 October 2006 - Gloria Estefan, Jeb Bush, Andy Garcia and Bernadette Peters in atte.....

The sign was already there - a worn-out relic of a Central American dive bar - and the new owner liked it too much to take it down. Las Rosas, at 2898 NW 7th Avenue in Miami's Allapattah neighbourhood, became the city's defining rock-and-roll dive: a graffiti-walled, neon-rose-lit venue that the New York Times would eventually anoint a slice of Miami subculture. Cesar Morales - the operator behind Wynwood staples Wood Tavern and The Bar Next Door - opened the bar in late 2016 as a deliberate es.....