Brickell Avenue

Contents

1. The rock under the street
2. How the stone behaves with water
3. Mansions first, then towers
4. The avenue now

Brickell Avenue shares its family name with 888 Brickell, the 90 story tower for which Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group is the developer, and like every building on the street it stands on a pale, porous rock that South Florida geologists call the Miami Limestone. The avenue’s past is generally narrated as a sequence of owners and buildings. It can also be told as the story of that stone: what it allowed people to build, and what it has done with water ever since.

The rock under the street

The clearest description of the stone at the river end of the avenue comes from archaeology. The Clio entry on the Miami Circle explains that the Tequesta village at Brickell Point was built by boring through a thin soil layer into limestone that formed in shallow seas roughly 125,000 years ago.¹ The rock was soft enough to be cut with hand tools, which is why the carved circle exists at all, and the entry calls it the only known prehistoric structure in the eastern United States built into bedrock. Around the site, the same entry says, grew a hammock of hardwoods and mangroves, the kind of cover that gave Brickell Hammock its name. The rock also kept a record of later builders: the entry notes that an apartment block put up on the point in 1950 did the worst damage to the ancient site, and a site drawing reproduced with the entry marks modern intrusions such as that building’s septic tank sitting among the prehistoric postholes in the same bedrock.

The quality that made the stone easy to work is its porosity, and that is the property that now dominates every conversation about building near the bay. Speaking on NPR in 2014, the University of Miami geologist Hal Wanless described sand over porous limestone on the barrier island and porous limestone again beneath the mainland, and warned that water moving through it would make low ground hard to keep dry.²

Figure

Two readings of the same stone

	As a building ground	As a water path
Origin	Formed in shallow seas about 125,000 years ago	The same porous bed carries tide and rain
Working it	Soft enough to bore holes into with hand tools	Coarse enough that water moves through it freely
Evidence	The Miami Circle, cut into bedrock at Brickell Point	Drainage wells that choke when high tide pushes back
Cover	A thin soil layer over the rock, once shaded by hammock	Streets and slabs that seal the surface above it

How the stone behaves with water

A porous bed behaves like a sponge that is already full. Engineering News Record reported in 2017 on what happened when Miami Beach relied on drainage wells sunk 80 to 100 feet into the island’s coarse limestone: at high tide the sea pressed back up through the rock, the wells could not take more water, and the storm runoff simply rose again into the street.³ The city’s engineers concluded that the rock had no spare room when the tide was in, and changed to pumping treated stormwater into Biscayne Bay instead.

The Miami mainland under Brickell Avenue is a different place from the island across the bay, but Wanless placed the same porous limestone beneath both, and the lesson carries: on this ground anything built low has to reckon with water arriving from below as well as from the sky.

Mansions first, then towers

The avenue took its first built form from one owner. The University of Florida Libraries note on Mary Brickell records that after William Brickell’s death in 1908 she developed the family’s hundreds of acres, including Brickell Hammock along with the strip afterward nicknamed Millionaire’s Row, and that the avenue is named for the couple.⁴ A nickname compilation by Barry Popik quotes the next chapter: grand homes lined the street during the first years of that century, and during the 1970s offices, hotel blocks and apartment buildings began to supplant them.⁵ The same page reproduces a 2015 profile that counted 53 banks in the neighborhood and described its population more than doubling after 2000, the period that brought the name Wall Street South. The district’s own promotional line, quoted on the same page, preferred Manhattan of the South and claimed some 200,000 daily workers and the country’s densest cluster of international banks, figures that say more about ambition than about measurement but show how completely the street had turned from houses to offices.

Figure

The avenue in four eras

1. 01
   Early 1900sMary Brickell's land along the avenue fills with large houses and earns the name Millionaire's Row.
2. 02
   1970sOffice towers, hotels and apartments begin replacing the houses.
3. 03
   1980s and 1990sThe district stays moderately built, with a handful of small banks among the houses and low buildings.
4. 04
   2000s onwardPopulation more than doubles and the press starts calling Brickell Wall Street South.

At its north end the avenue crosses the Miami River on a drawbridge. A Wikipedia summary of the Brickell Avenue Bridge gives the original span as 1929 and its replacement as 1995, notes a widening in 2006, and records that the bascule leaves opened 4,990 times in 2010, a reminder that the river under the avenue is still a working channel.⁶ For the 1995 bridge the state held a competition for public art, and Manuel Carbonell won it with a 53 foot bronze monument, a carved column narrating Tequesta life topped by a figure of a Tequesta family, set at mid span.⁷ The sculptor’s studio describes it as the first time the Florida Department of Transportation joined architecture, art and engineering in one bridge design.

The avenue now

Glass and concrete towers have replaced the mansions. A 2016 notice from Swire Properties marked the opening of the first office tower at Brickell City Centre, a 12 story glass building by Arquitectonica with a Metromover station attached to its structure.⁸ The citywide zoning code that governs such projects, Miami 21, took effect in May 2010; its authors at DPZ CoDesign list among its rules minimum separations between towers, habitable ground floors on primary frontages, and tall corridor buildings stepping down toward single family streets behind them.⁹

Those rules shape the view from the sidewalk. What they cannot change is underneath: a stone soft enough for the Tequesta to carve by hand, that once carried a pioneer family’s hammock, and that still takes in the tide beneath a street of towers. The account continues in The Miami Skyline, and across the drawbridge in The Miami River.