Downtown & Bayside

From Miami's first business center to a place people avoided after dark, and back to a neighborhood of residential towers on the bay.

Downtown was Miami's original business center, built around the bay and the railroad in the early 1900s. The Freedom Tower, built in 1925 as a newspaper office, later became the place where Cuban exiles were welcomed in the 1960s. By the 1980s many offices had moved away, and Downtown emptied out after dark.

Bayside Marketplace opened on the waterfront in 1987 and brought people back to the bay. Since then, new residential towers and museums have turned Downtown into a place where people live, not just work, with the marina, the Skyviews wheel and the skyline right on the water.