Wednesday evening, August 26, dozens of Miami dog owners showed up at Chewy Bark Park in Coral Gables for something that didn't exist a month earlier: the first Chewy Pack Walk, a new monthly series that opens with a guided group walk down The Underline before circling back to the park for refreshments and giveaways. National Dog Day gave it a launch date, but the timing matters less than what it confirms. The trail didn't wait to be finished before people started building a weeknight around it.
That's the part of this story that keeps getting buried under headlines about budgets and construction schedules. The Underline is still short of linking Brickell all the way to Dadeland South on anything close to its original timeline. But the five miles already open are booked solid, week after week, with programming that has nothing to do with commuting and everything to do with why people actually move through a neighborhood.
The Two Underlines Running at the Same Time
Read the county coverage and you'd think The Underline is mostly a construction site. In July, Miami-Dade commissioners approved a $2.25 million increase to the engineering and inspection contract for Phase 3, the 7.36-mile final stretch running from SW 19th Avenue to the Dadeland South Metrorail station, and stretched the timeline out another 270 days. It's the latest in a run of cost creep that goes back to 2016, when the whole build was estimated at $100 million. By 2022 that figure had grown to $140 million, and nobody has offered an updated total since.
Commissioner Oliver Gilbert, who has voted against these increases more than once, put the frustration plainly during the July vote: "I understand it needs to pass, but fundamentally understand what we are doing."
Meanwhile, the finished portion of the park, running from the Miami River through Brickell, the Roads, Shenandoah and Silver Bluff, hit its own milestone back in May. Segment 4, the stretch between SW 27th and SW 37th avenues, opened with a ribbon cutting attended by Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago that gave The Underline five continuous miles after five years of building. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava described it in terms that matter more to the people already using it than to anyone tracking the construction contract: "This is what it looks like when infrastructure puts people first."
Two different projects, moving at two different speeds. Only one of them determines what your Wednesday night looks like right now.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Month
Walk the finished stretch on any given day and it feels less like a park and more like a gym membership with a printed schedule. Here's what's running through the fall:
- HIIT & Run Workout, first and third Sunday of each month, 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. at the Underline Urban Gym near 700 SW 1st Avenue. Friends of The Underline runs it with Baptist Health South Florida as presenting partner, and instructors Decue, Mo and Manofallbyrds lead 30 minutes of interval training followed by a 30-minute group run.
- A Saturday Farmers Market at the Brickell Backyard Promenade, at the green crosswalk on SW 1st Avenue across from SW 9th Street, running weekly through mid-October.
- Free weekly yoga at the Inter Stage in Brickell, scheduled clear through December 2027.
- A monthly group run and walk through Brickell on the third Wednesday of the month, open through mid-September.
- The new Chewy Pack Walk, launched August 26 at Chewy Bark Park in Coral Gables, now a standing monthly fixture.
Layer in the independently organized Amigos Meet walk club, which uses The Underline as its regular route with no official sponsorship attached, and you get a corridor with more standing weekly commitments than most parks twice its size and decades older.
Five Miles in Five Years, and the Next Seven Aren't Cheap
The contrast is worth sitting with. Friends of The Underline CEO Eulois Cleckley framed Segment 4's ribbon cutting as a mobility win, and it is one. But the mobility story and the community story aren't the same story. The trail's usefulness as a commuter shortcut still depends on Phase 3 clearing whatever comes next in county contracting, construction extensions and cost adjustments. The trail's usefulness as a place where you already know three people by name because you see them at the Sunday HIIT class doesn't depend on any of that. It's already true, today, regardless of what happens to the Dadeland stretch.
That gap between the infrastructure timeline and the lived experience is the real story here, and it's easy to miss if the only thing you're reading is the county press release.
Why the Finished Stretch Already Acts Like an Institution
Part of what makes the difference is who has attached their name to it. Baptist Health South Florida didn't sponsor a one-time ribbon cutting, it committed to a recurring Sunday fitness class with named instructors on a fixed schedule. Chewy didn't run a single dog meetup, it launched a monthly series with a permanent home base at a specific park with a street address. Friends of The Underline, the nonprofit that grew out of Meg Daly's original vision for the space, is the connective tissue behind nearly all of it, which is a different kind of commitment than a county department managing a construction contract line item.
That's the gap between a park and a park with a calendar. One gets visited when you happen to pass by. The other gets returned to on purpose.
What It Means If You're Already Here
If you live along this stretch, in Brickell, the Roads, Shenandoah, Silver Bluff, or close enough to Coral Gables that the Chewy walk is an easy midweek stop, the practical takeaway isn't about waiting for Phase 3 to reach Dadeland. It's that the five miles you already have access to function less like a sidewalk and more like a second living room, one with a printed schedule you can build a week around. The county's construction saga will keep generating headlines and budget votes for a while yet. Your Sunday morning run doesn't need any of that to resolve first.
If you're weighing a move into one of these pockets of Miami and want to understand how a corridor like this actually shapes daily routine and not just a listing description, Maria Penalver has spent years reading these blocks street by street. Let's Connect.
