Miami 2018: MiamiCentral Opens, Ultra Says Goodbye to Bayfront Park
In 2018, MiamiCentral gave downtown a world-class transit hub, Ultra Music Festival bid farewell to Bayfront Park, and Dwyane Wade came home for one last dance — a year of endings and beginnings.
Part of our ongoing curation of what it means to live, love, and play in the Magic City.
From the Vault · 2019
This is an archival piece from the Premier Guide Miami collection. The coverage, context, and details reflect the time it was originally published.
The opening of Brightline's MiamiCentral station in May 2018 gave downtown Miami something it had been missing for decades: a world-class transit hub. The station, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was immediately recognized as one of the most significant pieces of new architecture in Miami in years — a building that was not just functional but genuinely beautiful, a statement about the kind of city Miami was becoming.
Ultra Music Festival 2018 was the last edition at Bayfront Park, and the farewell was bittersweet. The festival had grown from a single-day event in 1999 to a three-day institution drawing more than 165,000 fans, and Bayfront Park had been its home for most of that journey. The combination of world-class electronic music and the Miami skyline had made it one of the most iconic festival settings in the world. Saying goodbye to it was not easy.
Dwyane Wade's return to the Miami Heat for the 2018-19 season was one of the most emotionally resonant sports stories of the year. Wade, who had spent most of his career in Miami before stints in Chicago and Cleveland, came home for what would be his final season — a farewell tour that gave the city one last chance to celebrate the player who had brought it its first NBA championship in 2006. His return was a gift, and Miami received it with the gratitude it deserved.
The Wynwood Walls celebrated their tenth anniversary during Art Basel 2018, marking a decade of commissioning internationally recognized artists to transform the walls of a neighborhood that had become one of the world's most important outdoor art destinations. Ten years in, the Walls had become as much a part of Miami's identity as the Art Deco architecture of South Beach or the skyline of Brickell.
2018 was a year of endings and beginnings — Ultra's farewell to Bayfront Park, Wade's final season, MiamiCentral's opening. The city was in transition, as it always is, moving from one chapter to the next with the restless energy that has always defined it. Premier Guide Miami was there for all of it, as it has been since the beginning.
The PGM Edit
In 2018, MiamiCentral gave downtown a world-class transit hub, Ultra Music Festival bid farewell to Bayfront Park, and Dwyane Wade came home for one last dance — a year of endings and beginnings.
Premier Guide Miami
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