17 Years of Miami

N.E.R.D. played Miami weeks after we launched. Pharrell jumped off the monitor mid-set. Camera was out. That photograph became the first one that mattered.

He came to the University of Miami and the room went completely still. Press credential. Camera. Stay out of the way. Some moments you witness — you don't narrate them.

Smokey Robinson in a green blazer, the band locked in, the crowd completely with him. Nine frames shot. Full show, start to finish. Some nights you don't leave early.

Off CNN for about a year. Doing live shows — smaller rooms, more relaxed, more himself. The photograph is him mid-laugh on the red carpet. That was the real Larry King.

LeBron, Wade, Bosh. Restaurants stayed open until 3am. Strangers talked to each other on the street. The city felt different that summer — and it was worth writing about what that actually felt like.

The Apprentice. The X Factor. American Idol. America's Got Talent. All of them passed through South Florida. By 2014 that run was ending — a strange, specific beat that produced 74 articles across four networks.

Art Basel had been growing every year since 2009. By 2015 the satellite fairs had spread across Wynwood and the Design District and the prices were genuinely staggering. Miami in December still surprises — that's why we kept going back.

Brickell City Centre opened and on the first Friday night the atrium was already full. The neighborhood felt different after that — more settled, more itself. Worth documenting.

The first Brightline train left Miami for Fort Lauderdale. South Florida had been waiting a long time for something like this. Covered the launch, then kept covering it — the stations, the culture, the way it changed how people thought about getting around.

MiamiCentral opened. Ultra Music Festival left Bayfront Park after twenty years. Two unrelated events that read like the same sentence: the city had changed.

Serious conversations about a Miami Grand Prix — proposed routes, the Hard Rock Stadium circuit concept, a lot of ambition. Most people weren't sure it would happen. We started writing about it anyway.

The restaurants closed. The venues went dark. The writing continued — smaller pieces, more personal, less certain. Miami in silence was still Miami. Some of what came out of that year is the most honest work in the archive.

The first Art Basel after the pandemic. Enormous crowds, almost overwhelming energy. Miami had not just survived — it had been thinking the whole time.

We had been writing about this since 2019. When the cars finally ran the Hard Rock Stadium circuit, the city you'd been watching became the city you always thought it could be.

He chose Miami. Not New York. Not Los Angeles. Miami. The city had been building toward this moment for years — and it knew it.

Covered the first Brightline run in 2017. Seven years later the train reached Orlando. The Florida that seemed possible had quietly arrived.

By 2025 there was something at the Arsht or the Pérez or the New World Symphony almost every week worth seeing. That hadn't always been true. Miami had become the kind of city where you have to choose what to miss.

Gibson Garage opened. Sergio Vallín signed guitars. The first band played the stage. Miami still finds ways to surprise — that's the only reason to keep going.