I-395 Master Plan Park

Major elements of the $800 million 1.4-mile corridor include the replacement of the existing I-395 elevated highway and a new Signature Bridge to span Biscayne Boulevard designed by Linda Figg, designer of the Sunshine Skyway bridge in Tampa Bay and the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys. The bridge is stayed by cables suspended from a pair of 350-foot-tall pylons that straddle each of the two 980-foot-long spans, which clear Biscayne Boulevard by 24 feet that opens up the sky and reduces the overhead structure’s visual impact for people on the ground, while allowing an expansive green park space at its center. The opening also gives viewers on the ground a dramatic opening to look up at the dancing pylons, as if they were giant artworks in a sculpture garden. Additional elements include new eastbound and westbound ramps, walls, and roadway lighting. New urban design elements such as landscaping, streetscape lighting, and community space areas under the highway bridges are also presented.

A key piece of the project designed by Zyscovich would transform what’s now a blighted, disconnected no-man’s land of low overpasses and closely spaced columns beneath I-395 into a series of parks, gardens and public spaces linked by a mile-long pathway between Overtown and Biscayne Bay by raising the new expressway farther off the ground and drastically reducing the number of support piers, the support columns would be reduced from the 440 now existing to no more than 107. With almost 55 acres in size, the stretch of land under and around the new I-395 will become the largest urban park in the city of Miami, including a pedestrian bridge spanning the Florida East Coast rail tracks, trails that will link dog parks, open-air performance spaces, splash fountains community gardens and public art. Urban lighting schemes would ensure both safety and curb appeal after dark along the full length of the trails. Paving would be an abstract keyboard pattern and landscaping in some spots will be shaped to recall musical notation. In Overtown, the paving will be inscribed with jazz instruments. At the entrance to the Ziff opera and ballet hall, an arrangement of trees in a multi-use plaza will echo the musical notation for the theme of the Miami Sound Machine’s “Rhythm is Gonna Get You.”

By eliminating the existing support embankment and moving a roadway that now connects northbound Biscayne Boulevard to the MacArthur Causeway to the north side of the new bridge, a new 2-acre park will be created to connect Museum Park and its Metromover station to the Arsht Performing Arts Center with space dedicated to a “music chamber” with mini-stages around column bases.