Walk south along the water from the Crimson at 601 NE 27th Street and the path simply stops. The building's own stretch of baywalk, tucked along a quiet inlet off Biscayne Bay, ends at a fence line where the next parcel begins. No sign, no detour, just a dead end that sends you back up to the street to finish the walk on sidewalk instead of shoreline. Anyone who has lived in this stretch of Edgewater for more than a season has hit that exact spot. For years it has been the neighborhood's most literal metaphor: a public waterfront trail that Miami has been promising residents since 1979, still arriving in pieces.
That is changing this year, and not because of one announcement. Three separate projects, each stalled or simply undone for a different reason, all moved forward within months of each other in 2026. None of them alone would be worth a headline. Together they mean the walk a lot of Edgewater residents already take, or wish they could take without doubling back, is closer to actually connecting than it has been at any point since the neighborhood's condo boom began.
The dead end at the Crimson has an address now
On August 26, 2026, Miami's Urban Development Review Board recommended approval for a 53-story tower at 717 NE 27th Street, immediately east of the Crimson, on a parcel that fronts both Biscayne Bay and the inlet that cuts north into the block. The developers behind the project, called OKO Lilli Tower, are proposing 117 residences and, tucked into the approval materials, something more useful to anyone who already lives nearby: nearly 350 linear feet of new publicly accessible baywalk built to the city's waterfront design standards.
The project's attorney, Carlos Lago, was specific in his letter to the city about what that stretch of pavement is actually for. He described it as forming a critical link in the Biscayne Line, connecting the existing baywalk segment north of the site, the one that dead-ends at the Crimson, to the baywalk segments already built to the south. That is the exact gap a lot of residents have been walking into for years. The board's conditions were minor, mostly asking the developer to talk with neighboring properties and add more trees, which suggests this isn't a project fighting for its life through years of hearings. It is one clearing its last procedural steps.
The other end has been broken for almost fifty years
The Crimson gap is a local frustration. The gap under the MacArthur Causeway is a regional one, and it is far older. In 1979, Miami passed what's known as the Dan Paul ordinance, requiring new waterfront buildings to set back from the water and maintain a public promenade along the bay. That single rule is the reason a continuous baywalk exists at all, and also the reason it has taken this long. Buildings built before 1979 were never required to comply, which is exactly why the path frays into disconnected fragments once you leave Brickell and downtown and head north toward Edgewater. A 2021 description from the Miami Herald put it plainly, calling the result a hodgepodge of disconnected pathways.
The worst of those breaks sits right at the MacArthur Causeway, where the baywalk from the Pérez Art Museum and Maurice Ferre Park simply runs out. In March 2026, the City Commission approved the design and funding grant applications for the first phase of the I-395 Baywalk Pedestrian and Bikeway Bridge, an over-the-water span designed to go underneath the causeway and finally connect that PAMM segment to the site of the old Miami Herald building. It will not fix Edgewater's local gaps by itself, but it fixes the choke point that has kept the entire stretch from Brickell through downtown into Edgewater from ever functioning as one path. Combined with the Crimson connector to the north, the two projects close the walk from both directions at once, something that has never happened in the same calendar year before.
Margaret Pace Park stops being a place you pass through
The park in the middle of all this has its own overdue finish line. The city first unveiled a master plan for Margaret Pace Park's eight acres back in August 2023, broken into phases that started with shoreline improvements and worked through a splash pad, new beach volleyball courts, and upgraded tennis and pickleball courts. The final phase, a two-story community center with fitness and art rooms and a rooftop overlook, is scheduled to break ground in late 2026 and run through 2028.
The design firm Touzet Studio is behind two structures that will anchor that construction: a circular Community Pavilion meant for yoga and group events, and a linear Baywalk Pavilion built around a row of swings and seating right along the water. Both are modeled on the shape of mangrove seedlings, which sounds like a design flourish until you notice what it actually solves. Margaret Pace Park sits almost exactly between the two connector projects, the Crimson gap to the north and the causeway bridge to the south. A park that finally has real destinations inside it, not just a lawn you cross on your way somewhere else, is the piece that makes the rest of the connected walk worth using.
Here's the practical version of the next two years, project by project:
- Now through late 2026: The OKO Lilli Tower baywalk segment moves from board recommendation toward construction, closing the Crimson dead end.
- Late 2026 through 2028: Margaret Pace Park's community center phase, the last piece of its 2023 master plan, gets built.
- 2026 onward: The I-395 bridge's first phase moves from approved design and funding into construction, closing the causeway choke point.
None of these finish tomorrow. But for the first time, all three are actually underway in the same window instead of sitting on separate timelines that never seemed to align.
The walk now has somewhere to end
A connected path only matters if there's a reason to walk it, and Edgewater's ground floor has been filling in at the same pace as the walk itself. On July 7, 2026, Gioia Hospitality Group, the team behind the Michelin-recognized Daniel's, A Florida Steakhouse, signed a lease for an 11,500-square-foot waterfront restaurant at Aimco's planned 38-story tower at 560 NE 34th Street, with 2,500 square feet of outdoor space directly on the bay and interiors by the Rockwell Group. Daniel's itself landed at No. 40 on the 2026 World's 101 Best Steak Restaurants list, ranking seventh in North America. Construction on the Edgewater location isn't expected to wrap until late 2027 or early 2028, so this is a reason to keep walking the corridor for years, not a reservation to make this fall.
Closer to now, Portofino Fresh Market is preparing to open at 2200 NE 2nd Avenue, joining Fruta Fresca and Halal Heat in a retail strip that plan review documents suggest will lean into an Italian market and restaurant format. A few blocks north, pastry chef Sappir Zuzan opened Péché Mignon in March 2026, a champagne bar and café built on training from a two-Michelin-star kitchen in the south of France. And since December 2024, chef Guillermo Gassan's Iko Miami has been running a wagyu hot stone bar and sushi counter that has quietly become one of the more distinctive small rooms on the bayfront side of the neighborhood.
None of these are the kind of destination restaurant that pulls people in from across the county. That's the point. They're neighborhood formats, places built for someone who already lives here and wants somewhere to walk to, which is exactly what a finally-connected baywalk needs to be worth using.
What this actually changes if you already live here
If you walk the water in Edgewater today, you can already string together a fair amount: south from Margaret Pace Park toward the Venetian Marina and Miami Women's Club, then a gap, then reconnect around Brickell Key before hitting the wall at the causeway. North from the park, you can reach the Crimson's private stretch and then hit the fence. What's different about 2026 isn't that any of that changes overnight. It's that for the first time, the two hardest gaps to close, the private-parcel problem north of the park and the infrastructure problem at the causeway, are both moving through approvals and funding in the same year, with the park's own missing piece under construction in between them.
That's a different story than another luxury tower announcement, and it's the one worth paying attention to if you're the person actually walking this corridor on a Tuesday evening rather than reading about it from across the bay.
If you're weighing what a fully connected Edgewater waterfront means for your own plans here, whether that's a property you already own or one you're watching, Urdapilleta Real Estate knows this stretch of the bay block by block. Schedule a private consultation and we'll walk you through what's actually changing, and when.
