What do you do with a hundred-year-old forest and a fifty-four-story tower when they're both trying to occupy the same intersection?
That's not a hypothetical for anyone who walks the corner of SW 15th Road and SW 1st Avenue these days. On one side of that intersection sits the Hammock Playground, the newest entry point into Simpson Park's old-growth hardwood forest, built as part of The Underline's second phase and opened in April 2024. On the other side, behind a construction fence, sits the future base of Seven Broadway, a 682-foot residential tower that will eventually hold 113 units and rise 54 stories above the exact same block. Same corner. Two very different timelines.
A Corner With Two Addresses
The playground and the tower are not just neighbors in the loose sense that everything in The Roads is close to everything else. They share an actual street address. The Hammock Playground sits at SW 15th Road and SW 1st Avenue, tucked against the preserved hardwood hammock at Simpson Park. Seven Broadway's site, at 41 and 75 SW 15th Road, has frontage on that same SW 15th Road, which locally goes by the name Broadway, plus a secondary frontage on SW 1st Avenue. It's the same corner, described from two different directions.
Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox and developed by Ytech, Seven Broadway will occupy a lot that most recently held a two-story office building and an eight-unit multifamily structure, both demolished to clear the site. The developer assembled the parcel between 2018 and 2020 for roughly $8.2 million, and the project has moved through Miami's Urban Development Review Board on its way toward construction. When it's finished, it will be one of the taller residential buildings anywhere near The Roads, and it will sit closer to Simpson Park's tree line than almost anything else built in the neighborhood in the past century.
The Forest That Already Survived Its Worst Year
If a fifty-four-story tower sounds like a threat to a small urban forest, it helps to know this isn't the first time Simpson Park has had to absorb something disruptive next door.
The park started as Jungle Park in 1913, when a group of Miami residents bought 5.5 acres of hammock land from Mary Brickell to keep at least a fragment of the original rock-ridge forest from disappearing under development. In 1926, a major hurricane tore through the property and wiped out much of what had been planted there, some of it non-native species that had crept in over the years. Botanist Charles Torrey Simpson, who had spent decades documenting South Florida's native plants, helped guide the replanting effort with species that actually belonged in a South Florida hammock. The park was renamed in his honor in 1927, and it has carried that name ever since.
What's left today is a 7.8-acre remnant of what was once the much larger Brickell Hammock, a forest that used to stretch from the Miami River down toward Coconut Grove before the city grew over most of it. Simpson Park, along with Alice Wainwright Park and a small patch on Virginia Key, is one of the only pieces of that original hammock still standing. The forest has already outlasted one storm, a century of surrounding redevelopment, and the disappearance of nearly everything else it used to connect to. A tower going up across the street is a new kind of pressure, but it's not the first pressure this particular seven-plus acres has faced.
What Two Years of Trail Actually Changed
The bigger shift for people who actually live here isn't the tower. It's what happened two years before anyone broke ground on it.
The Underline's Phase 2, known as the Hammock Trail, opened on April 24, 2024, and runs 2.14 miles from Brickell through The Roads, Silver Bluff, and Shenandoah, connecting the half-mile Brickell Backyard segment that opened back in 2021 to the edge of Coconut Grove near Vizcaya Station. The project added more than 100,000 native plants and trees along that stretch and increased tree canopy shade in the corridor by 36 percent. In 2025, a free bike-share program launched along the route, giving residents a way to cover the distance without a car or a bike of their own. Phase 3, a 7.36-mile southern extension toward Coral Gables and Kendall, is scheduled to finish in 2026, which will eventually turn this into a much longer corridor than what exists today.
For someone living in The Roads, the practical result is simple. Before April 2024, Simpson Park was a quiet dead-end you visited and then turned around and left. Now it's a trailhead. You can walk or bike from the park's crushed-shell paths directly onto a protected, tree-shaded corridor that runs toward Vizcaya Station and the edge of the Grove, without crossing a single unprotected intersection along the way.
The Walk, Mapped
Start at the koi pond inside Simpson Park, cross out through the Hammock Playground, and here's what's within easy reach without ever getting back in a car:
- Triangle Park, a small dog-friendly green space with a playground and basketball court, a few blocks into the neighborhood's core
- Southside Park, slightly larger, with its own basketball court and playground
- Perricone's Marketplace & Café, an Italian spot with a shaded garden that's been a neighborhood fixture for years
- Honey Uninhibited and Tutto Pasta, both within the same short walk
- Galeria Adelmo, a local gallery space that hosts classes and shows for area artists
None of this required the trail to exist. But the trail is what turned a scattered list of nearby spots into an actual loop you can walk in one go, forest to playground to park to lunch, without a car in between.
The Tower Isn't Taking the Forest's Land
It's worth being precise about what's actually changing here, because it's easy to conflate two different things. Simpson Park's footprint is not shrinking. The 7.8 acres of hardwood hammock that have survived since 1913 are not part of the Seven Broadway site. The tower's roughly 16,600-square-foot lot was, until recently, a two-story office building and a small multifamily structure, ordinary mid-century construction that had nothing to do with the preserve next door.
What's changing is the context around the forest, not the forest itself. The corner that used to be low-rise and largely unremarkable is about to have one of the taller buildings in the area standing directly across the street from an old-growth canopy that predates almost everything else in Brickell and The Roads combined. That's a real shift in how the block will feel and look. It's not a shift in how much forest is left.
For residents, that distinction matters more than it might seem. A tower rising on a previously developed lot is a different kind of change than a tower rising on parkland. The former is a taller version of what was already there. The latter would be something else entirely, and it isn't what's happening at this corner.
The next time you're on the Hammock Trail heading toward Vizcaya, or cutting through the Hammock Playground on your way into Simpson Park, look across the street. That fence marks where a fifty-four-story building is going to stand next to a forest that's been on that same block since before most of Miami's skyline existed. Both are staying. The corner is just going to look different doing it.
If you're curious about what a shift like this means for property values or timing in The Roads specifically, or you just want to talk through what you're seeing on your own block, Green Group Realty is happy to walk through it with you. Reach out to schedule a personal market consultation with Javier Portal.
