It might be the biggest thing to happen in downtown Miami since Henry Flagler brought his railroad south and created downtown Miami.
And it’s happening sooner than you might think, on the same long-vacant acreage where Flagler built his little Miami train depot more than a century ago.
No longer just a concept, All Aboard Florida, the new privately financed passenger-rail service to Orlando, is moving full steam ahead with plans for a mammoth new downtown train-station complex that supporters say will constitute nothing less than a quantum leap in Miami’s quest for a place among the world’s great urban centers.
MiamiCentral, the name chosen for the complex by All Aboard Florida, represents an ambitious and unusual all-at-once marriage of heavy infrastructure with urban revitalization that would turn a drab stretch of downtown into a bustling fulcrum of transportation and human activity — including a food market, shops, restaurants, offices and two residential towers with that increasingly rare commodity, 800 rental apartments affordable to people who work in the neighborhood.
