I walked three blocks of SW 5th Avenue, from SW 1st Street south to SW 4th Street. It's the edge of Little Havana, two blocks west of I-95, with Calle Ocho four blocks further south. Brickell is on the other side of the highway, close enough that its towers show up in a lot of these frames.
Gentrification is moving through this part of Little Havana one property at a time. On the first block, two houses have been ordered vacated. Where the walk ends on Calle Ocho, an empty lot is for sale, entitled for 205 units.
SW 1st to SW 2nd Street
Mi Rival Supermarket sits on the corner of SW 1st Street. It's a carniceria and grocery with a coffee window, set in a two-story wood frame house painted yellow, with a shingled awning across the front that reads American & Cuban Coffee.
The notice next to the door is in English and Spanish, warning that drinking alcohol in the store or within 100 feet of it can get you arrested.
Step back into the street and Flow Brickell is right behind the roofline.
Across the street is the Miami Hispanic Cultural Arts Center at 111 SW 5th Ave. The building is the J.W. Warner House, built in 1912 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. Before it was an arts center, it housed the Miami Floral Company for sixty years. Flow Brickell shows up behind this one too.
Walking south on Mi Rival's side, the first thing past the store is a wide lot that runs deep off the street, with a driveway leading back to the buildings at the rear and a truck parked in the yard. On a street this close to Brickell, a lot that size is what a developer looks for.
The rest of the block splits between houses people are taking care of and houses nobody is living in. The two-story apartment building at 120 has a white and gray facade with a plumeria growing by the door. A few doors down, a tan two-story house sits behind a chain-link fence, with chairs on the front porch and banana plants growing beside it.
Next to it is 134. The City of Miami Building Department posted it as an unsafe building on October 20, 2026, with orders that it be vacated and not occupied. The front door is behind an iron security gate, and the yard is bare concrete.
At 142, the front door is boarded with plywood, and the house has been posted unsafe as well. A chain-link fence runs across the yard with a No Dumping sign, No Basura underneath. That's two houses on one block ordered vacated.
Across the street at the end of the block, a residential tower rises behind the trees.
SW 2nd to SW 3rd Street
The second block has no boarded doors and no empty lots. It's apartment buildings and two-story houses, and people are living in them.
The Sylvania sits in the middle of the block, a three-story apartment building wrapped in an L around its lot. The entrance has a green awning with the address, 226, and arched openings across the ground floor. A sign next to the door advertises studios for rent, in English and Spanish.
While I was shooting the side of the building, a man rolled up the sidewalk on an electric scooter. He's the first person to end up in a frame on this walk.
Right next door, a yellow two-story apartment building has stucco peeling off in patches and rust stains running down from the window hoods. Not everything here has been kept up, though nothing is boarded up.
Between the apartment buildings are two-story houses behind chain-link fences. At 212, the front porch is crowded with chairs and plants, with a staircase running up the side to the second floor.
One bungalow at 202 sits behind a solid gray metal security fence, common in Little Havana, with a Beware of Dogs sign on the gate. Only the roof and the barred windows show above it. Rising behind it is a white apartment building only a few years old, which shows where the neighborhood is headed.
On the east side of the street, 219 is a two-story apartment building with coral stone panels on either side of the balconies. A white picket fence runs across the front, and the Brickell towers show over the roof.
SW 3rd to SW 4th Street
The third block is small apartment buildings and houses, and the owners are keeping them up. Most have fresh paint, and the porches and balconies have plants on them.
The bungalow at 303 and 305 is a duplex, with two front doors side by side, a red patio umbrella over the porch, and vines growing along the chain-link fence. Next door, a blue two-story house has a one-story front with arched panels over its doors and windows and red barrel tile along the roofline. Flow Brickell stands behind both of them.
The apartment buildings on this block are two stories, each painted a different color. The white one at 330 has a stepped parapet with a carved swag at the top, and the gray one at 315 has breeze block panels set between its windows.
The red one has exterior staircases running up to a second-floor walkway lined with potted plants. The sign on its wall reads Apartment For Rent, Section 8 Welcome.
Behind another red building, at 329, a glass tower in Brickell with a crane on top shows over the neighboring roofs.
At the corner of SW 4th Street, the three-story white building at 340 has been renovated, with new dark windows, a red tile roof and lantern lights by the entrance. It's the only building on the walk that shows money going into it.
This end of the block was the busiest part of the walk. A man on an electric bike came across the intersection, and a man on a scooter waited at the corner while a worker in a safety vest walked along the side of the road.
The Corner of SW 8th Street
I walked the last four blocks to Calle Ocho on my way home. At SW 8th Street and SW 5th Avenue, one corner is a grass lot behind a chain-link fence. The sign on it offers the lot for sale or joint venture as Brickell West, 19,000 square feet entitled for 205 units. The lot sits in Little Havana. The name it's being sold under belongs to the neighborhood across the highway.
From the intersection, the Calle Ocho street sign hangs in front of Flow Brickell, the same tower that stands behind Mi Rival at the start of the walk. Brickell starts on the other side of I-95, a few blocks east.
To walk it yourself, start at Mi Rival on SW 1st Street and head south on SW 5th Avenue. Get a coffee from the window before you go.