Culture: What a City Needs to Finally Grow Up A Miami native’s case for why the next skyline we invest in has to be the cultural one I was born in Miami in 1970 (ouch), back when Downtown’s tallest building was One Biscayne Tower, the Dolphins were 10-4 and made it to the playoffs (double ouch), and “Brickell” was still mostly parking lots and a handful of banks that closed by five. I’ve watched this city grow up almost literally alongside me — through the Mariel boatlift, tent city and the cocaine cowboys, through Miami Vice putting us on the map for all the wrong (and right) reasons, through the international banking boom of the ’80s, the condo canyons of Brickell, and now the newest chapter, where half of Wall Street seems to have a satellite office within walking distance of a museum they never visit. (Yet. Give it time — and maybe a cafecito.) Fifty-six years in, here’s what I’ve learned watching Miami grow: a city can raise all the towers it wants, but skylines don’t make a place world-class. Museums do. Zoos do. Symphonies, gardens, and theaters do. Cranes tell you a city has money. Cultural institutions tell you it has a soul. Every Great City Went Through This Look at the cities we love to compare ourselves to. New York wasn’t “New York” until the Met, the Museum of Natural History, and Carnegie Hall got built — decades after the money had already arrived on the docks. Chicago didn’t become Chicago in the public imagination until the Art Institute and the Field Museum gave all that meatpacking and railroad money somewhere to point with pride. Paris had wealth for centuries before the Louvre became the Louvre we know; London had an empire’s worth of capital flowing through it before the British Museum and the Tate turned that capital into something the world would actually travel to see. The pattern repeats everywhere: economic maturity comes first, but civic maturity — the kind that makes a place unforgettable rather than just profitable — comes from what a city chooses to build for the mind and the spirit, not just for the balance sheet. Miami is squarely in that in-between moment right now. We have the capital. We have the corporate relocations, the finance bros, the tech founders, the international buyers parking money in units forty stories up that sit empty eleven months a year. What we don’t yet have — fully — is the cultural infrastructure to match. And if we don’t build it now, while the money and the attention are here, we’ll have built a very expensive skyline with nothing behind it. We’ve Already Started — We Just Need to Finish the Job To be fair, Miami hasn’t been standing still. The Pérez Art Museum and the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science gave us a Museum Park that would have been unthinkable when I was a kid growing up here — back then, a “field trip downtown” meant visiting Miamarina and the Dockside Terrace restaurant, if you were lucky, and mostly meant nothing at all. The Adrienne Arsht Center and the New World Symphony gave us world-class stages. Vizcaya keeps teaching us where we came from. Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden reminds us what this place looked like before anybody poured concrete on it. And I’d be remis if, as head of one of this city’s cultural institutions, I didn’t mention that our own house —the largest cultural attraction in the county by attendance — has spent decades quietly becoming a place that does more than let kids look at animals through a fence. It’s a conservation institution doing globally significant work on species recovery, a research partner to universities, and, on any given Saturday, the place where a few thousand Miami kids get their first real look at the natural world their city sits inside of. And we are just getting started. More on that in another column. That’s the thing people miss about cultural institutions: they’re not decoration. They’re infrastructure, the same as the roads and the seaport and the airport that get all the ribbon-cuttings. A great museum or zoo or concert hall does economic work — it’s a jobs engine, a tourism draw, a reason a company relocating five hundred employees can tell them Miami isn’t just beaches and a beneficial tax structure, it’s a place with a life to it. And it does civic work that nothing else in a city does quite as well: it’s where a kid from Hialeah and a kid from Coral Gables end up standing next to each other looking at the same Florida panther exhibit or the same Picasso, which, last I checked, isn’t happening at very many other addresses in this town. Growing Up Means Investing in What Doesn’t Pay Off Next Quarter Here’s the uncomfortable part, and it’s the same lesson I try to teach my own kids at the dinner table over white rice and picadillo: growing up means learning to invest in things that don’t pay you back next quarter. A condo tower has a return on investment you can put in a spreadsheet. A museum wing, a zoo expansion, an endowed chair at the symphony — those pay off over a generation, in ways that are much harder to put in a spreadsheet and much easier to feel the absence of once it’s too late to build them. Every world-class city I can think of got there because somebody with money and somebody with vision decided, at exactly this stage of the city’s life cycle, to stop building only what makes a return this year and start building what makes the city worth living in for the next hundred. Miami-Dade’s voters and philanthropic community have shown they’ll step up — our bond programs and our county’s cultural affairs funding prove it. What we need now, as the corporate and private capital keeps landing at MIA and Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood, is for that new money to see itself in the same tradition: not just building where people work, but building what makes them stay, and what makes their kids grow up curious instead of just comfortable. And, to be fair, many of the newcomers have stepped up to the plate in a big way and that is encouraging additional investment in these institutions by committed locals. What I Want My Grandkids to Inherit I don’t know exactly what Miami will look like in another fifty-six years. I do know I’d like my grandkids to be able to say what I can say now — that they watched their hometown grow from something with potential, a word I detest and see simply as a lack of effort, into a place with a soul. That won’t happen by accident, and it won’t happen from the top of another glass tower. It’ll happen because this generation of Miamians — the bankers and the builders, the newcomers, alongside the museum directors and, yes, the zoo people — decided that a truly world-class city needs somewhere for its people to look up at something other than a construction crane. We built the skyline. Now let’s finish building the city. Jose Romano is a lifelong Miami native and head of one of the city’s largest cultural institutions. The post Culture: What a City Needs to Finally Grow Up appeared first on Miami’s Community News. ...read more read less