![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/jeep-4-696x393.png\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Culture: What a City Needs to Finally Grow Up<\/p>\n
A Miami native\u2019s case for why the next skyline we invest in has to be the cultural one<\/p>\n
I was born in Miami in 1970 (ouch), back when Downtown\u2019s tallest building was One Biscayne Tower, the Dolphins were 10-4 and made it to the playoffs (double ouch), and \u201cBrickell\u201d was still mostly parking lots and a handful of banks that closed by five. I\u2019ve watched this city grow up almost literally alongside me \u2014 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 \u201980s, 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 \u2014 and maybe a cafecito.)
Fifty-six years in, here\u2019s what I\u2019ve learned watching Miami grow: a city can raise all the towers it wants, but skylines don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Every Great City Went Through This
Look at the cities we love to compare ourselves to. New York wasn\u2019t \u201cNew York\u201d until the Met, the Museum of Natural History, and Carnegie Hall got built \u2014 decades after the money had already arrived on the docks. Chicago didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 the kind that makes a place unforgettable rather than just profitable \u2014 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\u2019t yet have \u2014 fully \u2014 is the cultural infrastructure to match. And if we don\u2019t build it now, while the money and the attention are here, we\u2019ll have built a very expensive skyline with nothing behind it.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve Already Started \u2014 We Just Need to Finish the Job
To be fair, Miami hasn\u2019t been standing still. The P\u00e9rez 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 \u2014 back then, a \u201cfield trip downtown\u201d 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\u2019d be remis if, as head of one of this city\u2019s cultural institutions, I didn\u2019t mention that our own house \u2014the largest cultural attraction in the county by attendance \u2014 has spent decades quietly becoming a place that does more than let kids look at animals through a fence. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the thing people miss about cultural institutions: they\u2019re not decoration. They\u2019re 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 \u2014 it\u2019s a jobs engine, a tourism draw, a reason a company relocating five hundred employees can tell them Miami isn\u2019t just beaches and a beneficial tax structure, it\u2019s a place with a life to it. And it does civic work that nothing else in a city does quite as well: it\u2019s 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\u2019t happening at very many other addresses in this town.<\/p>\n
Growing Up Means Investing in What Doesn\u2019t Pay Off Next Quarter
Here\u2019s the uncomfortable part, and it\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s voters and philanthropic community have shown they\u2019ll step up \u2014 our bond programs and our county\u2019s cultural affairs funding prove it. What we need now, as the corporate and private capital keeps landing at MIA and Fort Lauderdale\u2013Hollywood, 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. <\/p>\n
What I Want My Grandkids to Inherit
I don\u2019t know exactly what Miami will look like in another fifty-six years. I do know I\u2019d like my grandkids to be able to say what I can say now \u2014 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\u2019t happen by accident, and it won\u2019t happen from the top of another glass tower. It\u2019ll happen because this generation of Miamians \u2014 the bankers and the builders, the newcomers, alongside the museum directors and, yes, the zoo people \u2014 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\u2019s finish building the city.<\/p>\n
Jose Romano is a lifelong Miami native and head of one of the city\u2019s largest cultural institutions.<\/p>\n
\n Connect To Your Customers & Grow Your Business
\n<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1791239889_839_Bugle-Boy.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Culture: What a City Needs to Finally Grow Up A Miami native\u2019s case for why the next skyline…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":419638,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,125,124],"class_list":["post-419637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}