Fernand Optical has been fixing and selling frames for prescription eyeglasses and designer sunglasses in Downtown Miami at 160 E. Flagler St. since 1980, but even this longstanding family-owned business had a hard time operating during Flagler Street’s $33 million streetscape project. For more than five continuous years, the block where Fernand Optical operated endured a torn-up street and six-foot-tall fences along the sidewalks that made it impossible for anyone standing across the street to see what was on the other side.
“The homeless would poop in every different corner they could, and they would be able to stay here because of the fence,” said Fernand Jimenez, who manages the store for his parents who started Fernand Optical 46 years ago.
Several of the businesses that tried to operate on Flagler Street were wiped out by the street project and the pandemic, Jimenez said. But a strong customer base that spanned generations kept Fernand Optical in business. So, too, was his parents’ willingness to pour their life savings into the store to keep it afloat.
(Image from Flagler Flagler District BID.)
Map of the Flagler District that includes the Flagler Street renovation project's sections and prominent property owners. Flagler Street runs through the center.
“They’re like a person in a casino, it’s 100 grand in and they’re like ‘I’m gonna come back. I’m gonna come back,’” Jimenez said. “They don’t want to leave, [and] who am I to take someone’s passion away?”
But now there’s a chance that Flagler Street businesses and property owners may at last be headed toward some sort of payout.
On Feb. 27, the fences and barricades that surrounded Flagler Street between First and Second avenues, also known as “Section C,” were finally removed. This marked the first time that a segment of Flagler Street was reopened since June 2025 when Sections A and B, spanning from Biscayne Boulevard to Second Avenue, were finished. That leaves just a single block between First Avenue and Miami Avenue under construction (Section D), which a city of Miami spokesman said should be finished sometime in May.
With the streetscape project’s completion around the corner, Flagler Street stakeholders are prepping plans and events to promote Downtown Miami’s main street to the hordes of international soccer fans who are expected to attend the FIFA Fan Festival that will be held at Bayfront Park on June 13 through July 5.
“We have a unique opportunity, a once-in-a-generation opportunity, where there will be a lot of people going to Bayfront Park and right at a time when we are starting to look good,” said Terrell Fritz, executive director of the Flagler District BID (Business Improvement District).
Terrell Fritz, executive director of the Flagler District BID, says the street has an opportunity to promote itself during FIFA.
Despite the chaos brought by the construction, there are still plenty of interesting sights in this part of Downtown Miami. Flagler Street is home to the 104-year-old Seybold jewelry building, the 100-year-old Olympia Theater, and a 1930s-era Walgreens that was converted into the three-level Julia and Henry’s food hall. There’s the 360-foot-tall, 98-year-old Miami-Dade County Courthouse building at 73 Flagler St., which is just across the street from the newly built 25-story Osvaldo N. Soto Miami-Dade Justice Center. And there are multiple trendy restaurants and bars that have opened on Flagler Street and the surrounding area (often referred to as the Flagler District) such as Fratesi’s Pizza, Lost Boys, Over Under, Bespoke Barber Pub, La Boulangerie, and the newly opened Museum Tower Café by Todd English.
The Osvaldo N. Soto Miami-Dade Justice Center (finished last fall) and the Miami-Dade County Court House (finished in 1928).
Flagler Street is also where Israeli-American real estate developer Moishe Mana, who owns about 80 properties in Miami’s downtown area, wants to create an innovation district teeming with tech firms, fashion companies, and restaurants. He also plans to build a temporary park with soccer fields and padel courts at the same rubble-filled 72,000-square-foot parcel where he is now demolishing the old Flagler Station building that once stood at 48 East Flagler St.
But along with these eateries, watering holes, and historic landmarks are plenty of vacant buildings, empty storefronts, and ‘for rent’ or ‘for sale’ signs. According to an April Flagler District BID report, 80 percent of the empty retail spaces in Miami’s Downtown-Brickell area are in the Flagler District. That’s because Flagler Street’s economic vitality was nearly strangled by a streetscape project that left many businesses inaccessible for years, said Gary Ressler, managing partner of Tilia Companies and co-owner of the historic Alfred I. DuPont Building.
(Photo by Erik Bojnansky)
For lease signs posted at the Flagler Building on Flagler Street.
“Right now, [Flagler Street] is on life support,” Ressler said. But now that the road is nearly done, Ressler added, “for the first time there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
Flagler Fiasco
(Photo by Erik Bojnansky)
Miami officials hope to complete "Section D" between First Avenue and Miami Avenue sometime in May.
Stretching from Biscayne Boulevard to the SW 118th Avenue intersection at Paul W. Bell Middle School in Tamiami, Flagler Street has experienced multiple road projects since the dawn of the 21st century. This includes a two-and-a-half-year $45 million road project on West Flagler that devastated businesses in Little Havana before it was finally finished in 2019.
Within the past decade, Downtown Miami’s mile-long segment of Flagler Street was the scene for at least two street renovation projects. The first of these was handled by F.H. Paschen, a Chicago-based general contractor that the city of Miami terminated “due to non-compliance” in 2017, according to a city of Miami spokesman, after spending one-and-a-half years on a single block.
That was when Mana stepped in. He rallied Miami property owners to support a new streetscape plan crafted by Miami-based Zyscovich Architects, which called for a pedestrian friendly concrete-paver street without curbs that was designed for special events and street markets.
The new design, Mana told the Biscayne Times, was essential to help build a community that would form the basis of his envisioned Western Hemisphere trade zone. “It was a whole vision of the street that we were putting together,” he said.
Approved in 2019 with an initial budget of $27 million (paid for by the city of Miami, Miami-Dade County, and Flagler Street property owners), the project was suddenly stopped during the onset of the 2020 pandemic, an event that led to the shuttering of 72 out of 132 businesses that had storefronts on downtown’s Flagler Street, the Miami Herald reported. Despite some apprehension from local business owners, the new streetscape project was restarted in the summer of 2021 with a promised completion in two-and-a-half years.
That didn’t happen. Terrell Fritz of the Flagler District BID, who also lives in the Flagler District, remembers continuously seeing a crater at the First Avenue intersection “for months and months” with no work being done around it.
“It was a total fiasco,” Fritz said. What was even more frustrating was that information was hard to come by. “I mean, we’re dying and suffering -- businesses, property owners, residents, everybody—and we couldn’t get any answers from the city.”
Things weren’t great for Mana either. The longer-than-expected amount of time it took for the road to be finished hindered his team’s efforts to secure companies and firms willing to rent space at his properties.
“People have no imagination,” Mana said. “When they don’t see it. They don’t buy in to it.”
The construction made it nearly impossible for work crews to access Mana’s buildings, many of which were decades old and in need of attention. “All our buildings along Flagler were basically suffocating, not only business-wise, because we couldn’t open, but stuff with violations, 40 to 50 issues, and we couldn’t get a truck in there to fix it,” recalled Mana’s architect, Joe Clark.
By June 2025, the city of Miami declared general contractor Lanzo Construction in default of its “contractual obligations” and moved to terminate, according to a city spokesman. But the project’s bonding company, Liberty Mutual, sought to keep Lanzo Construction on the job. “No timely agreement was reached,” the spokesman said.
Miami City Commissioner Damian Pardo, whose district includes Downtown Miami, recalled that the city administration was unsure what to do about the bond company’s insistence on rehiring Lanzo.
“Do we abandon the bond and just worry about [litigation] later or complete the work ourselves?”
That decision became clear soon after Eileen Higgins was sworn in as mayor of Miami and James Reyes was appointed city manager, Pardo said. The city replaced Lanzo with Unitech Builders, and Section C was finished.
Property owner Gary Ressler credited Higgins for having the fortitude to take action.
“This was not on Mayor Francis Suarez’s radar and not a priority for [previous city manager] Art Noriega, but Higgins listened to downtown. She served on the DDA [Downtown Development Authority] for years [as a county commissioner] and she understood the importance of finishing this,” said Ressler, who is also a DDA board member.
New Flagler Rising
(Photo by Erik Bojnansky)
People listen to live music on Flagler Street on a Saturday afternoon.
To attract more people to the area, the Flagler District BID already holds regular green markets, vintage markets and live music on the street every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. To accomplish this, area property owners pay the city thousands of dollars each week for special event permits that allow the BID to close off the street from vehicles during those events.
“We’re bringing residents to Flagler and reintroducing them to the businesses by getting higher foot traffic every weekend,” Terrell Fritz of the Flagler District BID said.
The BID is also ramping up its “fix up, paint up, lease up” program that aims to spruce up faded buildings, remove graffiti, and fill empty spaces with temporary restaurants, cafes, shops, and galleries prior to the arrival of FIFA. If that isn’t possible, the BID is pushing property owners to fill those spaces with a temporary façade, artistic wraps, or window treatments.
During a tour of Flagler Street, Fritz noted that blocks that have been free of construction longer have a lot more business activity. But Section C, where many places were crushed by COVID-19 and roadwork, there are more “physical challenges,” Fritz acknowledged. “But hopefully, my goal would be that once FIFA is here there will be 30,000 people a day in the downtown area and some of them will wander over here,” he added.
(Photo provided by Mana Commons)
Moishe Mana, one of the largest property owners in the Flagler District, pushed for Flagler Street's current design.
Moishe Mana hasn’t been sitting idle during Flagler Street’s construction either. Mana’s team has been holding hundreds of technology and innovation conferences that brought 120 companies from 18 countries to Miami, said Charly Esnal, CEO of Mana Tech. That includes 16 events held in the span of a week at 21 SE 1st Ave., a 10-story building adorned with three large murals commissioned by Mana, which serves as the headquarters of Mana’s Mana Commons and Mana Tech affiliates, as well as a shared office space with 200 tech startups, Esnal added.
Mana Commons has also been upgrading the lobbies of the Biscayne Building at 19 W. Flagler St.(now marketed as showroom space for emerging fashion designers) and Museum Tower at 150 W. Flagler St. (which provides offices for law firms). Esnal also said the renovation of the 13-story Nikola Tesla Innovation Hub building, located a block away from Flagler Street at 155 S. Miami Ave., will be finished in about three months.
(Photo by Erik Bojnansky)
A green market on Flagler Street on a Saturday afternoon.
Now that most of the road construction work is done, Mana Commons has had an easier time promoting its properties. “We’re getting a lot more interest from food and beverage groups,” said Mana Commons architect Joe Clark.
That makes sense to Colliers commercial broker Stephen Rutchik who has seen increased office lease activity along Flagler Street now that its intersections aren’t constantly shut off from traffic. “It had previously been a barrier to get around and to be in,” he said. “But now Flagler Street is becoming a real draw, and tenants are understanding the value it can offer, not just today, but the potential that it has in the future.”
Still, that future wasn’t possible without some major disruption, Clark said.
“The process of creation starts with some destruction,” Clark said. “You can’t do one without the other.”