Bayside Marketplace

This guide to Bayside Marketplace in Miami traces how a stretch of rotting fishing piers on Biscayne Bay became a downtown gamble. By the early nineteen eighties Pier Five's charter boats and fish stalls stood empty, and Miami wrestled with a reputation problem sharpened by a certain TV cop show broadcasting the city's drug wars into living rooms. The Rouse Company answered with a ninety-three million dollar bet on architect Benjamin Thompson's open-air market design, meant to feel like an old-fashioned market shed on the water.