The Boulevard by the Bay; some call it the Biscayne corridor. Others call it uptown Miami, or midtown Miami, or edgewater. By any name, the urban swath north of Miami's downtown is a real estate market on fire, with some 12,000 residential units ready to spring from the ground over the next three to five years

South Florida CEO, August, 2003 by J.P. Faber

"Edgewater is the area north of the Omni, south of 36th Street," says Jeff Morr, the president and CEO of Majestic Properties, which is marketing ICE. For developer Henry Harper, whose Parc Lofts building is going up near the Performing Arts Center, the neighborhood has a different name. "To me it's the performing arts district," he says. Realtor Edie Laquer calls it the Omni corridor, while Miami City Commissioner Johnny Winton believes the area will ultimately be called Midtown, the working title for the massive mixed-use project going up in the Buena Vista rail yards.

Well, hold your horses. Rick Barrow, president of marketing/advertising firm Barrow, Beber, Silverstein, is on a mission: to name the district Uptown. Launching his cause with a full-page advertising insert in The Miami Herald in June, with another planned for September, he is already lining up the area's developers to back the idea.

By Barrow's Manhattan logic, Downtown centers around Flagler Street, Midtown lies between the Freedom Tower and the Performing Arts Center, and the area north of the Design District on Biscayne Boulevard is the Upper East Side. That leaves the stretch between I-395 and I-195 as Uptown.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"If you take the Performing Arts Center and the Design District as the anchors, one stands for the upscale end of culture, while the other stands as the upscale end of design and style," says Barrow. "So what's a metaphoric term that stands for the upscale end of style, culture and design? It's Uptown!"