At Bar Kaiju, under the glow of red lights on the second floor of The Citadel food hall, I drank a carbonated mango lassi milk punch. It was dubbed the Chukwa for the giant turtle from Hindu mythology that carries the Earth on its back. All drinks here are named for the world’s monsters—Nandi Bear, Kappa, Rodan—whose stories I read while flipping through the fantastical, illustrated menu. Bar Kaiju presents a history of humanity’s fears, packaged by clever barmen as liquid courage.

Walk two minutes north of The Citadel, and you’ll reach Little River. Cross the slim waterway’s bridge, walk five minutes east, and in the center of a small park, a sand mound rises eight feet above street level. Below the surface, now covered with grass and shaded by oaks, lie remains of Tequesta people, a tribe that continuously inhabited an area from Boca Raton to the Keys for 3,000 years.

This is the whiplash of great cities, with cultures that are worlds and millennia apart sharing a few square miles. But in modern Miami, sunshine and hibiscus and mojitos tend to blur the past. Bulldozers finish the job.

“The perception of Miami is a new place, a city created from dredge filled by Henry Flagler, a city that has no roots because Indigenous people didn’t count, because there was no sense of the earlier history,” says Bob Carr, Miami-Dade County’s first archaeologist and co-founder of the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy.

Little River, the flowing body of water, served as a corridor for the Tequesta between the Everglades and Biscayne Bay. In the 1920s, more than a century after the Tequesta died out, their burial mound was the first archaeological site in Miami to receive historic preservation status. “That sets the tone of Little River,” adds Carr. “There’s this promise of a lifestyle for modern Miamians that contains green space with a river and a history that shouldn’t be forgotten.”

Little River, that modern Miami community, sits north of downtown. Keep driving through Wynwood and the Design District and the heart of Little Haiti. Then, depending on who you ask, you’ll arrive. To varying degrees, you can still see all the layers of its history: farmland to commercial district to light industry to immigrant enclave to gentrifying creative center. In many cases, you eat those layers, too, to form your own muddled memory of time and place.

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Squawking parrots and crowing roosters wake Ray Chasser every morning. Outside his door, he breathes in a view of four stately trees: a ponytail palm, a gumbo limbo, a Pithecellobium, and a 150-year-old tropical almond. “It’s better than almost any rainforest I’ve been in,” says Chasser, who sports a full white beard, well-worn t-shirts, and sweat-soaked bandanas. “I’m secluded from Miami.”

Chasser lives on Earth ’N Us Farms, a rambling two and a half acre parcel of land he shares with his wife and a coterie of rescue pigs, goats, sheep, tortoises, and chickens. He grows a small organic garden, which the neighborhood’s population of feral chickens love to raid. He’s a landlord too. Chasser started buying property in Little River in the 70s and owns 25 rental units, including a treehouse Airbnb, where guests sleep below mosquito netting.

Though it started as a homestead with egg and milk production, Earth ’N Us became a vegan animal sanctuary 12 years ago. Chasser hosts school field trips, drop-in peace-seeking visitors, yoga classes, and farming workshops. On Sundays, after a weekly volleyball match, people gather for a vegan potluck under a thatched roof gazebo. Stop by, if you’d like, with a pot of black beans or a beet salad.

“People have told me, this is the only real thing left in Miami,” says Chasser. “But we’re in the most gentrified neighborhood in the country. I paid $15,000 to $20,000 for a property with a house. Now, they’re selling empty lots for $350,000.”

Farmers first arrived on this patch of earth in the late 19th century, growing fruits and vegetables to send to colder climates. But few farms last in paradise.

The City of Miami annexed Little River in 1925. The South Florida town’s population had boomed some 1,600-plus-percent in a quarter century, and over the next few decades the neighborhood adopted a white, middle class, mid-century character. On a website, Memories of Old Miami and Dade County, commenters remember Bowlerama and Rosetta Theater. They ate griddle cakes at Latta’s 24-hour diner, ribs at Church BBQ, and burgers and shakes at Larry’s. The Majorette drive-thru served fried chicken baskets for $0.75. Cobbs, the Harry & David of its time, shipped out fruit candies, citrus, and orange blossom honey from its Little River outpost. In 1951 dairy magnate Neville McArthur built a green-tiled Miami Modern milk processing facility that still operates today. Check the cooler of any South Florida mini-mart, and you’ll find a bottle of McArthur Dairy milk.

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I stood on the sidewalk of NW 71st Street and stared through the plexiglass at hotel pans brimming with legume (a vegetable and beef stew), macaroni and cheese, braised king mackerel, curry chicken, goat stew. The woman behind the steam table patiently scooped a little bit of this and that into a take-out container and added a heaping spoonful of pikliz, the scotch bonnet-laced cabbage relish.

Naomi’s started out as a health food truck and caterer in the 70s. But all its longtime cooks are Haitian women so, in 1998, the restaurant started feeding its community the food of home.

I brought my plate to Naomi’s backyard garden, shaded by palms and awnings and occupied by mismatched picnic tables and chairs. It was 10 degrees cooler than on the street, an oasis two blocks west of I-95. That mega highway stretches from Maine to downtown Miami and its construction amputated Little River’s left arm in the early 70s. To the south, the historically Black neighborhood of Liberty City had its heart pieced and body cleaved in two.

Shortly after, Little River’s identity began to fade. Ask almost anyone, and they’ll tell you: Naomi’s is in Little Haiti. Same for Le Jardin and its plates of crispy, succulent pork griot or Pack Supermarket, which still serves fried chicken for $1 per piece and smothered in pikliz. These restaurants were born from mass migration in the 1980s and 1990s, as Haitians fled their homes and political violence. They traveled by sea for weeks, and those who survived met a biased U.S. immigration system that often rejected their asylum claims. But Haitian American advocacy, lawsuits, and persistence earned many a home in Little Haiti.

The neighborhood radiates from the brightly painted Little Haiti Cultural Complex, where an exhibit this fall included posters with the message: LITTLE HAITI IS NOT FOR SALE. For decades, the boundaries of Little Haiti spilled like sweet Cola Couronne north and south, subsuming Little River, as well as Buena Vista and Lemon City. In 2016 the City of Miami made its boundaries—stretching all the way north to the river—official. “Now no one can come and erase the name of Little Haiti,” Marleine Bastien, executive director of nonprofit Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami, told The Miami Herald at the time.

While the core of Little Haiti remains intact, its edges, though official, are softening. Many Haitian families have moved to the suburbs. “By population density, there is a new Little Haiti, which is North Miami,” Jean Dondy Cidelca, a neighborhood historian and tour guide, told me. “The culture is disappearing: the businesses, the food, the sound of konpa, which is Haitian music. You see them less and less.” Deep pocketed developers press from all sides, and rising rents threaten small businesses and the working class.

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I leaned back into a red leather booth at Sunny’s and sipped a martini laced with fino sherry. My table started to fill: raw scallops with aguachile negro, a dramatically stacked Caesar, corn agnolotti, a yellowtail snapper dressed with caper vinaigrette, a mid-rare hanger steak with a side of potato butter and pineapple hot sauce.

Sunny’s may well be Miami’s restaurant opening of the year. Owner Will Thompson built it from the ground up in a former roofing factory. The dining room evokes Old Florida with its Palm Beach Regency interior; outdoor tables circle a towering banyan tree. “I came here because of the bones. Even in the complete absence of infrastructure, there was this big, beautiful tree and big Miami sky,” says Thompson. “It’s also one of the few areas that doesn’t feel like it will turn into a club-staurant kind of place.”

A decade ago Ashley Abess and Matthew Vander Werff began to quietly buy up properties in Little River, block by block, until they reached 20 full acres. The couple wanted to create a walkable neighborhood that they’d want to live in. Not oversaturated Wynwood. Not tourist-centered South Beach. Their approach was more rehab than raze.

“If you create something great for locals, everyone else is going to show up,” Abess, a fourth generation Miamian, told me in her office across the street from Sunny’s. “Also, we’ve always felt that there’s a lot of amazing talent in Miami that was not as visible as it should be, so Matthew and I also viewed this project as a way to celebrate and give opportunities to local talent.”

Food, in particular, anchors their bench. A few blocks from Sunny’s guests eat intricate, Kappo-style Japanese cuisine at Michelin-starred Ogawa. The pizza dough at nearby La Natural, as the name implies, is naturally leavened. Jacqueline and Michael Pirolo, beloved for their Macchialina, will move into the neighborhood later this year with Bar Bucce. Just north of the project, there’s a critical mass of new-school, chef-driven spots: Off-Site Nano Brewery (get the housemade hot dog), United States Burger Service, The Shores Fish Market (the fried fish sandwich, I die!), and Magie wine bar to name a few.

In 2021, Abess and Vander Werff sold a majority stake in their project to Nashville-based AJ Capital. More exceptional restaurants will certainly follow. Rents will certainly rise. The character of the neighborhood will continue to morph in ways no one can fully anticipate—as clever men package history, desire, and dinner into real estate.

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What did the Tequesta eat? Plenty.

Villages surrounded the Tequesta burial mound on both sides of Little River, and in their middens, those ancient garbage mounds, researchers found the bones of deer, freshwater and saltwater fish, sharks, snakes, alligators, small mammals, the occasional panther and bear, and even extinct monk seals. Oysters and shellfish fragments littered the piles. The Tequesta hunted and foraged from the Everglades, the mangroves and barrier islands, and a forested coastal ridge that runs from Palm Beach to Homestead.

“It’s the perfect place to live, sort of like having UberEats,” says Bob Carr. “As they say in real estate: location, location, location. This is why development has focused so intensely here over the last century, and why Miami keeps getting redeveloped. As you know, Miami is always one high rise short.”