Walk into Margaret Pace Park on a Sunday morning and the eight acres between North Bayshore Drive and the water are doing something they weren't built to do. Fifty-plus vendor tents run the length of the grass. A duo plays somewhere near the tennis courts. Dogs off their leashes for a minute too long get herded back by owners balancing coffee and a tote bag of produce. None of this was in the park's original design. It has become the design anyway.
That's the part worth sitting with if you already live in one of the towers stacked along Bayshore Drive. Edgewater doesn't have a downtown. It has a park that acts like one, and that park is now running on two separate schedules that don't have much to do with each other. One is the weekly rhythm of markets that show up like clockwork. The other is a multi-year construction plan that's about to enter its most visible phase. Knowing which clock governs what you're planning around is the actual local knowledge here, more useful than any list of new restaurant leases.
The Market That Doesn't Skip a Week
The Margaret Pace Park Farmers Market runs every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., rain or shine, and it's grown into something closer to a neighborhood institution than a weekend errand. It's organized by East Coast Marketplace, founded by Lucia Marinelli, an Edgewater resident who moved to Miami from Milan in 2015 and started out running a food truck called Made in Italy before she began organizing pop-up markets of her own. The Sunday market she built at Margaret Pace Park now draws more than 50 vendors selling hot food, baked goods, produce, art, and pet products, with regular live music and free admission.
What makes it worth naming specifically, rather than filing under "farmers market," is what Marinelli has said about the intent behind it. She's described the goal as building a market that functions as a community platform rather than just a place to sell things, and for vendors testing a business idea for the first time, the income from a Sunday at the park isn't extra. It's often the difference between a food concept surviving its first year or not. That's a different kind of stakes than most weekend markets carry, and it's part of why this one has stuck.
The city's District 2 office, currently held by Commissioner Damian Pardo, backed the market's development alongside Marinelli, which matters for residents mostly because it means the market has an institutional relationship with the park rather than a temporary permit that could lapse. Marinelli has since expanded the model, launching the Green Market on Flagler in February.
It's One Market Among Several, and They Don't Overlap
If you've heard someone mention "the Edgewater market" and assumed there's only one, there isn't. The weekend calendar around the park has filled in with enough separate events that mixing them up is easy to do.
| Day | Market | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Friday evening | Bayshore Drive pop-up | Along Bayshore Drive, food vendors and artisan goods |
| Saturday | Legion Park market | Legion Park, the more established of the two Saturday options |
| Saturday | Green Market on Flagler | Flagler corridor |
| Sunday | Margaret Pace Park Farmers Market | 1745 N Bayshore Drive, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. |
The Friday pop-up and the Saturday options are smaller and newer than the Sunday market, which is the one with the vendor scale, the live music, and the standing reputation. If you're planning a week around one of them, Sunday is the safe bet. The others are worth knowing about specifically because they're not guaranteed to run every single week the way the Sunday market has committed to.
The Park Underneath All of This Is Mid-Renovation
Here's where the second clock comes in, and it's the one most residents haven't tracked closely because it moves in years, not weeks.
Back in August 2023, the city unveiled a master plan to rebuild Margaret Pace Park in phases, aimed partly at making the park more resilient to Miami's heat and rising water. The plan called for a renovated entrance with an art installation, outdoor fitness equipment, kayak kiosks and launch areas, a two-story community center, a pickleball court, new restroom facilities, and a palm hammock grove, funded through a mix of park enhancement bonds, Edgewater Neighborhood Area Baywalk bonds, shoreline impact fees, and a state Department of Environmental Protection grant.
The shoreline work was the first phase out of the gate, targeted for completion by the first quarter of 2026. If that timeline held, the most visually disruptive part of phase one should already be behind the neighborhood by now. Phase two covers the playground upgrades and the splash pad, and it's the phase that touches the park's most-used pet amenity directly: the plan calls for the existing dog park to close for renovation, with the city running a temporary dog run in the meantime rather than leaving the space unavailable entirely. The main playground, by contrast, is designed to stay open through the installation of the new features around it.
The bigger disruption is still ahead. Construction on the two-story community center is planned to begin in late 2026, the same window we're in right now, and is expected to run until 2028. That's not a rumor or an early rendering. It's the funded, scheduled next phase of a plan the city has been building toward for three years, and it lands squarely on the same lawn where the Sunday market sets up its tents.
What That Actually Means for a Weekend Here
None of this shuts the market down. The market operates on the open grass along the bayfront side of the park, and nothing in the city's plan suggests relocating it. What changes is the texture of the visit around it.
Expect construction fencing and equipment staging to become a fixture on the south end of the park over the next two years, closer to where the community center is planned. The dog park will be out of commission for a stretch, with the temporary run as the fallback rather than a full closure. If your Sunday routine includes both the market and a stop at the dog run, plan for the substitute location rather than assuming it's business as usual.
The Baywalk gives you a way to route around the noise entirely. A northern segment opened in 2019, connecting Sea Isle Marina to Margaret Pace Park, and it's part of a longer promenade that Miami's Dan Paul ordinance requires along any new building on Biscayne Bay or the Miami River, meaning the walkway keeps extending as new towers go up. From the Paraiso cluster near NE 29th Street, you can already walk south along the water with barely an interruption. Until the community center phase wraps, the stretch north of NE 24th Street is the more reliable stretch for a quiet morning walk, while the south end absorbs the construction.
It's also worth knowing what the park has been quietly building on top of, because it explains why residents fought to keep it a park in the first place. It was created in the late 1960s and named for Margaret Pace, a founder and past president of the Miami Garden Club who also chaired what later became part of Everglades National Park and served as vice president of the Miami Woman's Club. The park got a $4 million renovation in 2003. The mosaic "throne chairs" near the playground, each about 20 feet tall, were installed to represent the three largest communities of elders who settled in Miami. None of that history is going anywhere, even while the concrete around it changes shape.
Two Clocks, One Park
The market runs every week no matter what. The construction runs in years, and this fall is when its most visible phase starts. Conflating the two is how a resident ends up annoyed at a market that isn't the problem, or surprised by a fenced-off dog run they should have seen coming. Once you know which schedule you're actually watching, Sundays at Margaret Pace Park stay exactly as good as they've become, even as the rest of the park catches up around them.
The Cofresi Group keeps this close an eye on every corner of Edgewater, not just the towers. If you're weighing a move to the neighborhood or already call it home and want a team that tracks the block as carefully as the market, reach out anytime.
