North Beach's First Real Walk: A Sculpture Named Nellie, and a Steakhouse Called Ezio's

Walk along Ocean Terrace at dusk this month and you will find a stone face lying on its side in a shallow pool, mirrored on the water so the full portrait only resolves in reflection. Most people who pause there do not yet know her name. She was Nellie Locust, a Cherokee woman who served in the Coast Guard Women's Reserve during World War II, and until last October she had no monument anywhere. Now she has one, four blocks from a dining room that flew in from Brooklyn.

That pairing is the actual story of North Beach in 2025, and it is not the one most coverage of the neighborhood has told. The headlines have mostly been about towers and money: who is building what, how many units are sold, what a square foot costs now versus five years ago. What changed for the people who already live here is smaller and more specific. For the first time, there is a reason to walk somewhere in this neighborhood and a reason to walk somewhere else nearby, on the same evening, without getting in a car.

Two Openings, One Year

The park came first. In September 2025 the City of Miami Beach completed Ocean Terrace Park, a five-acre stretch of green space between 73rd and 75th Streets, just north of the Bandshell, where a surface parking lot used to sit. The $15 million project, designed by landscape architect Raymond Jungles and built by Recreational Design & Construction, ties together a run of public space that now reaches from Altos Del Mar Park down through the new park to the UNIDAD Senior Center and Bandshell Park. It added water features planted with aquatic species, custom benches, turtle-friendly lighting, and an upgraded stretch of the Beachwalk.

Then, on December 19, 2025, Ezio's Steakhouse opened four blocks south on the ground floor of 72 Park, the 22-story condo tower at 580 72nd Street that finished construction in March of that year. The restaurant comes from Brandon Hoy and chef Carlo Mirarchi, the team behind Brooklyn's Roberta's, and it is their first permanent restaurant in Miami. Before this, if you wanted a serious dry-aged steak or a proper wine list in North Beach, you crossed a causeway to get one.

Neither project set out to complement the other. But together they closed a gap that has defined this stretch of the beach for years: plenty of ocean, plenty of quiet, and almost nothing between the two that gave a resident a reason to leave the house on foot.

The Face in the Water

Reflection, the sculpture at the center of Ocean Terrace Park, is 25 feet long and 8 feet high, assembled on site from locally fabricated 3D-printed concrete blocks and then hand-finished by the artist, Prune Nourry, to look weathered. It is her first public commission in the United States. The likeness is not generic. Nourry learned about the Biscayne Bay House of Refuge, a Coast Guard station that once stood near this exact site until the Great Miami Hurricane destroyed it in 1926, and that discovery led her to a historian, Donna Vojvodich, who researches the SPARs, the women recruited into the Coast Guard to fill wartime gaps left by men overseas. Among the photographs Vojvodich had collected was one signed simply "Sincerely, Nellie." Nourry tracked down Locust's family, got their permission, and built the sculpture from that photograph.

Locust trained in Palm Beach, served at stations in Fort Pierce and Miami, and died in 1947 at 26. Her connection to this exact patch of oceanfront predates every condo tower on Collins Avenue by seventy years.

Landscape architect Raymond Jungles explained the mirrored design to Artburst Miami:

"I figured if we reflected the piece, we could get twice as much for the price of one."

The full account of how the sculpture came together is worth reading if you have ever wondered who decides what a new public park should say about a place. In this case, the answer was: something true about it, not something generic.

Four Blocks South, a Different Kind of Import

Ezio's does not try to be local history. It is a straightforward transplant, and it says so. The dining room seats 80, wraps the northwest corner of 72 Park in about 2,200 square feet, and runs a custom dry-aging program that includes a 55-day bone-in ribeye, a 30-day double-cut lamb saddle, and a 90-day bone-in wagyu strip. The raw bar leans on stone crab claws and tuna crudo. The pasta list runs to a linguine cacio e pepe finished with winter truffle and a pappardelle with braised veal and parmigiano reggiano. The wine list carries more than 110 labels across Italy, France, Portugal, Argentina, and California.

The room itself, dark wood, veined stone, burgundy banquettes, was built to feel like a dinner party that started an hour before you arrived and has no plans to wind down. The Miami New Times coverage of the opening noted this was Hoy and Mirarchi's first Miami restaurant, following six months of pop-up runs at their original Roberta's location in Bushwick. There is a 20-seat outdoor patio, and dogs are welcome on it.

None of this required North Beach to invent anything. It required someone from outside to notice the neighborhood was ready for it, which is a different kind of validation than a monument to a woman who actually served here, but a validation all the same.

What's Now in Walking Range

Put the two openings on a map and a resident's evening starts to look different than it did a year ago. Within a ten-minute walk of each other, North Beach now has:

• Ocean Terrace Park and the Reflection sculpture, between 73rd and 75th Streets
• Ezio's Steakhouse, on the ground floor of 72 Park at 580 72nd Street
• The Miami Beach Bandshell, just south of the new park, for concerts and outdoor programming
• North Shore Park, with its beach access and shaded picnic areas
• The Beachwalk and Boardwalk, now with the upgraded segment running past the new park
• Normandy Shores Golf Club, a short walk inland for anyone who wants nine holes before dinner

None of these are new to the neighborhood on their own. The Bandshell has hosted shows for years. North Shore Park has always been there. What changed is that the gap between them now has a park worth walking through and a restaurant worth walking to, which turns a scattered list of neighborhood amenities into an actual loop.

The Neighborhood Telling Its Own Story

It is easy to read a wave of new development as a sign that a neighborhood is becoming something else, chasing whatever the last neighborhood over has already done. What was notable about 2025 in North Beach is that its two biggest additions pulled in opposite directions. One imported a proven concept from New York. The other commissioned a piece of public art that required a historian, a family's permission, and a hurricane a century ago to get right.

Residents do not need either of these facts to enjoy an evening walk that now actually goes somewhere. But knowing them changes what the walk means. Reflection is not decoration. It is the first time this stretch of oceanfront has publicly named someone who was actually here. Ezio's, for its part, is proof that the neighborhood can now support the kind of restaurant that used to require a drive south. Put together, they are the first two-stop evening North Beach has offered in longer than most current residents have lived here.

If you already call this stretch of the beach home, that is worth knowing on its own terms, no plans to move required.

If you are watching this same evolution from a real estate perspective, whether you already own here or are weighing what a neighborhood like this means for a future purchase, Martina Kanianska has been tracking Miami Beach block by block for exactly this reason. Let's Connect.