Miramar, FL

Miramar stretches for miles across southwest Broward County, from State Road 7 toward the Everglades and U.S. 27. Historic Miramar occupies the older eastern end; large subdivisions and business parks extend west across Florida's Turnpike and I-75. Miramar Parkway and Pembroke Road provide the principal east-west routes, while canals and lakes thread through neighborhoods built in different decades. The 54-acre Town Center between Red Road and Hiatus Road was deliberately placed near the middle of this long municipality. It combines City Hall, a county library and education center, cultural facilities, police headquarters, offices, housing, shops, plazas, and a transit hub, giving the city a civic midpoint that its original townsite could not provide. That midpoint shortens civic and business trips across the long street network.

ATTRFarragutful / CC BY-SA 4.0

Large offices and industrial buildings give western Miramar a working scale unlike its older residential districts. The fiscal-year 2025 financial report counted nearly 17 million square feet of offices, warehouses, industrial-flex buildings, and community retail. Finance, insurance, manufacturing and distribution, medicine, aviation, travel, tourism, and media all appear in the business mix. Larger facilities cluster near I-75, Miramar Parkway, and the Miramar Park of Commerce, where highway access supports corporate, warehouse, and production sites. Town Center adds municipal, education, and arts employment near the middle, while smaller storefronts continue along eastern corridors. Miramar has substantial workplaces of its own alongside neighborhoods originally planned for people traveling to Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Town Center carries much of Miramar's public calendar.

ATTROscar Flowers / CC BY-SA 3.0

The library, Cultural Center and ArtsPark, botanical garden, amphitheater, and plaza host classes and performances; the July 2026 calendar included weekly exercise and dance sessions there. Free Mira-Motion shuttles begin and end at the Town Center hub on weekdays and connect neighborhoods with parks, medical destinations, and Broward County Transit. The municipal routes do not operate on weekends or city holidays. As of late July 2026, the Green, Orange, and Red routes were operating, while the Yellow route was temporarily out of service. Farther west, the 173-acre Miramar Regional Park includes an aquatics complex, amphitheater, skate park, and fields for cricket and other sports. Its amphitheater hosted the 2026 Afro-Carib Festival with reggae, afrobeats, konpa, reggaeton, and Caribbean food.

ATTRWilliam “Patrick” Ma… / CC BY-SA 3.0

Miramar began much farther east and at a smaller scale. Developer A. L. Mailman acquired the first property in 1953 and built 56 concrete, flat-roofed houses when U.S. 441 had two lanes, part of Pembroke Road was unpaved, and few other roads reached the site. The city incorporated on May 26, 1955, with fewer than 200 residents and about 2.9 square miles. First mayor Robert Gordon chose a Spanish name meaning “Look at the Sea” that also recalled a suburb of Havana. The original boundaries ran only from Southwest 64th Avenue to University Drive. Today's drive from those first blocks to western business parks passes the central civic campus, two major expressways, and several generations of canal-lined subdivisions.