Ponce Circle Park is officially getting the most comprehensive redesign in its history. Allen Morris Co., the City of Coral Gables, and Agave Holdings, owner of The Plaza Coral Gables, have just unveiled a $10+ million overhaul of Fred B. Hartnett Ponce Circle Park, with a monumental Frank Stella sculpture at one end, an open-air stage at its center, and new crossings on the streets around it.
The money comes through a three-way public-private partnership. Allen Morris Co. will serve as Development Manager, overseeing design, permitting and construction through completion, and the firm is guaranteeing any cost overruns beyond the committed amounts. Construction is scheduled to begin in January 2027, with completion anticipated in the first quarter of 2028.
At the north end of the park, Puffed and Inverted Star II, a monumental polished aluminum sculpture by Frank Stella, will stand in a reflecting pool. The City of Coral Gables acquired the piece on the recommendation of its Cultural Development Board. Stella died in May 2024 at the age of 87, which makes this a posthumous public installation of one of his final large-scale works. The rendering shows the star on a stone plinth in a round pool, ringed by low plantings and a curved coral-stone bench wall under a double row of trees, with the traffic of Ponce de Leon Boulevard moving past beyond it.
At the center of the park, an open-air performance structure called the Odeon will carry year-round programming: concerts, theatrical performances, civic events, fitness classes, and cultural gatherings. When nothing is on the bill, it will work as flexible public seating. Maria de la Guardia of de la Guardia Victoria Architects & Urbanists, the Coral Gables firm whose work is rooted in classical architecture and urbanism, leads the architectural and landscape vision in collaboration with Andres Arcila of Naturalficial. The planting design is being developed with Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden for a resilient, biodiverse, regionally appropriate landscape. De la Guardia's firm is a familiar hand in the city; it designed The Village at Coral Gables, now open, and The George, now under construction in Biltmore Square.
The work will reach past the park's edges into the streets around it. Along Ponce de Leon Boulevard and on Almeria Avenue to University Drive, the plans call for enhanced pedestrian crossings, raised crosswalks, and speed tables, along with a new stormwater drainage system beneath them.
The park has been a civic gathering place since the early development of Coral Gables in the 1920s under founder George Merrick, and its original design came from landscape architect William Lyman Phillips. The Plaza Coral Gables, Agave's property, sits beside it, and the boulevard around it is filling in.
Ponce Park, the Allen Morris Company's 11-story, 58-residence condominium at 3000 Ponce de Leon Boulevard, is under construction directly across the street from the park. The firm has already broken ground, and completion is expected in early 2028, within months of the park's planned reopening.
Designed by Zyscovich Architects, the 58-residence tower pairs roughly 25,000 square feet of ground-floor retail with a Meyer Davis interior program that runs from the residences to the amenity floors, crowned by a rooftop pool and residents' lounge over Coral Gables.
The material story is unusually deep for the market: the Allen Morris team flew to Italy to hand-select the building's stone at the quarry source, pulling travertine from a Tivoli quarry that supplied the Roman Colosseum and Calacatta Borghini marble from the same Apuan Alps range Michelangelo drew from. The Meyer Davis amenity collection threads a dedicated spa, with treatment rooms, sauna and steam rooms and a yoga and Pilates studio, through landscaped gardens, a fire pit and a private conference room.
At street level, Quintin, the first U.S. outpost of Madrid's Quintin Ultramarinos, will anchor the retail with indoor-outdoor dining along Ponce de Leon Boulevard. Sales are led by ONE Sotheby's International Realty, with residences starting at $3.1 million. When both finish, the residences will face the Stella star and the Odeon from the far side of Ponce de Leon Boulevard, giving the developer a front-row seat to the park it is managing into existence.
"Fred B. Hartnett Ponce Circle Park sits at the heart of Coral Gables, surrounded by many of the city's most important destinations, and we have a rare opportunity to help create a park that truly belongs to the community," said W.A. Spencer Morris, President of Allen Morris Co.
"We took inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome," Morris said. "There's beautiful band shells throughout the United States and in Europe that we were inspired by, so we decided to take that language and provide sort of a Florida classical design element to it where it's clad in natural Floridian stones — oolitic stones, coral stones — and it gives it that sort of classic Miami feel. It feels contextual."
The Coral Gables City Commission has already unanimously approved the project, and a Development Management Agreement has been executed between all three parties. Allen Morris Co., the Coral Gables-based firm founded in 1958, has offices in Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, and Atlanta, and marked its 90th project in 2025.
Alongside Ponce Park, the firm is also building Ziggurat, a condominium and office building in Coconut Grove, backed by a $138.5 million construction loan. "World-class cities are defined by their parks and public spaces," said Mayor Vince Lago. "The transformation of Ponce Circle Park is another step in our commitment to creating exceptional open spaces that strengthen our downtown and enhance the quality of life for generations to come."
Construction starts in January 2027, and the park is slated to reopen in the first quarter of 2028.