Pinecrest Gardens — Miami's Strangest Public Park, Hiding the Bones of Parrot Jungle

There is a giant slide tower in the middle of a botanical garden in suburban Miami, and almost nobody who walks past it knows why it is there.

It is too tall to be a playground feature, too odd to be public art, too rusted to be new, and surrounded by the wrong kind of trees. If you ask the guard at the gate, you will get an answer that does not quite fit: it used to be part of the old park. Which old park. Parrot Jungle. And then the whole place starts to read differently — the swan pond is not a swan pond, it is a flamingo lagoon someone repurposed; the mosaic pathways are not decorative, they are 1950s ticket-line markers; the geodesic dome over the amphitheater is not a Pinecrest design choice, it was bolted on later to cover the open-air stage Franz Scherr built in 1937. You are not in a 14-acre municipal park. You are inside the footprint of one of Florida's longest-running tourist attractions, still standing, still walkable, still cheap. Most visitors leave without noticing.

That's the case for Pinecrest Gardens. It is the strangest public park in Miami because it is the only one where the bones of what came before are visible if you know to look.

What you are actually visiting

In December 1936, Franz and Louise Scherr leased twenty acres of hammock land at the corner of Red Road and Killian Drive for $25 — a sum that translates to roughly $580 today. The Scherrs ran a feed and supply store in Homestead. Franz had been pestering the owner of Monkey Jungle, a few miles south, with suggestions until the owner finally told him to go start his own jungle. He took that literally.

Parrot Jungle opened on December 20, 1936, with about 100 visitors paying 25 cents each to see Scherr's birds, trees, and flowers. The premise was unusual for the era: most American animal parks were cages and concrete; Scherr let his macaws and cockatoos fly free in the canopy. The park grew through the 1940s and 1950s into one of South Florida's anchor tourist attractions. Generations of Miami kids posed on the same petting-zoo benches. The flamingos in the opening credits of Miami Vice — pink flock taking off across a pastel sky — were filmed here. Pinky the cockatoo rode a tiny bicycle on a high-wire. Sir Winston Churchill, Jimmy Carter, and Steven Spielberg all signed the guestbook.

Bern Levine bought the park from the Scherr family in 1988 and ran it for fourteen more years. By the late 1990s the model was tired, the audience had shifted, and Levine cut a deal to move the operation to a new waterfront site on Watson Island, where it opened on June 28, 2003 as Parrot Jungle Island (later, simply Jungle Island). The Red Road property went to the Village of Pinecrest, which had only existed as an incorporated municipality since 1996. The Village reopened it as Pinecrest Gardens — a public botanical garden — on March 8, 2003.

The U.S. Department of the Interior added the property to the National Register of Historic Places as the Parrot Jungle Historic District on October 17, 2011. The protected 15 acres include the original coral-rock walls, the mosaic pathways, the cypress slough, the petting-zoo enclosures, and the structures Scherr built before World War II. This matters because it means most of what you walk through is not a "themed" recreation. It is the actual thing.

How to read the park

The trick to enjoying Pinecrest Gardens is not to walk it like a botanical garden. Walk it like a ruin.

Enter at the main gate on Red Road. The first thing you see is the Hibiscus Gallery — a small building that was the original Parrot Jungle gift shop. Today it hosts art shows and rents out as a 60-to-80-person event space. The footprint, the windows, and the entry plaza are unchanged.

Drift left into the Lower Gardens, where the path drops into a coastal bald cypress slough — a true Everglades-edge ecosystem that survived development by being inside the park. The cypresses here are not landscaping. They are remnant. The boardwalk threads between them on the original 1940s alignment. In May, you will hear catbirds in the canopy and the slap of fish in the dark water; by September the slough fills several feet higher and parts of the path become wet-foot terrain.

Cross to the Lake Walk and Swan Lake. This is the flamingo lagoon. The retaining walls are the original cast concrete from the Scherr era — look at the patina on the inside curve and you can see where the birds used to perch. Today the lake has black swans, koi, exotic ducks, and a small floating dock for feeding. The fish pellets in the gumball-style dispensers cost a quarter; bring quarters. This is the only loop in the park where kids and adults pace at exactly the same speed.

The Upper Garden holds the surviving show infrastructure. The Banyan Bowl is a 500-seat amphitheater under a geodesic dome — the dome was added in the Pinecrest era, but the stage and seating bowl are the original Parrot Jungle performance space, where bird shows once ran four times a day. From October through May the Bowl programs roughly 70 performances: the Jazz at Pinecrest Gardens series, Tropical Nights (salsa, mambo, soul, funk), Dance in the Gardens, family theater. Tickets to most concerts run separately from garden admission and are sold through the venue's box office.

Behind the Banyan Bowl is the petting zoo and the Splash 'N Play water playground. Both are open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily and are covered by the basic admission fee. The zoo holds rabbits, goats, a few birds — small, deliberately low-stress, sized for toddlers. The splash pad is the right call between June and September, when standing in a regular Miami park feels punishing by 11 a.m.

The giant slide tower still stands. It is no longer operable. Look up.

Practicalities — money and timing

Pinecrest Gardens is one of the rare Miami attractions where the ticket price is not a trap.

Ticket	Price	Notes
General Admission (ages 2–64)	$8.00	All-day in and out
Seniors (65+)	$5.00	ID required
Children under 2	Free	—
Active Military + immediate family	Free	Valid military ID at the gate
Parking	Free	Shared lot with the Pinecrest Library

That is the entire price list. Compared with Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden ($29.95 adult), Zoo Miami, or the Frost Science Museum, Pinecrest Gardens is a different category of expense. A family of four pays $32 to spend a full day inside the grounds. That is less than parking at most South Beach hotels.

When to go. Weekday mornings, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., are the best window. The light is good, the heat is manageable, the splash pad is empty, and the parking lot has space. Weekends are when the park fills — Saturday because that is when local families go, and Sunday because the farmers market (9 a.m. to 2 p.m., about 60 vendors, free Vinyasa yoga 8:30–9:30 a.m. sponsored by Baptist Health) brings a second wave of foot traffic. If you are coming primarily for the gardens and the history, avoid Sundays. If you are coming for the market, do not bother trying to also see the petting zoo on the same visit.

When to skip. May 11 through May 15, 2026, the Gardens closed portions of the grounds in preparation for hurricane season — this is now an annual maintenance pattern, so check the official site if you are visiting in early May any year. During named-storm warnings, the park closes entirely. Stay away the day after heavy rain; the slough boardwalk gets slick.

Dogs. Leashed dogs are welcome on Sundays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. only. Six-foot fixed leash required, no retractables. Dogs are not permitted in the Upper Garden playground or petting zoo. If you have a service dog, full access applies per ADA — bring documentation.

Where Pinecrest Gardens fits in a Miami trip

Most travel guides bury Pinecrest Gardens under "things to do with kids in Miami" and stop there. That undersells it. The park is also:

• A historian's stop. If you are interested in the way early-twentieth-century Florida invented itself as a tourist economy, Pinecrest is a peer of the Deering Estate and the historic estates of Coconut Grove — three different versions of the same impulse to build a destination from raw hammock land. Deering did it with European antiques and a private fortune; the Scherrs did it with $25, a feed store credit line, and a flock of birds.
• A budget day. Pair it with the Red Road Linear Park walking trail (2.5 miles along Snapper Creek Canal between Kendall Drive and Killian Drive) for a free morning addendum, then drive 12 minutes to Fairchild for the contrast, or to Matheson Hammock for a swim.
• A concert venue. The Banyan Bowl programs from October through May, and the lineups skew strong: regional jazz headliners, Latin Grammy nominees, dance companies. Tickets are typically $30–60. The dome means rain rarely cancels a show.
• An airport layover detour. Pinecrest is 25 minutes from MIA via the Palmetto Expressway when traffic is moving. If you have a six-hour layover and a rental car, you can be at the swan pond in under 40 minutes after baggage claim.

Five rules for a good visit

1. Bring quarters. The fish-pellet dispensers are the unspoken centerpiece of Swan Lake. They eat eight quarters per kid faster than you would expect, and the park does not have change machines positioned in the right places.

2. Pack a small lunchbox. Outside food is officially not permitted, but the Gardens explicitly carve out a "personal lunchbox-sized container" exception. Coolers, platters, and rolling bags are out. There is a snack bar near the Banyan Bowl that is reliable but not cheap.

3. Wear shoes, not sandals. The slough boardwalk is wet, the mosaic paths are uneven, and the limestone underfoot near the historic structures is sharp.

4. Buy tickets at the gate, not online, unless it is a holiday weekend. Online tickets add nothing but a service fee. The kiosk line moves quickly.

5. Save the splash pad for last. It is the only part of the park your kids will not want to leave, so do not start there.

The bones

If you walk Pinecrest Gardens looking for a botanical garden, you will see a small, pleasant, slightly worn one. If you walk it looking for Parrot Jungle, you will see a 90-year-old roadside attraction held together by cypress trees and cast concrete, where Churchill once stood and a cockatoo named Pinky rode a bicycle along a wire that is still anchored somewhere in the canopy.

The Village of Pinecrest could have leveled the property in 2002 and built a generic suburban park with a few play structures. Instead, they kept the bones. That decision is the reason an $8 ticket buys you a layered visit instead of a flat one. Bring quarters. Look up.