North Miami's 100th Year Isn't Over. The Fall Calendar Is Just Getting Started.

Walk up to MOCA Plaza on the last Friday of the month this fall and you'll find something that didn't exist a year ago: a jazz trio setting up under string lights, folding chairs filling in around 7 p.m., museum doors staying open past their usual close. It's called Jazz at MOCA, it's free, and it runs on the last Friday of every month from August 28, 2026 through April 30, 2027. If you assumed North Miami's big anniversary celebrations wrapped up back in February with confetti and a proclamation, this is the part nobody put on a flyer: the calendar gets denser from here, not lighter.

That's the piece worth sitting with. North Miami didn't throw one party for its 100th birthday and call it finished. It built a slate of events that stretches into next spring, and it's doing that in the same calendar year that the Museum of Contemporary Art quietly turns 30. Nobody at City Hall or at MOCA has framed those two anniversaries as connected. But line up the dates and the overlap is real, and it changes how you should think about the next four months if you live here.

A Hundred Years, Thirty Years, Six Blocks of Overlap

North Miami was incorporated in 1926 by a group the Miami Times pegs at 38 voters, a small farming community that has since grown into one of Miami-Dade's most demographically layered cities. The city crossed the 100-year line on February 5, 2026, and marked it with Carnivals Around the World, a free festival that turned MOCA Plaza and the stretch toward NE Ninth Avenue into a run of carnival games, food trucks, and performances built around the cultures that make up North Miami today.

Mayor Alix Desulme, who told the Miami Times he started working for the city as a teenage park attendant, has talked about the centennial as more personal than ceremonial. In his words to the paper: "I've been here since 1993, watching the evolution of the city." That's not a marketing line. It's someone who has spent three decades on the payroll of the place he's now presiding over during its biggest anniversary.

Meanwhile, MOCA North Miami opened its current building in 1996, meaning 2026 also marks the museum's 30th year in that space. Cultured Magazine's February 2026 profile of executive director Chana Sheldon traces how a one-room gallery from 1981 grew into an institution that gave early shows to artists like Hernan Bas and Daniel Arsham before they had international followings, largely through its proximity to the New World School of the Arts. Neither anniversary needed the other to matter. But they're happening on the same plaza, in the same ten months, and that's the kind of coincidence that shapes what's actually worth putting on your calendar right now.

What's Actually Still Coming

A lot of the centennial's biggest single-day events already happened by the time you're reading this. The February 5 birthday party is done. So is the Independence Day Celebration by the Bay, held July 4 at FIU's Biscayne Bay Campus with fireworks over the water, and the National Night Out and Back-to-School Block Party that combined two annual traditions at MOCA Plaza in August under a "Through the Decades" theme. If you missed those, you missed them.

What's left is less flashy but arguably more useful, because it's built into things the city already does every year rather than one-off spectacle:

• Jazz at MOCA, free outdoor concerts on the last Friday of every month, August 28, 2026 through April 30, 2027, paired with evening museum access
• NoMi Haunted Trails, returning this fall as one of the "Centennial Infusion Celebrations" the city is layering onto its existing seasonal traditions
• The 51st Annual WinterNational Thanksgiving Day Parade, a tradition that predates the centennial by decades and is getting the anniversary treatment this year
• Light Up North Miami, the city's holiday lighting event, also folded into the Centennial Infusion series
• The North Miami Centennial Gala, a formal capstone event scheduled for Saturday, December 5, 2026, at FIU's Kovens Center

Notice what the city did with that list. Instead of inventing five new one-time festivals, it took a parade that's already in its 51st year and a holiday lighting tradition that already existed, and used the centennial as a reason to dress them up rather than replace them. The single genuinely new addition, Jazz at MOCA, is the one scheduled to run past the anniversary itself, into April 2027. That's a strong signal about what's temporary decoration and what might become a permanent fixture on North Miami's cultural calendar.

The Museum's Own Milestone, Running Quietly Alongside

MOCA's 30th year isn't being marketed with the same volume as the city's centennial, but it's arguably the more consequential anniversary for anyone who cares about the arts in this part of Miami-Dade. The museum holds close to 500 works and has hosted first U.S. solo shows for artists who later became international names. Sheldon's interview with Cultured Magazine frames the museum's history as inseparable from Art Basel Miami Beach's rise, since MOCA was staging serious contemporary exhibitions in North Miami two decades before Art Basel arrived on the beach.

For a resident, the practical upshot is that MOCA's exhibition calendar this fall carries extra weight it wouldn't in a normal year. The museum is treating 2026 as a moment to look back at three decades of programming, which means the current shows sit inside that framing whether or not the wall text mentions it. Combined with the new Friday jazz series, MOCA Plaza is functioning as the city's most consistent free gathering point for the rest of the year, in a way it wasn't twelve months ago.

The Rest of the City Isn't Being Left Out

It would be easy to assume all of this centers on one plaza, but the centennial programming has actually been spread across the city rather than concentrated in a single spot. Griffing Park, at 12220 Griffing Boulevard, hosted this year's Juneteenth Festival timed specifically to coincide with the centennial. The Scott Galvin Community Center hosted the Black Maternal Health Symposium in April. NoMi Village, on NW 7th Avenue, was the site of North Miami's Official FIFA World Cup Watch Party in July, drawing soccer fans for what organizers called the only Official FIFA Watch Party of the Quarter-Final held in Miami-Dade County. And the year closes out at FIU's Kovens Center in December, a different venue entirely from where it started at MOCA Plaza in February.

That spread matters more than it might seem. A city that wanted a single big centennial spectacle would have concentrated everything downtown and called it a day. North Miami instead built a year where different neighborhoods, park systems, and even a university campus each got a piece of the milestone. If you live near Griffing Park, your centennial experience this year looked different from someone near MOCA Plaza, and both were legitimate parts of the same 100th anniversary.

There's also a quieter, ongoing option available to any resident curious about the city's history beyond the headline events: North Miami has been running a Historical City Tour aboard the city trolley throughout the centennial year, with tour dates scheduled on an ongoing basis. It's the kind of low-key offering that doesn't generate a press release on its own but is exactly the sort of thing worth knowing about if you've lived here for years and never actually toured the place formally.

What This Means Between Now and the Gala

North Miami's population sits at more than 64,000 residents, making it the sixth-largest city in Miami-Dade County, and this year it's behaving like a place that knows its own history matters to the people living in it right now, not just to a plaque. The centennial isn't a spring event you either caught or missed. It's a structure the city built to run through December, anchored by a museum quietly hitting its own 30-year mark, spread across parks and community centers that don't usually share a calendar.

If you're already living here, the useful move for the next few months isn't researching what North Miami is. It's paying attention to what your own city is doing with its milestone year while it's still happening, whether that means showing up to a free Friday jazz set at MOCA Plaza or working the WinterNational Parade route into your Thanksgiving weekend the way North Miami families have for 51 years running.

I'm Nathalie Garell, and I spend as much time paying attention to what's actually happening in Miami's neighborhoods as I do talking about property lines. If you're curious about North Miami, or any of the communities I work in across Miami-Dade, and want to talk about what makes a particular block or building feel like home, let's connect.