What It Is

Type: sporting event
First held / when: mid-1930s, the game traditionally played around New Year&#039;s
Where: the old Orange Bowl stadium stood in Little Havana , on the site now occupied by loanDepot Park
Related era: MiMo Postwar Boom
In a sentence: A New Year&#039;s college-football bowl game that grew into a national broadcast fixture and a Miami civic ritual.

The Orange Bowl is one of college football's older bowl games, first played in the mid-1930s and staged for decades in the stadium of the same name in what is now Little Havana. The stadium hosted the bowl game, University of Miami home football, and Miami Dolphins seasons before it was demolished in the 2000s — its site later became loanDepot Park, the Marlins' ballpark. The bowl game itself continues, now played at the Dolphins' stadium in Miami Gardens, and remains part of college football's major postseason rotation.

Why It Matters

For much of the twentieth century the Orange Bowl was Miami's loudest national stage — a New Year's broadcast that put the city's name and weather in front of a frozen northern audience, doing quiet work as tourism advertising long before that was a stated strategy. The stadium was also a genuine civic gathering place, the backdrop for everything from championship football to a famous 1962 address to Cuban exiles. Its demolition and replacement by a ballpark marked a generational handoff in how Miami stages its biggest spectacles.

Neighborhoods: Little Havana Eras: The MiMo / Postwar Boom Movements / Organizations / People / Landmarks: loanDepot Park