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Construction dust is everywhere in Flagler Village, a rapidly growing neighborhood and future downtown transportation hub that is attracting millennials, developers and avante-garde entrepreneurs. The village north of Broward Boulevard wants to be more than a bedroom community for the expanding downtown workforce next door. It's striving to include an eclectic mix of artist work spaces, shops, restaurants, bars and entertainment venues. "Flagler Village should be that fun, hip, energized, live-work-play area in Fort Lauderdale," said David Cardaci, who owns a Mexican restaurant in a converted auto-body shop, and a funky bar that serves drinks from an airstream RV. The 250-acre village, which extends from the Florida East Coast Rail Road tracks to Federal Highway south of Sunrise Boulevard, is already home to a pair of art districts that have taken root in decades-old warehouses that are newly emblazoned with vibrant graffiti...

Brewer Corey Artanis laughed when customers told him the shiny brewing tanks above the dining room at the Brass Tap Fort Lauderdale look fake. They're decorative, right? "I was like, 'Uh, no. The brewing tanks are here because we make craft beer onsite,' " says Artanis, who quickly realized his nearly year-old Flagler Village Brewery had a branding problem. The problem, Artanis says, was visibility. Not enough diners expected an in-house brewery hiding on the second floor of the Brass Tap, a brewpub franchise with 30 locations. So Artanis and Brass Tap owner Mathiew Baum hatched a summer face-lift for the brewery, adding to the 50-seat taproom black lounge chairs, flat-screen TVs and a beer mural, a whimsical Fort Lauderdale vision filled with hop plants, water towers and foamy brewing tanks as tall as skyscrapers. Nine months after Artanis tapped the brewery's first...