Walk the New River this month and you will pass two versions of the same mile of pavement. One version just won a national award. The other is wrapped in barricades because the ground underneath it is caving in. Both are true at the same time, on the same Riverwalk, and neither tells you the full story on its own.
If you have lived downtown for a while, you already sense this. The path feels different depending on which end you start from. What most people have not connected yet is why: the money that built the shiny end and the money that would fix the broken end come from entirely different places, moving at entirely different speeds.
A Park That Took Two Years and $15 Million to Get Right
Start at 32 East Las Olas Boulevard, where Huizenga Park reopened to the public on January 24 and 25 after a two year, $15 million redevelopment led by the architecture firm Perkins&Will and built by MBR Construction. The 3.6 acre riverfront space is now organized as a series of outdoor rooms rather than one open lawn. There is a Civic Lawn, dedicated in the names of Michele and Chuck West Jr., the founders of Pet Supermarket, whose $1.5 million gift helped fund the redesign. There is downtown Fort Lauderdale's first dedicated dog run. There is a children's play moundscape, expanded shaded seating along the river, and the restored Spirit of Fort Lauderdale Fountain, originally a gift from the Huizenga family. Two new public art installations, one by Manolo Valdés and one by Cey Adams, sit throughout the grounds, alongside more than 13,500 new plants across 58 species and 88 shade trees.
The park is not finished activating itself yet. Sweetwaters, a full service waterfront restaurant from the team behind Miami's Rusty Pelican, is under construction on site and expected to open this fall, with a rotating concession lineup that already includes Mr. Smash Burgers for a quicker bite on the lawn. Jenni Morejon, president and CEO of the Fort Lauderdale Downtown Development Authority, described the reopened park as offering more green space and shade, walkability, and connectivity, built to bring people together for recreation, culture, and daily life.
The redesign paid off in a way that is easy to overlook if you walk the path every day and stop noticing it. In April 2026, Riverwalk placed eighth nationally in USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards for best riverwalk, its second straight year in the top ten after debuting at seventh in 2025. The announcement specifically credited the Huizenga Park opening and the continued growth of downtown's residential population as part of what pushed the ranking forward this year.
West of the Park, the Path Just Stops
Now walk west from Huizenga Park, past Andrews Avenue, toward the train bridge. Somewhere in that stretch, the path simply ends behind a barricade. CBS Miami reported on August 12 that a section of walkway had collapsed along the New River, the result of an aging seawall that allows soil beneath the pavers to escape into the river, leaving voids and cavities underfoot. The city has barricaded the damaged section rather than repair it immediately.
The Fort Lauderdale assistant director of public works, touring the site with CBS, put the timeline plainly: the seawall is identified as the second priority in the city's master replacement plan, which is precisely why barricades went up instead of construction crews. Repairs are not expected to start until 2027.
"It's kind of an eyesore, it's been that way as long as I've lived here, which is 11 months," said Darin Gardner, a nearby resident, in the same report. "I feel it's gone unaddressed. It's not a good look for the city."
Gardner's frustration is worth sitting with, because it captures something true about how downtown residents experience the Riverwalk day to day. The award and the barricade are both real, but only one of them shows up when you are trying to get from Sailboat Bend to Las Olas on foot.
Two Projects, Two Timelines
Here is the part that explains the contradiction rather than just describing it. Huizenga Park's transformation moved on a two year clock because it was funded through what the city and its partners call a public private philanthropic partnership, combining money from the City of Fort Lauderdale, the State of Florida, the Downtown Development Authority, and private donors like the West family. That structure let the project move as a single, funded initiative with a fixed budget and a fixed opening date.
Seawall repair does not work that way. It moves through a citywide capital replacement plan, ranked by priority against every other aging seawall in Fort Lauderdale, competing for the same infrastructure dollars as every other segment. The city has been chipping away at other stretches in phases. Engineers walked a separate 500 foot section of Riverwalk's north side seawall through public review back in June 2025, with plans to raise the wall from roughly three feet to five feet and add a floating dock, though marine operators flagged concerns about dock clearance during that process. That project has its own timeline, and it is not the same stretch that collapsed near Andrews Avenue. The takeaway for anyone who lives here is not that the city is ignoring Riverwalk. It is that a linear park stitched together from parks, private gifts, and century old infrastructure will always have some sections outrunning others.
What's Actually Coming to the Path This Fall
Whichever end of Riverwalk you favor, the calendar picks up again as the weather turns. A few dates worth putting on the fridge:
- September 2 through October 9: live music at Tunnel Top Plaza, Wednesdays and Fridays at midday, a lower key way to catch local musicians on a lunch break.
- September 25: the Historic Stranahan House Museum hosts its fourth annual Founding Families Fall Festival, tied to the oldest house in Fort Lauderdale and Broward County's early history.
- October 17: the tenth annual Riverwalk Fall Festival takes over Esplanade Park with food trucks, pumpkin painting, and the kind of free family programming Riverwalk Fort Lauderdale, the nonprofit behind the park's day to day activation, runs several times a year.
- November 14: the sixth annual Riverwalk International Food Festival returns, also at Esplanade Park.
You can check current listings directly through Riverwalk Fort Lauderdale's event calendar or the Las Olas Boulevard events page if you want the fuller neighborhood picture, including what is happening along Las Olas itself in the same weeks.
Walking It This Week
If you are planning a walk in the next few weeks, the practical version of all this is simple. Huizenga Park is open daily from 7 a.m. and worth building a loop around, particularly if you have not seen the Civic Lawn or the restored fountain since the reopening. The dog run is genuinely new territory, not a rebranded corner of an old dog park, so if you have avoided Riverwalk with a dog in the past because there was nowhere for it to run loose, that has changed.
Heading west toward Andrews Avenue and the train bridge, expect the barricade and plan a different route back rather than assuming the path connects through. This is not a short term detour. With repairs not slated until 2027, the closed stretch is likely to be part of the landscape for a while, which is worth knowing before you map a route for guests visiting from out of town.
None of this changes what the Riverwalk fundamentally is for the people who live along it, a rare stretch of New River frontage running over a mile from Sailboat Bend past the Stranahan House, first proposed back in 1926 and still being built out in pieces a century later. It is just a reminder that a national top ten ranking and a barricaded sidewalk can both be accurate descriptions of the same place in the same month. Knowing which end you are on still matters.
If you are watching this stretch of the city change and wondering what it means for property values, timing, or your own next move along the New River, Lisa Stephenson knows this corridor block by block. Let's Connect.
