For most of the past two years, downtown Jacksonville's riverfront has looked like a series of unrelated fenced-off lots. You'd see cranes at the old Jacksonville Landing site, orange barriers around Friendship Fountain, a chain-link perimeter where the JEA Southside plant used to sit. Each project read as its own isolated headache, the kind of thing you mentally filed under "someday" and routed around on your way to dinner or a Jaguars game.
That's no longer accurate. As of this year, those separate sites have started linking up into something Jacksonville hasn't had in decades: a continuous riverfront you can actually walk, from the Southbank across to the Northbank, without detouring into a parking garage or a surface lot. The pieces are still uneven, some finished, some months from done, but the connective tissue is now in place in a way it wasn't a year ago.
The Piece Most People Noticed First
Riverfront Plaza sits on the old Jacksonville Landing footprint at Hogan Street and Independent Drive, and it's the one most residents have already stumbled into. Phase 1, a $32.5 million build with a playground stacked on top of a pavilion building plus an event lawn along the Riverwalk, had a soft opening November 29, 2025, timed to the Holiday River Fest, then a formal ribbon-cutting December 5. If you were downtown for the holiday tree lighting or the Light Boat Parade last winter, you likely walked through it without knowing it had only existed for a week.
Phase 2 is the part that changes daily use rather than holiday use: a beer garden, a rain garden, and a bike and pedestrian connection over to the Main Street Bridge. That construction was slated to start in early 2026, with completion targeted for late 2027, so if you've noticed activity near the plaza this fall, that's likely what you're looking at.
The Walk That Reconnected in May
The bigger shift for anyone who actually uses the riverfront on foot happened quietly in May. On May 13, 2026, the city held a ribbon cutting for the Riverfront Music Garden and, more importantly, for the reopened Northbank Riverwalk itself. That reopening matters more than any single park, because it's what turns a handful of separate green spaces into one path. According to the city's own announcement, the Riverwalk is now walkable continuously from Riverside Arts Market all the way to the Hyatt, with the bridge over the newly daylighted McCoy's Creek complete and the Corkscrew fitness area refurbished along the way.
Mayor Donna Deegan framed the whole effort in a phrase worth remembering if you're deciding where to walk the dog this weekend: the goal, she said, is "to turn our riverfront into a true front porch for the entire city."
The Music Garden itself, a $6 million project built between Water and Hogan streets alongside the Jacksonville Center for the Performing Arts, leans into the theme rather than adding generic green space. It's built around a treble-clef centerpiece and a planned Walk of Fame honoring local musicians, so if you're the kind of resident who cares which songwriters and performers this city has produced, that stretch is worth an actual visit rather than a drive-by.
What's Open Right Now, Mapped Out
Here's the honest state of play as of this fall, broken into what you can walk today and what's still behind fencing.
Open and walkable now:
- Riverfront Plaza Phase 1, playground and event lawn, Northbank at Hogan and Independent
- Riverfront Music Garden and the reconnected Northbank Riverwalk, Water to Hogan streets
- The four RiversEdge parks on the Southbank, opened November 24, 2025
- Friendship Fountain, reopened in February 2024
Still under construction or not yet started:
- St. Johns River Park, the area immediately around Friendship Fountain, targeted for spring 2026 completion in the city's most recent reporting
- Riverfront Plaza Phase 2, beer garden and Main Street Bridge connection, targeted for late 2027
- Shipyards West Park, a 10-acre build on the Northbank near the USS Orleck
- James Weldon Johnson Park, the square south of City Hall, still in design
The Southbank Got There First
While the Northbank drew most of the attention because of the old Landing site, the Southbank's RiversEdge development actually opened its parks first, on November 24, 2025. It's a $693 million mixed-use project built on the former JEA Southside Generating Plant site, a plant that ran from 1947 to 2001, and the parks portion alone cost $35 million across 4.1 acres. What you get walking through it now is winding paths, a yoga lawn, and a playground built around touch-activated games, a strange but fitting afterlife for a stretch of riverfront that spent half a century as an industrial site.
Councilman Matt Carlucci put it plainly at the RiversEdge ribbon cutting: more foot traffic there is "going to be good for the businesses down here" and, in his words, "Downtown is going to be discovered again."
Who Actually Paid for This
The financing behind these parks is worth knowing if you've wondered why so much riverfront construction happened at once. City staff have described the funding agreement tied to the Jaguars' Stadium of the Future project as the largest community benefits agreement in NFL history, and that agreement fully funded the final construction of three of these projects: Shipyards West Park, Metropolitan Park, and parts of Riverfront Plaza. In plain terms, a chunk of the green space you're walking through downtown right now exists because of a stadium deal, not a parks bond or a tax increase. That's an unusual funding path for public parks, and it's part of why several of these projects moved from design to ribbon cutting inside a single year instead of the decade these things sometimes take.
What's Still Coming
Two projects are worth watching if you want to know what the riverfront looks like next year rather than this one. Shipyards West, designed by Agency Landscape and Planning, was 90 percent through design review as of last fall, with plans for pickleball and volleyball courts, fishing piers, a kayak launch, a boardwalk, a beach area, and floating wetlands, all anchored next to the floating naval museum USS Orleck.
James Weldon Johnson Park, the square across from City Hall, is moving slower. The nonprofit Friends of James Weldon Johnson Park is partnering with the city on a redesign led by Hood Design Studio, the same firm behind LaVilla's Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing Park, which opened in June 2024. The city has put the project cost at roughly $28.5 million, with funding expected to become available this fall and construction running 12 to 18 months after that. If the timeline holds, that means groundwork could start before the end of 2026, with an opening more likely in 2027 or 2028.
What This Means for Your Weekend
If you haven't walked the Northbank since before this spring, the honest recommendation is to go back. Park near Riverside Arts Market on a Saturday morning, walk the reconnected Riverwalk east past the Music Garden and Riverfront Plaza, and you'll cover ground that was fenced off a year ago. Cross over and the Southbank's RiversEdge parks and Friendship Fountain give you a second stretch worth the walk, especially if you've got kids who'd rather run through a playground than sit through brunch.
None of this changes what the riverfront has always been good for: a place to walk, a place to bring visiting family, a reason to stay downtown after a Jaguars game instead of heading straight home. What's changed is how much of it now connects without a detour, and that's worth knowing whether you've lived here two years or twenty.
For more on what's shifting across Northeast Florida neighborhoods, from the coast to the urban core, the team at Noah Bailey Group keeps a close eye on the changes that actually affect daily life here. If you have questions about a specific pocket of Jacksonville or Northeast Florida, reach out anytime.
