For most of the past few years, walking the Northbank Riverwalk from Riverside toward downtown meant hitting a chain-link fence somewhere past the Fuller Warren Bridge and turning around. McCoy's Creek construction closed one stretch. Bulkhead work closed another. The city kept pushing out completion dates, and regulars adjusted by treating the Riverwalk as two separate paths rather than one continuous one.
That changed on May 13, 2026. The City of Jacksonville held a ribbon-cutting at the new Riverfront Music Garden, outside the Jacksonville Center for the Performing Arts, and formally reopened the Northbank Riverwalk. Mayor Donna Deegan and city officials were there for it. The headline wasn't really the music garden itself. It was the sentence buried in the coverage: the revitalized Riverwalk now connects the Riverside Arts Market to the Hyatt. A bridge over the newly daylighted McCoy's Creek closed the gap. The Corkscrew fitness area, a longtime Riverside landmark, got refurbished along with it.
That one connection is the actual news for anyone who already lives down here. It means a walk that used to require a car and two parking decisions can now happen entirely on foot, and it opens up a Saturday that Riverside, Brooklyn, and Southbank residents haven't had available to them in this form for years.
What Broke, and What Just Got Fixed
The Northbank Riverwalk has been a construction zone in phases since at least 2023, with the McCoy's Creek project alone stretching back to 2019 when the city started pulling out the old Leland and Smith Street bridges. Segments closed, reopened, and closed again as work moved through different contractors. One city tracking page had even projected the McCoy's Creek span reopening back in January 2026, months before the ribbon actually got cut in May. If you've lived here through any of that, you already know the drill: detour signage, a fenced-off block, a mental note to route around it next weekend.
The project that finally closed the loop was handled jointly by the city's Parks, Recreation and Community Services Department, Public Works, and the Downtown Investment Authority, with design and construction work from Halff, Urban Conga, Daily Tous Les Jours, and JB Coxwell. What they delivered isn't just a park. It's a walkable spine that ties the Fuller Warren Bridge end of Riverside to the Hyatt end of downtown without a single detour sign in between.
One End of the Loop Is Still the Saturday Market
Riverside Arts Market hasn't changed and doesn't need to. It's still under the I-95 Fuller Warren Bridge at 715 Riverside Avenue, still every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., rain or shine, and still run by Riverside Avondale Preservation. Close to 150 vendors set up weekly, the riverfront amphitheater seats 350 people for live music, and the market pulls more than 4,000 visitors on a typical Saturday. First Saturday Brews, a recurring monthly slot pairing a local brewery with the River Stage lineup, keeps the market from feeling like the same booths in the same order every week.
What's different now is what happens when you're done shopping. Instead of walking back to your car in the same direction you came from, you can keep going east on a Riverwalk that no longer dead-ends.
Brooklyn Is the New Midpoint
Follow the reconnected path east and it lands you in Brooklyn, at HUB Brooklyn on Riverside Avenue, home to Alder & Oak. This is a wood-fired Aegean and Mediterranean spot that cooks everything without seed oils, using only Iliada extra virgin olive oil from Kalamata and grass-fed beef tallow. The kitchen runs a Mibrasa coal-fired grill alongside an Earthstone wood-fired oven, turning out whole grilled fish, Galician octopus, meze, coal-fired steaks, and 24-hour cold-fermented pizza. The courtyard dining is covered and looks out on the Jacksonville skyline. Upstairs, Zorbas is a walk-in-only rooftop bar serving cocktails and Aegean small plates, open late on Fridays and Saturdays.
Alder & Oak is confident enough in the Brooklyn location that it announced a second one targeted for Jacksonville Beach this past June. That's a small but real signal about where the neighborhood's food scene is heading, and it's the kind of expansion that tends to happen only after the first location proves it can pull a crowd.
The market anchors one end of the loop. Brooklyn is now the midpoint. The river closes it.
The Water Taxi Closes the Loop
Here's where the reconnection actually pays off. Instead of retracing your steps back to Riverside, the St. Johns River Taxi lets you cross the water and finish the day on the Southbank near Friendship Fountain and the Museum of Science and History. The service runs a text-a-taxi pickup program (text 904-860-TAXI from any dock during operating hours), keeps extended hours and adds boats on Jaguars game days at EverBank Stadium, and operates Wednesday through Sunday with Friday and Saturday hours running until 10 p.m.
This isn't a novelty ride for tourists. In 2025, the water taxi logged about 413,600 rides, and ridership through the first quarter of 2026 averaged roughly 1,900 boardings a day, according to the American Public Transportation Association's quarterly ridership data. That's a working piece of downtown infrastructure that a lot of residents already use to skip a bridge crossing on foot.
A Saturday, Mapped
Here's what the loop actually looks like end to end, now that all three pieces line up:
- Start at Riverside Arts Market before 10:30 to catch the morning vendor rush and grab produce before it thins out.
- Walk the reconnected Northbank Riverwalk east, past the refurbished Corkscrew fitness area and over the new McCoy's Creek bridge, toward Brooklyn.
- Stop at Alder & Oak for lunch in the courtyard, or come back later for a Zorbas rooftop drink on a Friday or Saturday night.
- Pick up the water taxi from a Northbank dock and cross to the Southbank.
- Finish near Friendship Fountain or MOSH before heading home.
None of this required a car. That's the part that wasn't true a year ago.
Why This Actually Matters Downtown
It's tempting to file this under general downtown improvement news and move on. But the specific thing that happened here is narrower and more useful than that. For years, the Northbank Riverwalk functioned as two disconnected walking paths separated by an active construction zone, and residents built their Saturday routines around that fact without necessarily noticing they'd done it. The market was a market. Brooklyn was a separate trip. The water taxi was something you took to a Jaguars game, not something you used to get home from lunch.
The May reopening didn't add much new physical space. What it did was remove the fence in the middle, and that's a different kind of change than a new restaurant opening or a new park getting landscaped. It's the difference between three separate destinations and one loop, and it's worth updating your own Saturday for.
If you're already living in Riverside, Brooklyn, or along the Southbank, this is one of those changes that's easy to miss until a friend from out of town asks what there is to do on a Saturday and you realize your answer just got a lot better. And if you know someone weighing a move into this stretch of Jacksonville and wondering what daily life actually looks like here, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground detail Meredith Rowe can walk them through, block by block, before they ever make an offer.
