EskewDumezRipple and Hargreaves Jones Complete New Orleans Waterfront Park

The newly opened Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park completes New Orleans's waterfront revitalization, capping a decades-long effort to reconnect the city's core with the Mississippi River. EskewDumezRipple and Hargreaves Jones led the design of the park, which sits in the heart of the city's downtown riverfront.

The project carries weight beyond its acreage. As The Architect's Newspaper notes, even if the park had been nothing more than a ho-hum stretch of green grass, it would still mark a milestone — the final piece in the city's long-running campaign to open its downtown riverfront to public use.

New Orleans spent much of the twentieth century with its riverfront walled off by industrial uses, port facilities, and rail lines. Successive phases of revitalization have chipped away at that barrier, and Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park closes the remaining gap. The firms' involvement signals the caliber of the commission: EskewDumezRipple, a New Orleans-based practice, paired with Hargreaves Jones, the landscape architecture firm known for large-scale waterfront transformations.

The park's completion consolidates a continuous public edge along the Mississippi in the downtown core, giving residents and visitors direct access to a stretch of riverfront long dominated by private and industrial activity.

With the park now open, attention turns to how the city programs and maintains the space — and whether the revitalized waterfront can sustain the public life that New Orleans has spent decades working to reclaim along the river.