Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park
Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park reimagines one of the last working stretches of the New Orleans downtown riverfront as a public space – an elevated park on an existing wharf structure that reconnects New Orleans to the water, stitches together historic neighborhoods and creates a new economic and cultural engine at the edge of the French Quarter.
As the roughly $30 million second phase of Audubon Nature Institute’s Riverfront for All initiative, the Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park will be completed in April 2026, with its first major public debut planned for French Quarter Fest.
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Map provided by Audubon Nature Institute
Completing the Vision
Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park is the next major chapter of the Reinventing the Crescent master plan – the post-Katrina framework by Hargreaves Jones, TEN Arquitectos, Chan Krieger and EskewDumezRipple that proposed the transformation of the riverfront from an industrial, maritime use into an accessible public space. With clear focus on demonstrating how design could reconnect New Orleanians with the Mississippi River, the stage is set for Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park to continue that transformation at the city’s historic core.
The phases of completed & planned projects within the Reinventing the Crescent Plan.
Aerial view, facing downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter
Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park was shaped as much by process as by design. From the outset, the project was actively programmed and refined through a robust, multiplatform community engagement effort that included in-person town halls, digital forums, and ongoing dialogue with residents, cultural leaders, and adjacent neighborhoods..
Community feedback directly influenced how the park balances active and contemplative spaces, where performance areas should be located, how circulation should work, and even granular considerations like seating quantity, placement and shade. The resulting design is not an imposed vision - it is a collective one, grounded in what New Orleanians said they needed from their parks and waterfront.
Project Manager Haley Robinson leading a feedback session for initial plans, 2023
Playground elements with a local Louisiana wildlife theme
Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park positions New Orleans within a broader national movement. Across the country, great American cities – New York, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle – have spent recent decades reclaiming their waterfronts as cultural stages, ecological corridors, and economic engines. Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park firmly places New Orleans in that conversation by transforming former working wharves into a continuous, publicly accessible riverfront; the project demonstrates how a world-class waterfront can shape daily public life, fuel tourism, and strengthen cultural identity.
Shade structures and seating options
Reclaiming the Riverfront
For decades, the riverfront at Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park was a hard industrial edge: sheds, trucks, and security fencing separating residents and visitors from the Mississippi. After Hurricane Katrina, the Reinventing the Crescent plan reframed the waterfront as a tool for recovery, resilience, and long-term economic development, envisioning more than six miles of continuous public space along the river.
Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park is the next chapter of that vision. As part of Audubon Nature Institute’s Riverfront for All initiative, the project converts former working wharves into a public park that will complete a 2.25-mile continuous riverfront experience, linking Spanish Plaza and Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park Phase I upriver to Crescent Park downriver – promoted by the city and tourism agencies as the longest contiguous riverfront park in the United States.
Where the city once turned its back to the river, Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park returns the river into everyday public life.
