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, Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park was completed in April 2026, with its first major public debut during a record-setting French Quarter Fest, where the newly opened riverfront space helped expand the festival footprint for one of the highest-attended years in the event’s more than 40-year history.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A civic hinge between the French Quarter, Marigny, and Bywater
The site occupies a pivotal location between the lower French Quarter, Faubourg Marigny, and the Bywater. The design transforms an industrial remnant into a welcoming landscape that links the Moonwalk, the French Market, and the New Orleans Jazz Museum to Crescent Park, closing the last gap in the public riverfront.
Frenchmen Street in the Marigny acts as a cultural gateway, pulling the city’s music and nightlife energy to the water. Esplanade Avenue terminates in a new civic threshold that weaves together pedestrian paths, rail, and transit, creating an intuitive access point for residents, tourists, and festival-goers arriving from the Quarter and beyond.
Creating a Green Park
The mandate of the project was simple yet ambitious: to add green space along the river and transform a once-industrial edge into an accessible, flexible, and ecologically rich public park. Designed for both everyday use and large community gatherings, the landscape introduces a continuous ribbon of green along the Mississippi.
A tree-lined shaded promenade traces the river’s edge, connecting a sequence of distinct spaces – the great lawn, the play grove, and the Esplanade plaza/gateway. From upriver to downriver, the experience shifts from urban plaza to open green space, from performance and concessions to quiet overlooks and habitat gardens, always keeping the river in view.
The Pavillion: heritage, architecture, and adaptive reuse
At the heart of the project, a portion of the Governor Nicholls warehouse is preserved and reimagined as an open-air pavilion – a flexible frame for the city’s evolving cultural life.
EskewDumezRipple’s architectural intervention retains the muscular steel structure and industrial vocabulary of the wharf while opening the building to light, landscape, and public use. A perforated membrane acts as a scrim to filter daylight and at night transforms into a translucent, glowing presence.
The NOLA Front Porch pavilion becomes an all-weather venue for food and beverage, small markets, performances, and community gatherings, with approximately 3,000 SF of enclosed support space tucked beneath an elevated roof for everyday social activity and events
Audubon is actively soliciting an operator for the pavilion’s commercial kitchen and concessions, envisioning day-to-night use that ranges from coffee and snacks to corporate events, small concerts, and arts festivals. A lease with a food-and-beverage partner, twice-monthly programmed events, and pavilion naming rights are all part of a strategy to ensure the park can support its own operations over time.
This approach celebrates the authentic working-riverfront heritage of the site rather than erasing it. Structure, not façadism, becomes the memory device: the rhythm of columns and trusses is echoed in lighting, paving, and tree planting, so visitors can literally read the old infrastructure through the new public realm.
A park built on structure, over water
Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park is, quite literally, a park on the water. Instead of demolishing and rebuilding, the design reuses some of the existing wharf structure as the foundation for new decking, lawns, and public spaces, reducing material consumption and construction waste while leveraging the structural capacity and embodied carbon of the original platform.
The deck is thickened strategically to provide deep soil for over 120 new trees and expansive planting beds, while lighter promenades are located closer to the river. This structural choreography allows heavier program elements – shade canopies and trees – to sit over the strongest supports, while views and movement occur at the water’s edge. Standing on the deck, visitors experience the river’s sound, movement, and vast horizon up close – a sensory reminder of the city’s enduring connection to the Mississippi.
Integrated utilities, drainage, and event infrastructure within the deck enable the park to host everything from everyday picnics to major festivals without compromising comfort or resilience in New Orleans’ hot, humid climate.
Habitat, shade, and climate resilience
What was once an expanse of pavement and metal sheds becomes a layered urban ecology. The planting strategy draws from regional riparian and coastal landscapes: native oaks, cypress, red maple, and magnolia form a shade canopy, with understory sweeps of grasses, perennials, and pollinator species turning the park into an ecological stepping stone along the Mississippi Flyway.
A marsh-inspired play grove introduces children to wetland ecologies and the role of healthy river systems in the region’s future, turning play into environmental literacy. Shaded groves, misting elements, and generous tree canopy collectively cool the microclimate, making the park comfortable throughout much of the year and positioning it as a piece of soft climate infrastructure.
Economic engine and “front porch” for the city
Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park is as much an economic strategy as it is a design project. Riverfront for All is funded through a partnership between the City of New Orleans, Audubon Nature Institute, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, and New Orleans & Co., with a project cost of roughly $30 million and the city committing at least $15 million in capital funds.
By creating a walkable, bike-friendly riverfront that links convention activity, the French Quarter, and neighborhood-scale cultural districts, the park is expected to increase dwell time, support local vendors and artists, and strengthen New Orleans’ appeal for major events such as Super Bowl LIX, French Quarter Fest, and large conventions throughout the year. Tourism leaders are already positioning the completed riverfront as a headline “what’s new” attraction for visitors in 2026 and beyond.
Daily life remains the primary brief: concessions, flexible seating, and small performance spaces support local musicians, food operators, and markets; generous lawns and terraces invite families, joggers, and nearby residents to claim the riverfront as part of their routines.
Programming the site as a small-scale concert venue, festival platform, and corporate event setting a few times each month is central to Audubon’s goal of making the park both inclusive public space and a self-supporting public asset.
Downriver, a second phase at the larger Esplanade Avenue Wharf is now being reconceived, with Audubon revisiting earlier concepts to balance neighborhood concerns about noise and congestion with the need for long-term revenue and stewardship. Longer term, Audubon and the City continue to discuss what it would mean for a single steward to manage the full riverfront from Woldenberg Park to the Bywater – positioning Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park as a prototype for how design, programming, and financial sustainability can work together.
A renewed relationship between city and river
Together with Crescent Park, the Moonwalk, and Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park Phase I, Goldring Woldenberg Riverfront Park Phase II completes a long-imagined “front porch to the Mississippi.” It transforms a guarded industrial edge into a shared public stage – a place where infrastructure becomes public life, where heritage and ecology coexist, and where New Orleans can face its river again with confidence, curiosity, and care.
Project Credits:
Client: Audubon Nature Institute
Architecture: EskewDumezRipple
Landscape Architecture: Hargreaves Jones
Structural & Civil Engineering: Morphy, Makofsky, Inc.
MEP: Salas O'Brien
Lighting: HLB Lighting Design
General Contractor: Broadmoor, LLC
AV / IT: Salas O’Brien
Signage and Wayfinding: RSM Design
Surveyor: Gandolfo Kuhn, LLC
EskewDumezRipple Design Team:
Steve Dumez - Director of Design
Christian Rodriguez - Principal-in-Charge
Haley Robinson - Project Manager
Blake Rambo - Project Architect
Chris Pietsch - Designer
Andy Redmon - Construction Contract Administrator
Hargreaves Jones Design Team:
George Hargreaves - Director of Design
Mary Margaret Jones - Project Lead
Gavin McMillan - Technical Lead
Kirt Rieder - Principal-In-Charge
Megan Esopenko - Project Manager
Emily McCarthy - Designer
Audubon Nature Institute Team:
Michael Sawaya - Chief Executive Officer & L. Ron Forman Chair in Conservation Leadership
Ron Forman - President & CEO Emeritus
Jackson Kerby - Vice President of Construction & Exhibitry
Katherine Randall - Senior Project Manager
