The Riverfront Parkway’s New Relevance

I made a blog post called “The Split Personality Of The Riverfront Parkway” back in 2016 and, for the most part, my observations still hold up. The parkway is wildly inconsistent in its surface material, its maintenance, and its utility from one section to the next. Most of the parkway is just as it was 8 years ago. The section that passes through downtown West Bend, however, is utterly transformed. In recent years, the city has realized that people like to be close to water … even something so plain as the very narrow, very shallow Milwaukee River. In 2023, the city completed a new “riverwalk” on the west side of the river. It’s not just a complement to the multi-use paths on the east side. In some respects, it’s better.

On the east side of the river, you can take the parkway past the Museum of Wisconsin Art up to Rivershores. You can cover the same ground on the Eisenbahn State Trail. Either way, you have to cross busy Washington Street. The new riverwalk lets you pass under the street, as I have been doing on recent rides like today’s:

And, just as significantly, the new riverwalk connects more things. Some downtown businesses are already pivoting toward the riverwalk, treating the back door as a second front door. West Bend’s newly reconstructed Main Street boasts many improvements, but more parking isn’t one of them. As more people discover the riverwalk, parking on the east side and then walking to downtown businesses should be more common. Outdoor dining will become more common too, not just because of the river, but also because we like to watch people.

I still think very few people will travel the parkway from end to end, and that’s OK. The new riverwalk would be an asset to West Bend even if didn’t connect to anything to the north or south. In the past 10 years we have witnessed the construction of hundreds of new residential units downtown, and more are coming. We’re moving toward a very dense urban core that can thrive because of our recent investment in bike- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure.