Ask a regular at Tom Lee Park what the riverfront was missing and the answer usually isn't more green space. The park solved that years ago with hammock groves, a misting fountain, and a sculpture by Theaster Gates dedicated to the man the park is named for. What Downtown has actually been short on, right up until this month, is somewhere to sit down for a real meal without walking several blocks off Riverside Drive.
That gap has a paper trail. When Walt & Ricky's Seafood Kitchen filed its plans with the Downtown Memphis Commission earlier this year, the application described the project as one of the few full-service restaurants along Riverside Drive with daytime hours. Not the only new restaurant downtown. Not the fanciest. One of the few places along the entire riverfront corridor where you could get a proper lunch. Owner Mowbray Rowand put it plainly when the restaurant was announced: the biggest opportunity he saw wasn't a trendy neighborhood or an undiscovered cuisine, it was daytime dining steps from a park that was already drawing families, tourists, and residents all day long.
That's the story of Tom Lee Park in one sentence. The landscape got finished first. The businesses that make a finished landscape livable took years longer to show up. This fall, for the first time since the renovation began, they're arriving together.
The Park Built Itself in Layers, and the Storefronts Lagged Every Time
Memphis River Parks Partnership has been building this stretch of riverfront since 2019, when Studio Gang's design for Tom Lee Park grew out of an earlier concept plan for the city's whole river corridor. River Garden and Fourth Bluff Park, two former Confederate-named spaces, were reimagined and completed in 2018 and 2019. The River Line, the five-mile walking and biking trail that ties the parks together, opened in 2018. The Sunset Canopy, the park's 15,000-square-foot event space dedicated to Tyre Nichols, has been hosting yoga classes and pickup basketball for a few years now.
None of that required a restaurant next door. A trail doesn't need a kitchen. But a 31-acre park that pulls people in for a full afternoon does, and for most of the renovation, Riverside Drive simply didn't have one. Fancy's Fish House, the building at 1 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, sat as the closest sit-down option and then sat empty after it closed. The park kept getting better. The block next to it didn't move.
Three Landmarks in Six Months
What changed this year is the pace. Instead of one project finishing every couple of years, three landed in a single stretch:
| Date | What opened |
|---|---|
| June 12, 2026 | Memphis Flyway, the elevated boardwalk at the park's south end |
| September 2, 2026 | Walt & Ricky's Seafood Kitchen, in the former Fancy's space |
| October 3, 2026 | Tom Lee Day and the second annual Gumption Revival Lantern Parade |
| December 6, 2026 | Memphis Art Museum opens on the bluff at Front and Union |
Four events, six months, one corridor. That's a tighter cluster than anything the renovation has produced since the trail and the first two parks opened back in 2018 and 2019.
The Flyway Gave the Park's Quiet End a Reason to Visit
The Memphis Flyway opened on a Friday in June after nearly two years of construction, and it did something the rest of the park hadn't: it gave the south end, the quieter, more ecological half of Tom Lee Park, its own destination. The $10.4 million structure is a 220-foot elevated walkway that winds through tree canopy and over wetlands before ending in a looped overlook of the river, the skyline, and the Arkansas shoreline. It's free, it's ADA-accessible, and because it sits along a major North American bird migration route, it's become a genuine birdwatching spot in the middle of a Southern city. Riverside Drive closed for more than two months during the final phase of construction and reopened the same afternoon the Flyway did.
If you've walked the park's north end for the concerts and skate nights but never made it south past the playground, the Flyway is the reason to finally go. It's the piece that completes what Studio Gang described as the park's gradient: active and urban near Beale Street Landing, quiet and ecological as you move south toward Martyrs Park.
Walt & Ricky's Fills the One Thing the Park Couldn't Build Itself
Walt & Ricky's held its grand opening on September 2, timed to 901 Day, with a patio that looks directly onto the park. The menu runs toward Gulf seafood and raw oysters, with a chargrilled oyster in barbecue butter that the restaurant is positioning as its signature dish, alongside whole branzino, Chilean sea bass, and steaks for anyone who wants to sit on the patio without ordering off the raw bar. The restaurant signed a ten-year lease on the space starting in April and sought a $40,000 grant from the Downtown Memphis Commission for exterior signage and lighting, the kind of investment that signals a business planning to stay through more than one park season.
What the restaurant's own filing said matters more than the menu. It described itself as serving park visitors, residents, and downtown workers, and it named the gap directly: daytime dining along Riverside Drive. That's a specific, narrow hole in the neighborhood's offerings that a lot of people who live here have probably grumbled about without ever hearing anyone name it in writing.
December Moves the Corridor North, With a Catch Worth Noting
In December, the corridor extends past the park itself. The Memphis Art Museum, the institution formerly known as the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, opens its new 123,500-square-foot building at Front and Union on December 6. The Herzog & de Meuron design sits on a reconstructed bluff and includes a 50,000-square-foot rooftop sculpture garden, a street-level community courtyard called Hyde Square, and new, wider sidewalks meant to connect downtown foot traffic directly to the riverfront. It shares a public plaza with the historic Cossitt Library.
The catch, and it's a good one if you live in Shelby County: admission will be free in perpetuity for every Shelby County resident, a policy the museum announced alongside the opening date. That's not a limited-time member promotion. It's a standing commitment tied to a $40 million gift from the Hyde Family Foundation, and it means the museum functions less like a ticketed attraction and more like an extension of the park itself, another free space along the same half mile of riverfront.
What's Already Running Every Week, No Ticket Required
While the bigger openings get the headlines, the riverfront's weekly schedule has quietly filled in too. None of it costs anything:
- Yoga on the River, Tuesdays at 6:00 p.m., hosted by the Downtown Memphis Commission
- Hustle & Flow Pilates, Mondays at 6:00 p.m. under the Sunset Canopy
- Free Step Aerobics, the first and third Wednesday of each month, 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.
- A free senior walking group, Mondays from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m., running now through November 23
- Stargazing at Beale Street Landing, next scheduled for tonight, September 19, at 6:30 p.m.
That last one lands the same week this piece is being written, which is a decent illustration of how often the riverfront calendar turns over. If you check it once a month you're missing most of it.
The One Weekend Worth Actually Planning Around
If there's a single date to put on the calendar, it's October 3, Tom Lee Day. The city proclaimed the first Saturday in October in honor of Tom Lee, who saved 32 people from a capsized steamboat on the river in 1925 without knowing how to swim himself. The celebration runs from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. under the Sunset Canopy, with a lantern walk to the Beale Street Landing rooftop at 6:00 and the parade itself stepping off at 7:00, led by the Lucky 7 Brass Band and Chantelle Rytter's oversized lantern puppets. If you want to carry your own lantern, workshops have been running at Beale Street Landing through September for twelve dollars, materials included.
It's the kind of evening that pairs naturally with the corridor's other new piece. Grab an early dinner on the patio at Walt & Ricky's, walk the few blocks to the Sunset Canopy for the celebration, and end at the Flyway or the Beale Street Landing rooftop as the lanterns come out. That loop wasn't possible a year ago. The park was there, but the rest of the evening had nowhere to happen.
Downtown residents have watched this stretch of riverfront change in pieces for the better part of a decade. What's different about this particular fall is that the pieces are finally lining up on the same calendar, and for the first time, you can walk out your door, eat, walk the trail, and end the night at a parade without leaving a half-mile stretch of Riverside Drive.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth, or just curious how these changes are showing up in what buyers are asking about Downtown, the team at Ware Jones knows this stretch of riverfront block by block. Connect with a Memphis neighborhood expert whenever you're ready to talk it through.
