The $75 million Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Centennial Park will open in late October — three and a half years after work to develop the destination park on Detroit’s west riverfront began.
At the same time, the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy will open a boardwalk 17 feet from the river’s shore in front of Riverfront Towers west of downtown Detroit and other parts of the west RiverWalk that will connect to the new waterfront park.
Visitors will be able to travel almost 5 miles along the Detroit River from the east RiverWalk near the bridge to Belle Isle west to the former Joe Louis Arena site, over the new boardwalk, into Centennial Park and up the Southwest Greenway trail to the Michigan Central campus in Corktown.
The Ralph Wilson Park — named in honor of the foundation’s namesake and announced on the 100th anniversary of his birth Oct. 17, 1918 — is set to open the weekend of Oct. 25-26 with a weekend of free activities.
Credit: Nadir Ali/Detroit Riverfront Conservancy. The 5-acre Delta Dental Play Garden includes a variety of animal play structures.
“This park is absolutely going to be a destination for folks to come … whether they’re walking there, riding their bike, they’re from the adjacent neighborhoods or from the greater metro Detroit area … or even further out,” Detroit Riverfront Conservancy CEO Ryan Sullivan told Crain’s.
It will be “one of the most iconic public spaces in the country and will represent a massive step towards the completion of our vision for 5.5 miles of perpetual public access to our revitalized riverfront,” Matt Cullen, chairman of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy board of directors, said in a news release. “Our community owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to the Wilson Foundation for launching this vision for Detroit, as well as to the many partners that joined them in turning this vision into a reality, such as William Davidson Foundation, Huron-Clinton Metroparks, Delta Dental, Erb Foundation, DTE Foundation, and all of the other benefactors who have made this achievement possible.”
The 22-acre park was designed by New York City-based Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., the landscape architecture firm that designed the Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York and Maggie Daley Park in Chicago. The firm brought Sir David Adjaye, principal of Adjaye Associates, who completed the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and was among Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2017 as one of the greatest architectural visionaries of modern time, to design comfort stations and a sport house for basketball and indoor sports.
The world-class park at 1801 W. Jefferson Ave. will be home to four major attractions:
- the William Davidson Sport House, which features a raised canopy and skylight for two open-air public regulation basketball courts and flexible space for a variety of programs and events;
- the 5-acre Delta Dental Play Garden with an array of native animal play structures, including a 23-foot-tall bear slide for kids to climb in and around;
- the 2.5-acre Huron-Clinton Metroparks Water Garden, with ice skating when the water is frozen in the cold months;
- the DTE Foundation Summit, an expansive green lawn that will be used for special events and programming as well as sledding in the winter.
The park will also include outdoor classrooms and about 900 newly planted trees, with about 750 planted so far.
“It’s just it’s a stunning transformation of what once was…a construction site,” Sullivan said.
The park was completed with $35 million in new commitments from the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation last year following the embezzlement of more than $40 million by the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy’s former CFO, William Smith. To ensure it would open on time, the Detroit-based foundation made a $10 million grant and $25 million loan guarantee to provide a $35 million credit facility to pay contractors as they completed work on the riverfront projects.
The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan served as the fiduciary for that funding and has helped in efforts to secure commitments from other foundations. The conservancy is now leading that fundraising, working closely with the Wilson Foundation and the Community Foundation to raise the full $25 million behind the loan guarantee, Sullivan said.
“We have a number of existing firm commitments as well as some soft commitments we’re still working on. We’re anticipating providing an update later this year,” he said.
The Ralph Wilson Park would not be opening this fall if it were not for that lifeline fund, Sullivan said.
“We’re tremendously thankful to the collaboration with the Wilson Foundation (and) the Community Foundation. Together they stepped up in a big way … and they ensured this park was going to be finished and provided that certainty of funds,” he said.
About 90% of the park is complete. Work yet to be completed includes planting more trees and plants around the water garden and installation of a floor stamped with the Detroit Pistons logo in the William Davidson Sports House, Sullivan said. Davidson owned the Pistons from 1974 until his death in 2009.
Elements of the conservancy’s annual Detroit Harvest Fest will move to Ralph Wilson Park as part of its grand opening weekend. This year’s event will be free to the public and include live entertainment, fall activities, food trucks and other activities.
Sullivan projects more than 50,000 people will visit the park during its opening weekend, based on the number of people who have attended the Harvest Fest event on the Dequindre Cut in past years.
Following the opening of Centennial Park, the conservancy will have roughly two-thirds of a mile of Riverwalk to complete to the west of it, extending the path between Rosa Parks Boulevard and Riverside Park, near the Ambassador Bridge to and from Canada.