Long-planned riverfront path to Belle Isle set to open in October

Detroiters this fall will reclaim a strip of industrial ruin after 20 years of hope and $11 million of gritty work.

The Detroit Riverfront Conservancy expects in October to open what it calls the Uniroyal Promenade, an extension of the riverfront path from Mount Elliott Park to the MacArthur Bridge, enabling trail users to reach Belle Isle without dealing with traffic and noise on Jefferson Avenue.

The last stretch of concrete was poured last week on the trail that will connect the downtown riverfront to Belle Isle, 3.5 miles from the former Joe Louis Arena site to Gabriel Richard Park at the northeastern foot of MacArthur Bridge.

West Village resident Justin Craig, co-owner of RUNdetroit in Midtown, says he is "beyond excited for this extension," capturing the sentiment of thousands of runners, cyclists and walkers around the city.

Belle Isle, popular for exercise and recreation, is "an amazing jewel for the city," Craig said. "Having cool things is neat, but making it accessible is critical." He said the city is accomplishing that with an emerging network of trails, including the RiverWalk, Dequindre Cut and Southwest Greenway reaching into neighborhoods and providing broader recreational and commuting access.

"It's nice to have little pockets of quiet and outdoor time," he said, noting that Detroit is catching up with major cities that dedicate significant amounts of public land to recreation and green space.

Behind the work is the Riverfront Conservancy, which has managed a $200 million investment so far in revitalizing the river shoreline and trails connecting to it. The city's RiverWalk earlier this year was named the nation's best in the USA Today Reader's Choice Awards — without the new extension, which hugs the river and promises to be more solitary and quiet than the downtown stretch.

A history of heavy industry and pollution

The old Uniroyal site became the largest tire manufacturing site in the world until shutting down in 1980. The city bought the site and demolished the buildings, but environmental contamination and Detroit's financial and bureaucratic struggles have left it vacant. The RiverWalk extension is the first new development on the 42-acre parcel.

Industrial use of the site — which has about 2,000 feet of riverfront and close-up views of the western tip of Belle Isle — started in 1866 when Detroit Stove Works set up operations there. After more than a century of heavy industrial use, the land and shoreline required complex cleanup, with responsibility for the work on about two-thirds of the site tied up in litigation for years, said Mark Wallace, president and CEO of the Riverfront Conservancy.

The length of the riverfront restoration has been "technically complicated with literally dozens of brownfield sites" to clean up from the city's history of riverfront industry, Wallace said. The Uniroyal site, with a total $11 million price tag, was a particularly "substantial project along the shoreline," with toxic sediments needing to be cleaned up with $2 million in federal money. The conservancy partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency under the Great Lakes Legacy Act to get the riverfront ready for public use.

The conservancy controls only the first 65 feet of shoreline; the city holds the rest of the Uniroyal site. A development group led by Detroit native and retired NFL star Jerome Bettis was tapped in 2004. Bettis, with partner Jamal Dukes, is working on a new redevelopment plan.

The rest of the RiverWalk

When the new segment of trail opens, the east RiverWalk will be complete, but the conservancy's mission when it was founded in 2003 was a 5.5-mile trail from the MacArthur Bridge to the Ambassador Bridge. That is projected to happen next year, Wallace said, with opening of the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Centennial Park west of the residential Riverfront Towers.

The western end of the path will stretch to Riverside Park, at the terminus of West Grand Boulevard, near the Ambassador Bridge. Wallace praised the city's renovation of Riverside Park, saying it has become one of the summer's most popular destinations. The city in 2020 completed environmental cleanup and a renovated picnic area, boat launch, parking, horseshoe and table tennis area.

The completed RiverWalk will avoid streets altogether, Wallace said, except for a stretch of less than half a mile, which will remain along East Atwater Street, bordering the Aretha Franklin Amphitheater and Robert C. Valade Park, which opened in 2019.

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To the west, a boardwalk has been added at the Riverfront Towers marina, keeping the RiverWalk off of West Jefferson.

When the "bridge-to-bridge" RiverWalk vision was conceived, the new Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor was not on the drawing board. Connecting the RiverWalk to that bridge, which is to open in late 2024 and will include a bicycle/pedestrian lane between the U.S. and Canada, will take a new plan, with organizations in Michigan and Ontario working on connecting trails on both sides of the river.

Getting people outside

For Wallace, who has led the Riverfront Conservancy since 2014, the Uniroyal link is gratifying.

"This team (at the Riverfront Conservancy) has been running up the hill for 20 years," he said.

"My favorite thing about my job is watching people make memories on the riverfront, interacting with nature, meeting new people and making new friends," he said. "When I see people having those experiences, it makes me so happy."

Lance Woods, co-founder of WeRun313, thought to be Michigan's largest running club, has watched progress on the extension during weekly club runs that reach Mount Elliott Park and soon will be able to continue east.

"It's great for the city," he said. "You have some people who will walk, some people who will jog, some people who will skate." Easy access to longer paths "brings the community together," Woods said, "and it's good for visitors to see a positive side of Detroit that's not always conveyed."

Like Woods and Wallace, Craig is eager to try out the new path. He has run by the Uniroyal site countless times, he said. "I'll be on the new path the day it opens," he said.

Randy Essex is an editor at the Free Press who also will be on the new stretch of RiverWalk as soon as he can be. Reach him at ressex@freepress.com. This story has been corrected from the original posting to remove an incorrect reference to the distance of the new trail link.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: East riverfront link to Belle Isle nearly complete