The Riverline is the name Memphis River Parks Partnership uses for its long-term plan to connect the city’s separate riverfront parks into one continuous trail for walking and cycling, running roughly from the northern edge of Downtown to the bluffs south of the Memphis and Arkansas Memorial Bridge. Most of it is not built yet. Some sections already exist as finished parks; others are lines on a plan.
What is the Riverline, exactly?
It is a connector, not a single new park. Memphis’s riverfront has always been a string of separate green spaces — Mud Island, Tom Lee Park, Martyrs Park, the bluff parks around Downtown — built at different times, under different names, with no continuous path tying them together. The Riverline is the plan to close those gaps, so a person could move on foot or by bike from one riverfront park to the next without detouring onto city streets.
The idea comes out of the Memphis Riverfront Concept Plan, a 2017 planning document commissioned by the Riverfront Development Corporation (the organization now known as Memphis River Parks Partnership) and produced by the architecture and urban design firm Studio Gang. That plan set out a vision for the whole riverfront rather than one park at a time, and the Riverline is the through-line it proposed.
Who is actually responsible for building it?
Memphis River Parks Partnership is the nonprofit that manages most of Downtown’s riverfront parks under an operating agreement with the City of Memphis, and it is the organization that publishes and updates the Riverline concept on its own site. Individual segments are funded and built as separate capital projects — sometimes by the Partnership, sometimes by the city, sometimes with state or federal money attached to a specific park.
Because of that project-by-project funding, the Riverline does not have one single completion date. Readers who want the current status of any given segment should check Memphis River Parks Partnership’s own site directly, since park-by-park progress is the kind of detail that changes year to year.
What’s already built along the route?
Several of the anchor pieces already exist and are open to the public:
- Tom Lee Park, rebuilt and reopened in 2023 as part of the Partnership’s broader riverfront work, is the largest single completed piece of the plan.
- Mud Island River Park, connected to Downtown by a pedestrian bridge, anchors the northern stretch and holds the outdoor scale model of the lower Mississippi.
- Martyrs Park, a small riverfront memorial park tied to the city’s 1878 yellow fever epidemic, sits along the bluff south of the cobblestones.
- The Big River Crossing, a pedestrian and bicycle deck on the old Harahan Bridge, extends the riverfront network across the Mississippi into Arkansas.
These were not all built as one project. They were built at different times, under different funders, and the Riverline plan is largely an attempt to describe how they should eventually read as one system rather than four unrelated parks.
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What is proposed but not yet built?
The Riverfront Concept Plan and the Partnership’s later materials describe a series of additional connections: a continuous bluff-top path linking the Downtown parks without street crossings, restoration and reuse of the historic cobblestone landing near the foot of Beale Street, and a southern extension toward Chickasaw Heritage Park and the Metal Museum, which sit on the bluff south of Downtown.
The concept plan also proposed civic gathering spaces along the route rather than just a path — a “River Garden,” a “Civic Canopy,” and similar structures meant to give the corridor destinations, not only a route through it. Whether and when each of those pieces gets built depends on funding that has not, at time of writing, been fully secured for every segment. This is exactly the kind of detail readers should confirm on Memphis River Parks Partnership’s own site rather than take from any single article, since individual projects move in and out of the near-term budget.
How does the Riverline connect to Memphis’s other trails?
The Riverline is not the city’s only greenway project, and it is meant to eventually link into the others rather than stand apart from them. At its northern end it approaches the Wolf River Greenway, a separate multi-mile trail system following the Wolf River from the Mississippi inland through northern Shelby County. Further out, the Shelby Farms Greenline and the broader Shelby Farms Park trail network form yet another piece of the city’s growing off-street path system, though they are managed by different organizations and were planned on a separate timeline.
None of these systems is a single continuous trail today. They are overlapping projects, each with its own manager and its own pace, and the Riverline is specifically the piece that runs along the river itself through Downtown.
What does the Riverline mean for someone visiting versus someone who lives here?
For a visitor, the practical version of the Riverline right now is the walkable stretch through Downtown: Mud Island down to Tom Lee Park, past Martyrs Park, with the Big River Crossing available as a way to walk or bike into Arkansas and back. That corridor is already a reasonable way to spend part of a day without a car, and it connects naturally into a longer walking route through Downtown.
For a resident, the more useful fact is that the riverfront is not finished and is not static. Individual parks get rebuilt, renamed, or reprogrammed on their own schedules — Tom Lee Park’s 2023 rebuild is the clearest recent example — and the Riverline plan is the framework the Partnership uses to decide which project comes next. Anyone who lives near the river and wants to track what’s actually changing year to year is better served checking the Partnership’s own project pages than any general guide.
What else lives along the riverfront besides the trail itself?
The Riverline runs past the same stretch of river covered in more detail elsewhere on this site — what the water itself is like, what’s safe to assume about swimming or boating in the Mississippi at Memphis, and what other landmarks sit along that same bluff. For a fuller picture of what’s actually along that stretch, see what lives along the Memphis riverfront and the site’s Parks & Riverfront archive, which tracks individual riverfront parks and trails as separate entries.
Anyone planning a visit built around the riverfront specifically should start from the Memphis Practical hub, which covers getting around Downtown and along the river without a car, since much of the Riverline corridor is designed to be walked or cycled rather than driven.
Where to check current status
Because the Riverline is a live, multi-year construction and funding plan rather than a finished trail, the only reliable source for what’s currently open, under construction, or newly proposed is Memphis River Parks Partnership’s own site at memphisriverparks.org. Readers planning a visit around a specific segment — the cobblestones, a southern extension, a particular park’s reopening — should confirm current status there before relying on any secondhand description, including this one.
Access Memphis is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favourites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.
Featured image: Photo by Heath Cajandig, source, CC BY 2.0
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