Illustration by Tabi Walters

A sunny weekend in mid-September saw the grand opening of Broadway Park West. Sitting on seven acres of new green space on the Huron River just north of the Amtrak station, the park connects to the Border to Border Trail via a new pedestrian bridge—eliminating the need for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the less-accessible Argo Dam.

“To give back twelve hundred linear feet of riverfront in the heart of Ann Arbor—it really is remarkable,” says Stacy Fox, chair of the board of directors of the Lower Town Riverfront Conservancy. A nonprofit founded to manage the new park, it got a jump start with a $20 million “enhancement grant” from the Michigan Legislature in 2022.

Related: Riverfront Conservancy

The site “was closed off to the public for more than a hundred years,” says Fox.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the fourteen acres wedged between Depot St., Broadway, and the Huron housed a coal gasification facility belonging to the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company (MichCon). DTE acquired the land in 2001 when it bought MichCon, spending millions of dollars on environmental cleanup and demolition along the river. In 2017, the site was sold to Lower Town Riverfront Partners, who founded the conservancy and completed the cleanup work.

The other seven acres of the site will eventually become a mixed-use development with private condos, a 180-room hotel, retail space, and around twenty units of affordable housing. The developer is the Detroit-based Roxbury Group, of which Fox is cofounder (with David Di Rita). This arrangement—a park managed by a nonprofit tied to the property’s developer—is a first for Ann Arbor.

Fox’s first job after graduating from U-M was assistant director of Washtenaw County Parks and Recreation Commission. “Its first director, Bob Gamble, hired me as employee number two,” she says. She helped pass Ann Arbor’s first park millage in 1976 and was instrumental in creating the county park system.

Since Broadway Park West is located near the train station, on a riverbank, and in a floodplain, its development involved input from FEMA, Amtrak, and the ​​Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. Its opening weekend marked the conclusion of the first of three development phases. The second, which Fox hopes will be finished by late 2026, will see the construction of an 8,500-square-foot timber pavilion with a stage. The third will include the installation of water features, including a splash pad.

Related: Because They’re There

For now, Fox is just excited that Broadway Park West is now open to the public: “We have a completed park, and we’re turning it over to the community to…discover this new public space, exactly as we envisioned.”