According to KWTX, on a Tuesday night in mid-August, the Waco City Council spent part of its meeting approving paperwork on a project that remains underway. A fourth amendment to the city's development agreement with Catalyst Urban Development. A shift in Phase 2 plans at Webster Avenue from a hotel to mixed-use residential and commercial space. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, a crew from Fort Worth-based Fain Group LLC was still driving metal sheet retaining walls into the riverbank behind the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum and pouring fresh concrete near Foster Pavilion. If you walk that stretch of the Riverwalk this fall, you will see both things happening at once: a council chamber full of amendments, and an active construction site.
The infrastructure and the businesses along it are not moving at the same speed. Riverwalk work continues while nearby businesses have opened and changed.
The Slow Clock
The $26 million overhaul underway right now covers the Riverwalk's west side, from the Union Pacific Railroad bridge down to the Baylor University School of Law. It is meant to fix the flooding and deterioration that has plagued the older sections since they were built in the 1970s and 80s. According to a KCEN-TV report, sections in front of the Ranger Hall of Fame Museum, near Interstate 35, at Foster Pavilion, and along the Riverfront Lofts have all been slated for closure as work moves through.
What makes this project hard to pin down is that the completion estimates have changed. Back in March, reporting on the closures put the completion date at January 2028. By August, city officials were describing a "late 2027" wrap-up for the same stretch of trail. Both are estimates, not firm reopening dates. If you have been waiting for a firm reopening date to plan a walk down there, check what is accessible now.
This is one piece of something much bigger. The Riverwalk rebuild sits inside a $1.4 billion, 12-to-20-year roadmap the city adopted for more than 100 acres of downtown, organized into five districts named for chapters of Waco's history: Baron's Branch, Waco Square, Mary Avenue, Riverfront, and Ballpark. It is a plan built in decades, not seasons. Frances Fuentes, a longtime Waco resident, put it about as plainly as anyone has.
In a KCEN-TV report, she said, "I think it's gonna be beautiful. We needed that here in Waco."
Her comment looks ahead to the finished project, while the immediate question this September is what is accessible this weekend.
The Fast Clock
While the path project continues, the businesses that depend on foot traffic through that corridor are not sitting on their hands. In May, KXXV reported that Ning and Bang Garsee, the couple behind Curry Up and Wok This Way, announced their first true brick-and-mortar restaurant, landing it right on University Parks Drive inside the riverfront development. Before this, they had run two locations: one tucked inside Union Hall food hall, another at Union Grove in Woodway. The Woodway location closed. Chef Bang Garsee described it as something he had been wanting to do for a long time, a full-service Thai restaurant with outdoor seating, a bar, and a design pulled from his own hometown memories. The couple is still running the Union Hall location while the new space works through architectural planning, with the sidewalk in front of it not yet finished.
That is not a fluke. It is the pattern along this whole stretch right now. The construction fencing is real, but it has not stopped businesses from planning new spaces along the corridor.
Eighth and Austin, Three Times Over
A few blocks north of the river, the Waco Hippodrome offers the clearest example of how fast this second clock actually runs. A KXXV report said that when the theater added its expansion in 2018, the ground floor became home to The Raleigh, a diner-style restaurant named for a hotel that used to stand across the street before it closed in the 1980s. The Waco Tribune-Herald reported that by 2023, that same street-level space had turned into Maria Mezcaleria, a mezcal-focused bar carved into the Hippodrome's expanded footprint. The Waco Tribune-Herald reported that Chef Richard "Cayman" Colunga, previously of 135 Prime steakhouse, opened a second-floor restaurant under the Encore banner last September alongside business partner Justin Blalock, who also owns Uncle Worm's Texas Cuisine on North 19th Street. Colunga described the operation as drawing roughly three-quarters local customers and a quarter tourists.
Now Colunga and Blalock are pushing into a third level of the same building. Encore's own site bills it plainly: a new kitchen coming to street level, opening late summer 2026. Given where we are on the calendar, that means the building is either mid-opening right now or has just quietly flipped the sign. Three different restaurants at that same street-level address since 2018. If you have lived in Waco for a while, you have probably eaten at more than one of them without realizing it was the same physical corner reinventing itself over and over.
What This Actually Means If You're Walking Down There This Fall
- Expect fencing and equipment near the Ranger Hall of Fame Museum, close to I-35, around Foster Pavilion, and along the Riverfront Lofts. These are the active work zones, not the whole trail.
- Don't wait on a firm reopening date before making plans. The estimates differed between March and August of this year, so check for updates before relying on one.
- If you want Thai food on University Parks Drive, it is still Union Hall for now. The Curry Up and Wok This Way storefront is in the planning phase, not open yet.
- At the Hippodrome, check current hours before assuming which floor is serving what. A building with this much turnover rewards checking ahead rather than assuming last year's memory still holds.
- The slow, decades-long roadmap for downtown is a separate conversation from whether you can get a good dinner near the river this month. Treat them as two different questions, because the city clearly is.
For a weekend visit, check both the city’s access updates and the businesses’ current hours; neither timeline tells you what the other is doing.
If you are the kind of person who likes tracking what is actually happening in this town rather than what a five-year-old headline said, that instinct will serve you well here. And if the day ever comes when you are thinking about a move within Waco or into it, having someone who already knows which corners are worth watching tends to help.
Brook Ashley Dowd keeps an eye on both clocks. Let's Connect.
