On a Tuesday night in mid-August, the Waco City Council spent part of its meeting approving paperwork on a project most residents have stopped expecting to see finished. 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 a construction site that has outlasted several mayoral terms of expectation.
Here is the thing locals tend to miss because the fencing is so persistent. The infrastructure and the businesses along it are not moving at the same speed. One is stuck in a slow, bureaucratic churn that keeps sliding its own deadline. The other has already opened, expanded, and reinvented itself twice in the time it took the city to finish permitting the retaining wall.
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. 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 city's own estimates keep moving. 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. Neither is wrong exactly. Both are the kind of estimate that shifts every time weather, bidding, or utility work adds a few more months. If you have been waiting for a firm reopening date to plan a walk down there, you should probably stop waiting and just go see what is passable 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 who brought her grandchildren to fish along the river during spring break, put it about as plainly as anyone has.
"I think it's gonna be beautiful. We needed that here in Waco."
She is right that it will eventually be something. She is also describing a timeline measured in years, which is a different animal from the question most residents actually have this September: what can I do down there this weekend.
The Fast Clock
While the path project inches along, the businesses that depend on foot traffic through that corridor are not sitting on their hands. In May, 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. When the Woodway spot closed, instead of retreating, they leaned into the corridor everyone else is treating as a construction zone. 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, which tells you something useful on its own: they are betting on the riverfront's future customer base before the sidewalk in front of it is even finished.
That is not a fluke. It is the pattern along this whole stretch right now. The construction fencing is real, but it is not stopping anyone with a lease and a concept from moving in.
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. 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. By 2023, that same street-level space had turned into Maria Mezcaleria, a mezcal-focused bar carved into the Hippodrome's expanded footprint. Then last September, Chef Richard "Cayman" Colunga, previously of 135 Prime steakhouse, opened a second-floor restaurant under the Encore banner alongside business partner Justin Blalock, who also owns Uncle Worm's Texas Cuisine on North 19th Street. The operation has been drawing what Colunga described as 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 have already moved once between March and August of this year, and they will likely move again before anyone cuts a ribbon.
- 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.
The honest version of this story is not "everything downtown is finally finished" or "nothing has changed in years." It is that the infrastructure clock and the small business clock have never run at the same pace here, and pretending they do is why so many residents assume downtown is still stuck when large parts of it have quietly moved on without waiting for permission from the retaining wall.
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.
