In June 2022, two Highland Park kids cut a ribbon on a skate bowl they'd asked the city to build. They emailed St. Paul's Parks and Recreation Commission with a pitch. The bowl and the city's first skate trail became part of a new 3.6-acre park called Gateway, at the northwest edge of what used to be the Ford plant.
Four summers later, Gateway Park is broken in. It's the oldest finished piece of a much bigger site that, as of this year, still isn't.
That gap between the skate park's age and the rest of the site's is the actual state of Highland Bridge right now. If you've walked, biked, or driven along Mississippi River Boulevard this year, you've probably noticed the same thing: pieces of a park system opening on different clocks, some already lived-in, some still fenced off, layered on top of an older river-park system that's mid-renovation itself. None of it is finished at the same time. That's not a complaint. It's just the useful thing to know if you're planning a fall walk, a bike loop, or a picnic reservation anywhere between Ford Parkway and the river.
Four Parks at Different Stages
The Highland Bridge master plan calls for four new parks on the old 122-acre Ford Motor Company assembly site, which closed in 2011 after churning out vehicles since 1925. Gateway was the first to open. The second, Uŋčí Makhá Park, opened later that same summer with a nature playground, a hammock grove, and picnic space, about half a mile from Hidden Falls via a paved trail that follows Mississippi River Boulevard down to the falls' viewing plaza. That connection matters: it means the newest park on the site is already stitched into the oldest trail system in the neighborhood, not sitting apart from it.
The other two parks are a different story.
| Park | What's there | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Gateway Park | Skate bowl, skate trail, viewing platform, biofiltration basins, stormwater pond | Open since June 2022 |
| Uŋčí Makhá Park | Nature playground, hammock grove, picnic space, connector trail to Hidden Falls | Open since summer 2022 |
| Assembly Union Park | Named for the site's Ford assembly-line workforce | Listed on the city's active design-and-construction project page as of February 2026 |
Assembly Union Park's name is a deliberate nod to the people who worked the line here for most of the 20th century, not just the machinery. As of this year, it's still a project on the city's books rather than a finished amenity. A fourth park, Míča, rounds out the plan, but the city hasn't published the same level of build-out detail on it yet.
The gap isn't an oversight. Highland Bridge stalled for years. A Ryan Companies executive told the Highland District Council in late 2024 that the developer had "struggled for five years to get something going" on one of the site's blocks, pointing to construction costs, financing difficulty, the city's rent control ordinance, and the pandemic as the drag. St. Paul amended its developer agreements with Ryan Companies in May 2025 specifically to unstick both housing and commercial construction, and by a May 2026 Planning Commission briefing, staff described the site as having "fresh momentum," with streets, utilities, and new buildings moving again. The numbers commissioners heard: somewhere between 2,600 and 2,800 residential units total, more than 55 acres of public open space, and the section of the site closest to Ford Parkway on track to wrap up construction this year. The next visible milestone is Block 2, a four-story, 97-unit building with three commercial storefronts and a daycare planned alongside it.
None of that changes what a walk through the site looks like today. It just explains why Gateway and Uŋčí Makhá feel finished while the rest of the loop still reads as a construction zone with a name attached.
The Older Parks Are Getting Rebuilt at the Same Time
What makes this fall a strange moment for the neighborhood's green space isn't only the new construction. It's that the two river parks Highland Bridge connects to, both far older than the Ford redevelopment itself, are being reworked in parallel.
Hidden Falls Regional Park was chosen for parkland by landscape architect Horace Cleveland back in 1887, with major improvements added by the WPA in 1936 and 1937. It's the neighborhood's original river park, 6.7 miles of paved trail along the bluffs below Lock and Dam 1. The city's design team set spring 2026 as the construction start for a new pavilion and ADA-accessible restroom there, a plan first shown to the public in September 2025 at a Highland District Council event called Music at the Bridge, held in the open space near the Highland Bridge water feature with live music from a local band called The Space. If that spring timeline held, the shelter you've reserved for a cookout in past years may already look different than it did last fall.
A short trail south, Crosby Farm Regional Park has had its own repair underway. Flooding damaged the boardwalk and fishing pier badly enough that the city planned to remove both outright, with that removal scheduled for May and June of this year. A new fishing pier is going up in its place near the park's east entrance at Lexington and Shepard Road. If you fished or walked that stretch in past summers, it won't look the same right now.
So the practical picture for fall 2026 is layered: a four-year-old skate park that's fully broken in, a nature park connected to it that's just as settled, Assembly Union Park still listed as an active city project, and two much older river parks getting their pavilion and their fishing pier rebuilt on their own separate schedules. Different stages of infrastructure, inside a loop most residents can walk in under an hour.
What's Actually Open This Fall
The city doesn't publish a single master calendar for all of this, so closures get posted piecemeal on separate project pages, which means the easiest way to know what's open on a given weekend is to check before you go rather than assume last year's route still holds.
A few dates are fixed, though. The Twin Cities Marathon runs October 2 through 4 this year, with events along Mississippi River Boulevard, Summit Avenue, and the Capitol grounds, so that stretch of the boulevard won't be available for a normal walk or ride that first weekend of October. A week later, on October 8, the city's Annual Bonfire Night returns to Highland Park itself, the original neighborhood park along Montreal Avenue rather than the newer Highland Bridge site, running from 6 to 8 p.m. It's a small, useful reminder that the neighborhood's oldest gathering spot is still doing exactly what it's always done, even while the parks a few blocks away are still being poured and planted.
None of this is a reason to avoid the area this fall. If anything, it's the opposite: for a few months, Highland Park has both a finished, well-used skate park that began with two kids' email to the city and a handful of half-built or half-rebuilt parks within walking distance of it, plus two of the city's oldest river parks getting real investment at the same time. That's an unusual amount of change to land in one small stretch of riverfront at once, and it's worth knowing which pieces are actually open before you plan around them.
If you're thinking about how proximity to a still-filling-in park system like this affects a home nearby, or you just want a neighborhood-specific read on what's changing block by block, connect with the team at Arbor Residential Group. We keep track of this stuff so you don't have to piece it together from five different city project pages.
