The LauderGO Water Trolley has looped along the New River for more than a decade, free to ride, pet-friendly, stopping at eight docks between Esplanade Park and Tarpon River. For most of that decade, the honest answer to "where does it actually take you" was: nowhere in particular. A scenic loop. A way to kill twenty minutes between happy hour and dinner. This year that changed, and the reason has less to do with the trolley than with what finally showed up at one of its stops.
Huizenga Park, the 3.6-acre riverfront green space at 32 East Las Olas Boulevard, reopened to the public on January 24 and 25, 2026, after a two-year, $15 million redevelopment led by the global design firm Perkins&Will and built by MBR Construction. For downtown residents who watched five years of fencing and construction dust pass by, that reopening is the actual news. The trolley was never the problem. It just didn't have a real destination.
What five years of construction actually bought
The park started life under a different name. It was built as DDA Park in the late 1990s and renamed Huizenga Plaza in 2003 to honor Wayne Huizenga, the Fort Lauderdale businessman behind AutoNation, Blockbuster, and Waste Management. It ran about 2.1 acres before the redesign. By the time the Downtown Development Authority and the Huizenga Park Foundation broke ground on the renovation, the park had gone quiet, a patch of green most people walked past on the way to something else.
What came back in January is bigger and built differently on purpose. The footprint grew to 3.6 acres and now includes Poppy's Play Patch for kids, downtown Fort Lauderdale's first enclosed dog run known as The Dog Spot, the restored Spirit of Fort Lauderdale Fountain, and a central Civic Lawn with expanded shade along the river. Tara Steil, a downtown resident who brings her dog Jax to the park, told CBS Miami that she and her neighbors had been tracking the construction for years:
"We've been waiting for a really nice park in this area for him, so we're really excited."
That is the shift worth paying attention to. Downtown Fort Lauderdale has spent the last several years building its identity around private consumption: yacht slips, valet lines, tasting menus. Huizenga Park is public infrastructure, free to use, built for the kind of daily routine that doesn't show up in a restaurant review. The park is slated to host more than 150 events this year, most of them free. A dog run and a play moundscape don't generate headlines the way a caviar bar does, but they generate foot traffic on a Tuesday morning, which is a different kind of activity for a downtown to have.
The restaurant is still coming, but the park doesn't need it to matter now
Dining at the park will eventually be anchored by Sweetwaters, a full-service waterfront restaurant from the team behind Miami's Rusty Pelican, expected to open in fall 2026. Construction on the restaurant broke ground in November 2025, and in the meantime the park is running a rotating concession program built around local food vendors, starting with Mr. Smash Burgers as the first branded stand. The sequencing matters here. Most riverfront redevelopments open with the restaurant as the draw and let the public space fill in around it. This one did the opposite: the free green space opened first, the dog run and the fountain and the open lawn, and the destination dining is still months out. For a downtown resident, that means the park has already been worth a visit for half a year before the marquee restaurant even seats its first table.
The trolley connects to it, but you have to know that
The LauderGO Water Trolley runs daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., operated by Water Taxi in partnership with the City of Fort Lauderdale, and it is genuinely free, no fare, no app purchase, dogs welcome on a leash. Its eight stops trace both banks of the New River: Esplanade Park, Riverfront Plaza, Huizenga Plaza, Riverwalk Laura Ward Park, Smoker Park, Downtowner Saloon, New River Yacht Club, and Tarpon River. Stop #2 is Huizenga Park itself, which means a resident coming from Victoria Park or the Tarpon River neighborhood can skip parking near Las Olas entirely and ride the water straight to the dog run. The park also sits a 10-minute walk from the Brightline station, so the same logic works for anyone arriving by train. Wait times run 20 to 30 minutes, which is closer to waiting for a city bus than hailing a boat, but it is a bus that happens to cross a river.
This is the kind of infrastructure that only works if people actually know where it leads. For years the trolley's usefulness was capped by the fact that most of its stops were transitional, places you passed through on the way to a restaurant a few blocks inland. Huizenga Park gives it an actual anchor, a place worth riding to on its own and not just a place you get off near.
What's opening around it, and why the timing overlaps
The park's reopening lands in the middle of a genuinely busy year for Fort Lauderdale dining, and the geography lines up more than coincidence would suggest. On Las Olas Boulevard, Skinny Louie has been readying its Wynwood-born smash burger for the corridor this summer, and Little Hen, known for its floral interiors and English-style brunch in Miami and Weston, is preparing to take over the former Planta Queen space at 1201 East Las Olas Boulevard. Down at Sands Harbor Resort & Marina in Pompano Beach, Lola's on the Water already opened its dock-side dining room earlier this year with panoramic marina views. Later this year, Caviar Club is set to bring dry-aged steaks and tableside seafood towers to Las Olas, and Amal will bring Lebanese mezze and grilled specialties to one of downtown's most walkable dining blocks.
None of this is happening because of the park. It's happening because Fort Lauderdale's dining scene has been on a multi-year run, with Miami operators moving north and local names getting second locations. But a resident walking or trolley-hopping between Huizenga Park and Las Olas this fall will find both storylines converging on the same six or eight blocks: a newly reopened public park with a dog run and open lawn, and a restaurant corridor adding names almost monthly.
Dine Out Lauderdale gives the whole stretch a reason to move at once
Dine Out Lauderdale started August 1 and runs through September 30, 2026, which means as of this week it is nine days in. More than 140 restaurants are offering three-course prix fixe menus at set tiers, $35 for lunch and $45, $60, or $75 for dinner, no ticket or sign-up required, just a request to your server for the Dine Out menu. It is the kind of civic dining event that rewards people who already live here and know which restaurants are worth the trip versus which ones are riding the marketing. Pair that with Sunchasers, the W Fort Lauderdale's Wednesday-through-Sunday poolside DJ programming on its WET Deck, and the weekly rhythm downtown residents have settled into this summer looks less like a tourist calendar and more like an actual routine.
| Night | What's actually happening |
|---|---|
| Monday | Trivia at neighborhood spots like Tarpon River Brewing, game night at Gulfstream Brewing |
| Wednesday | Trivia continues at Gulfstream Brewing, live music spreads to spots like Papas Raw Bar in Lighthouse Point |
| Thursday | Pups N' Pints social hour at Pompano Beach Brewing |
| Saturday | Waterfront yoga classes along the marina, Las Olas Oceanside Park Market for the morning crowd |
None of this requires a car. Most of it doesn't even require leaving the downtown and beach corridor the trolley already covers. That's the quiet thread running through this year: a free water shuttle that already existed, a park that just gave it a real reason to stop, and a restaurant calendar dense enough to fill every night of the week without anyone needing to drive to Sawgrass Mills or Boca to find something new.
Fort Lauderdale's downtown has always sold itself on the water. What changed this year is that the water finally connects to somewhere a resident would actually want to walk their dog.
If you live in this stretch of Broward and the changes downtown have you curious what they mean for your own property, The Brescia Group tracks this market block by block. Get Your Instant Home Valuation whenever the question crosses your mind.
