The idea is older than most of the buildings it now runs past. Mayor Bill Poe first floated a downtown riverfront walkway in 1975, and a short boardwalk actually went in behind the old Curtis Hixon Hall the following year — then the money ran out, and the idea sat mostly dormant for a quarter century.
It restarted for real in 2002, when mayoral candidate Pam Iorio campaigned on finishing it and then did, as the city acquired parcels and threaded a path together piece by piece over the next decade. The turning point came in 2010, when Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park, the Tampa Museum of Art, and the Glazer Children’s Museum all opened along the route in the same year, giving the path a real anchor. A federal transportation grant funded a $9.2 million boardwalk under the Kennedy Boulevard bridge in 2014, physically connecting segments that had been separate walks, and a 2016 extension pushed the path north into Tampa Heights to Water Works Park — the stretch that now ends at Ulele.
What you get today is 2.6 miles of continuous, paved, mostly shaded path along the Hillsborough River, linking the Tampa Convention Center, Benchmark International Arena, the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, the Tampa Bay History Center, and the string of parks in between. The TECO Line Streetcar runs along part of the route if you want to cover ground faster, and water taxis connect over to Hyde Park and Harbour Island. Starting in 2012, the city commissioned a series of bronze busts — $15,000 apiece — honoring figures from Tampa history along a stretch now called the Monument Trail; there are 30 of them as of 2022. Under the Laurel Street Bridge, a 2016 lenticular mural called “Woven Waves” is designed to look different depending on the angle you view it from.
The city announced plans in 2022 to extend the Riverwalk across the river into West Tampa, eventually adding roughly 6 more miles as part of a wider “Green Spine” greenway network — not built yet, but the direction the path is headed.
Good to know: The Riverwalk is free and open 24/7, no reservations needed. Good access points: Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park downtown, or Water Works Park at the north end near Ulele.