At Huizenga Park, the Dog Run Beat the Restaurant to Opening Day

Back in January, the story out of downtown was about a fountain, a ribbon cutting, and a restaurant nobody had eaten at yet. More than six months later, the story that actually holds up is different. The waterfront restaurant everyone wrote about is still under construction. The dog run, the free yoga classes, and the Thursday night trivia are already running like they've been there for years. If you live near Las Olas Boulevard, that gap between the headline and the daily reality is worth understanding, because it changes what the park is actually good for right now.

What reopened in January wasn't finished

Huizenga Park sits on 3.6 acres along the New River at 32 E. Las Olas Boulevard, and its reopening weekend on January 24 and 25 came after two years of construction that capped a project five years in the making, led by the design firm Perkins&Will. The park had been a fixture of downtown since the late 1990s, renamed for Wayne Huizenga in 2003, but the version that reopened this winter is a different piece of infrastructure: a central lawn, shaded seating rooms, a children's play moundscape, more than 13,500 new plants, 88 new shade trees, and downtown Fort Lauderdale's first dedicated dog run.

That last detail is easy to skip past in a press release, but it's the one that actually changed daily life for a specific group of residents. Before this year, if you lived in a downtown condo with a dog and no yard, your options for legal off-leash time were thin. Tara Steil, who lives downtown, told CBS Miami she and her dog Jax had been waiting on the renovation for exactly that reason, saying "we've been waiting for a really nice park in this area for him so we're really excited."

The programming is the point, not the preview

The bigger structural fact is this: Sweetwaters, the full-service waterfront restaurant from the team behind Miami's Rusty Pelican, is not expected to open until fall, and as of this summer it's still a construction site inside the park rather than a place you can sit down. That means for most of 2026 so far, the draw at Huizenga Park has been the free recurring programming, not the food.

The park runs three standing pillars of programming: Health & Wellness (presented by Cleveland Clinic), Arts & Culture, and Dogs & Pets. In practice, that shows up as a weekly rhythm. Here's what a typical week looked like on the park's own calendar in July:

The exact times shift week to week, so the park's own calendar is the reliable source for what's actually on this week rather than what was on in July. But the pattern is consistent enough that you can build a routine around it: yoga twice on Tuesday, dogs on Thursday, a market every other Sunday. More than 150 of these sessions are scheduled across the year, and the overwhelming majority are free.

The fountain and the art nobody's talking about

The restaurant coverage has also crowded out two things that are already finished and already sitting in the park. The Spirit of Fort Lauderdale Fountain, originally a gift from the Huizenga family, was restored as part of the renovation and anchors the walk from the Las Olas entrance toward the river. Two permanent public art installations went in alongside it: a piece by Cey Adams and Manolo Valdés' sculpture Cabeza con Mariposas. Neither requires an RSVP or a reservation. Fort Lauderdale Downtown Development Authority president Jenni Morejon put the intent behind the whole redesign simply: "parks are like the soul of a city."

Getting there without a car

The park is free and open daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. If you're downtown already, it's a ten-minute walk from the Brightline Fort Lauderdale station, and the seasonal Water Trolley stops at the park as Stop #2. Street parking is available on SE 1st Avenue just north of Las Olas Boulevard, which matters more on market Sundays or trivia nights when the lawn fills in.

A week that actually uses it

If you're within walking distance and haven't built the park into your routine yet, here's a version that doesn't require checking the calendar every day:

1. Tuesday morning, before work: sunrise yoga on the lawn, done by 8 a.m.
2. Thursday evening: Yappy Hour at The Dog Spot, which is currently the closest thing downtown has to a dog park with a happy hour attached.
3. Every other Sunday afternoon: the Community Market, followed by a slow lap past the fountain and the Valdés sculpture on the way back to Las Olas.
4. Any evening this fall, once Sweetwaters finally opens its doors on the river side of the park, the same walk gets an actual reason to end with dinner.

None of this requires the restaurant to be open, which is the point. The park has been fully functional as a daily amenity since January. The dining anchor is a bonus arriving later, not the thing that makes the space worth using now.

Access to a well-used public space like this is one of the quieter reasons people end up loving where they live, long before it shows up on a spec sheet or a listing photo. If you're curious what that kind of proximity is actually worth for a home near downtown, or you're weighing a move to be closer to mornings like the ones happening on that lawn, High Equity Realty is glad to help you get a Free Home Valuation and talk through what your options look like in this market.