If you've walked or driven Riverside Avenue this year, you've probably noticed the same thing without quite naming it: the addresses keep climbing past new signage. Not scattered across the neighborhood the way openings usually are, but strung along one stretch of one street, in order, like someone is filling in a form.
Riverside Avenue is the spine that carries you from downtown and the Brooklyn district up into Riverside proper before it slides under the Fuller Warren Bridge. Walk that stretch and you'll pass 1 Riverside Avenue, then 90, then 400, then 715. The first three sit in Brooklyn, the entry corridor Riverside residents drive through every time they head downtown. The fourth is Riverside's own front porch. Four addresses, four different projects, all opened or announced within roughly the same twelve months. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's a bet, placed by four separate operators, on the same half-mile of pavement, and the reason behind the bet says more about where this corner of Jacksonville is headed than any single restaurant review could.
The Address Order
Start at 1 Riverside Avenue, where the One Riverside development is bringing a Whole Foods to the ground floor, targeted to open in spring or summer of 2026. Move up to 90 Riverside Avenue, inside the Fresh Market-anchored Brooklyn Station complex, where Zunzibar, a South African-inspired beach bar with roots in Savannah and outposts in Hilton Head and Tybee Island, is renovating the space that spent two decades as Burrito Gallery before that restaurant closed. Keep going to 400 Riverside Avenue, at the corner of Forest Street, where the Hub Brooklyn project now has Alder & Oak open, a wood-fired Mediterranean concept from Southern Grounds founder Mark Janasik, occupying roughly 2,600 square feet of interior dining plus a covered courtyard. Its second location, in Jacksonville Beach, opened this June. And at 715 Riverside Avenue, under the Fuller Warren Bridge, the Riverside Arts Market keeps doing what it's done every Saturday for years, only now with all of that new development stacking up a few blocks south of it.
| Address | Neighborhood | What's There | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Riverside Ave | Brooklyn | Whole Foods, One Riverside development | Targeted spring/summer 2026 opening |
| 90 Riverside Ave | Brooklyn | Zunzibar, Brooklyn Station | Renovating former Burrito Gallery space |
| 400 Riverside Ave | Brooklyn | Alder & Oak, Hub Brooklyn | Open; second location in Jacksonville Beach opened June 2026 |
| 715 Riverside Ave | Riverside | Riverside Arts Market | Open every Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. |
A few blocks off this stretch near the Riverwalk, Pearl Hospitality Group opened Norikawa earlier this year, a Japanese waterfront concept with a full sushi program, positioned at the entrance to the new Emerald Trail extension along McCoys Creek. It's technically downtown rather than Brooklyn or Riverside, but it's aimed at the same foot traffic the whole corridor is now competing to capture.
Why the Same Half-Mile
None of this happened by accident, and it didn't happen because Riverside suddenly got fashionable. It happened because the city has spent years and $105.4 million rebuilding what runs underneath that stretch of pavement.
McCoys Creek, which parallels Riverside Avenue for much of this corridor, spent decades as a straightened, hardened channel prone to flooding. The restoration project hit a real milestone in fall 2025, when the creek finally connected and flowed through its newly built channel at the St. Johns River outfall. Work continued into this year, with restoration beginning in February on the upstream section known as the Branches, and the Stockton Street Bridge, rebuilt with a bike lane and sidewalks, reopening this spring.
Layered on top of the creek work is the Emerald Trail's Riverside Link, a 2.3-mile segment designed by HDR and SCAPE Landscape Architecture that will connect Riverside to North Riverside and tie into McCoys Creek. As of this summer the segment is still working through design rather than construction, but eleven Rotary Clubs across Northeast Florida have already raised more than $250,000 specifically for it, a detail that matters because it signals the kind of grassroots buy-in that tends to keep a public works project moving even when federal funding gets complicated, which it did here after Congress pulled a transportation grant the city had been counting on.
Then in May 2026, the city cut the ribbon on Riverfront Music Garden, a roughly $7 million park between the Jacksonville Center for the Performing Arts and the St. Johns River. It closes a gap in the Northbank Riverwalk, connecting the path from the Hyatt Hotel near Main Street all the way to the Fuller Warren Bridge and Riverside Arts Market. The park includes sidewalk plaques honoring musicians with Jacksonville ties, among them Ray Charles, the Allman Brothers Band, and Ma Rainey.
Put the pieces together and you get a corridor where a restored creek, a new trail link, and a completed Riverwalk connection all land within the same stretch of Riverside Avenue at nearly the same time. Whole Foods, Zunzibar, and Alder & Oak aren't opening next to construction. They're opening because the construction is finishing.
Park Street Runs on a Different Clock
A mile away, Five Points is changing too, but on a completely different schedule and for a completely different reason. There's no creek restoration behind Park Street's turnover. There's just the ordinary churn of small businesses opening, closing, and getting replaced.
Ben & Jerry's opened this spring at 1027 Park Street, a locally owned scoop shop run by Justin and Daiana Renaldo along with Orlando and Tanya Garcia. A few doors down, Fat Tuesday, the New Orleans-style daiquiri chain, announced plans in July to move into 1045 Park Street, the former home of Rain Dogs, a bar and music venue that had sat empty for more than a year after closing.
Cheryl Croft, who owns Edge City and was stepping into the role of Five Points Association president, put it plainly when asked about the new arrivals: filling empty storefronts benefits everyone in the district. Alexander Rodriguez, who owns Rodrigo's Kraft Pizza nearby, made a similar point about the tradeoff. When an old business closes, you lose friends, but the empty space becomes an opportunity for something new to bring in different customers.
That's succession, not infrastructure. Nobody spent $105 million to get Fat Tuesday into the old Rain Dogs building. A lease came open, a tenant moved in, and the block kept its texture. The two kinds of change move at different speeds. Riverside Avenue's cluster is timed to public projects already moving through design and construction this year. Five Points will keep turning over storefronts on whatever schedule leases and closures dictate, which is to say no fixed schedule at all.
Saturday Doesn't Move
Through all of this, the Riverside Arts Market has stayed exactly where it's always been, at 715 Riverside Avenue under the Fuller Warren Bridge, every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., rain or shine. Produced by Riverside Avondale Preservation, it draws close to 150 vendors and more than 4,000 visitors on a typical Saturday, with a riverfront amphitheater that seats 350 for live music. It's also one of the state's markets that accepts SNAP benefits for fresh produce, and it runs a composting partnership with Apple Rabbit Compost, supported by TerraWise Homes, that keeps food scraps out of the landfill.
The market is useful here as more than a nice detail. It's the fixed point against which everything else on this list can be measured. The market didn't change because Whole Foods is coming. It didn't need Alder & Oak or Zunzibar to draw a crowd. What's changing is what surrounds it, not the thing itself, and that's a distinction worth holding onto as the corridor fills in over the next year.
What This Looks Like on an Ordinary Saturday
If you're already walking this stretch most weekends, here's the practical version of all this. The market at 715 stays the same. The path toward downtown along the Riverwalk now runs cleaner from the Hyatt through Riverfront Music Garden to the bridge, thanks to that May opening. Construction fencing near the creek will keep shifting through the rest of this year as the McCoys Creek restoration continues upstream, and once the Riverside Link trail segment moves from design into construction, expect a new round of fencing and detours along Riverside Avenue itself. And if you're heading to Five Points instead, expect the storefronts to keep turning over on their own timeline, driven by leases and local operators rather than public works schedules.
None of this requires you to do anything. It's just useful to know which changes are temporary detours and which ones are the new shape of the block, and now you know which is which.
If you ever do want to talk about what any of this means for property values or timing a move in Riverside and Avondale, Glen Hamilton has spent years watching this exact corridor change and is glad to walk through it with you. Let's Connect.
