Omaha's RiverFront: How a Beloved Downtown Park Was Reborn

If you have not been to downtown Omaha in a few years, you have not really seen it, because the heart of the city has just been reborn. Along the Missouri River, where Omaha began more than a century and a half ago, the city has completed one of the most ambitious park transformations in its history, and the result is a dazzling, family-friendly destination that did not exist in this form even a few summers ago. To appreciate how special it is, you have to know the long road that led here.

The story really begins back in the 1970s. Downtown Omaha was struggling as businesses drifted away, and a mayor named Gene Leahy had a bold idea: bring the city back to the river. He championed a plan to turn neglected downtown blocks into a green oasis, and the result, eventually named the Gene Leahy Mall in his honor, became a beloved sunken park with a winding lagoon and a set of metal slides that generations of Omaha kids grew up flying down. It helped spark decades of downtown revival.

By the 2010s, though, the well-loved park was showing its age, and the city set its sights on something far grander. Rather than simply patch up one park, Omaha launched a sweeping plan to reimagine three connected downtown green spaces, the Gene Leahy Mall, Heartland of America Park, and Lewis and Clark Landing, as one unified seventy-two-acre destination known as The RiverFront. The price tag was enormous, around three hundred and twenty-five million dollars, a sign of just how seriously the city believed in its downtown.

The Gene Leahy Mall closed in 2019 for its dramatic makeover, and Omahans waited as the old sunken park was completely transformed. In July of 2022, it reopened, and the change was breathtaking. The park had been raised up to street level, opening it to the city around it, with sprawling new lawns, a performance pavilion for free summer concerts, a state-of-the-art playground, interactive water features, a sculpture garden, and even a sizeable dog park. And in a wonderful nod to the past, the beloved slides were preserved, so a new generation can fly down the very same hills their parents did.

What makes the new RiverFront so special is how completely it has redefined what a visit to downtown Omaha can be. On a warm day, the lawns fill with families, kids splash in the water features, music drifts from the pavilion, and the city skyline rises beautifully beyond the green. It is the kind of place where you could happily spend an entire afternoon, then walk just a few minutes to the Old Market for dinner. The city did not just renovate a park; it gave its downtown a brand-new front porch.

There is something poetic about it, too. More than a century and a half after Omaha was born on the banks of the Missouri, the city has returned, grandly and joyfully, to the very river where it all began, fulfilling a dream first dreamed half a century ago. The past and the future meet right there on the riverfront.

So if you are looking for a reason to visit Omaha right now, this is it. Come see the brand-new RiverFront, let the kids loose on the playground and the famous slides, and experience a downtown that has never looked better. Before you plan your trip, take a look at everything happening around the city on our Explore Omaha event calendar, and start planning a visit to Omaha's beautiful reborn riverfront.