Children climbed, swung and spun on multicolored playground equipment Nov. 24 on the site of a demolished coal-fired power plant as the city of Jacksonville celebrated the opening of the RiversEdge public parks on the Downtown Southbank.
“Today we’re doing something generations of Jacksonville residents have really just dreamed about,” Mayor Donna Deegan said during a ribbon-cutting event. “We are turning what was once an underused, mostly vacant stretch of riverfront into a welcoming public park that truly belongs to everybody in Jacksonville.”
The four parks are part of the $693 million RiversEdge mixed-use project on the former site of the JEA Southside Generating Plant, which operated from 1947 to 2001. The city utility spent more than $28 million decommissioning the facility and doing environmental cleanup at the site, east of the Duval Schools headquarters building.
The parks have various themes. For example, The Gym focuses on physical health and fitness, and Healing Arts highlights spirituality and meditation.
The city issued a site-clearing and horizontal development permit July 17, 2024, for the RiversEdge parks and recreation area, for installation of hardscape and landscape, on 4.1 acres at a project cost of $35 million.
In 2023, Jacksonville City Council approved an amended redevelopment agreement providing a $97.99 million Recapture Enhanced Value Grant for the project. The agreement increased the REV Grant from $41.97 million, the amount included in the original agreement in 2018.
According to the redevelopment agreement, the project includes 1,170 residential units, 200 hotel rooms and 121,400 square feet of retail space.
In April 2025, residents began moving into town homes developed by Pennsylvania-based Toll Brothers along Prudential Drive in RiversEdge.
Dallas-based Preston Hollow Community Capital LLC is the site developer of RiversEdge but not the vertical developer. Rather, it markets the individual property parcels to developers.
Preston Hollow founder, CEO and chairman Jim Thompson said during an interview after the Nov. 24 event that the company was in talks with hotels, multifamily developers and commercial developers for the site but had not finalized any agreements.
“We’re always in conversation with folks who want to come and be part of the process, so hopefully we’ll see something vertical come out of the ground,” he said.
Thompson said Preston Hollow had a hotel partner “lined up.”
“The problem is that hotels cost more to build right now than they produce in revenue to pay for themselves,” he said. “We believe, and I know the city shares this view, that the Southbank desperately needs more hotel rooms, so we’re working hard to try to bring that to fruition.”