Harold Simmons Park is under construction.

The Dallas Water Commons is taking shape. And an Austrian wellness company just updated plans for an $800 million resort next door. Here’s what’s actually happening — and why it matters.

Dallas has always had a complicated relationship with the Trinity River. The river runs right through the heart of the city. And for most of Dallas’s history, we’ve treated it like a drainage ditch — something to manage, not something to enjoy. People drive over it. They don’t go to it.

That might finally be changing. Not because of one announcement, but because of three separate projects — in different stages, with different funding sources, from different developers — that are all pointed at the same stretch of the Trinity River at the same time. And the timing, for once, actually seems to be working.

Here’s what’s happening down there.

Harold Simmons Park

Dallas voters approved the broader Trinity River Corridor vision in 1998. Nearly three decades of debate over roads, flood control, funding, and design followed. Harold Simmons Park finally broke ground in 2025.

The park is 250 acres along the Trinity River between the Ronald Kirk Bridge and the Margaret McDermott Bridge, just west of downtown. $350 million. Miles of trails, overlooks, event lawns, recreational amenities, and real access to the river. It’s designed to be Dallas’s answer to what other major cities have done with their waterfronts — a public space that becomes part of how people think about living here.

The first major feature is called Play Cove. It’s not a neighborhood playground — it’s being built as a destination. Custom climbing structures, interactive water play, oversized slides, nature-inspired adventure areas, inclusive spaces for all ages. The structures are currently being fabricated in Germany before being shipped to Dallas for installation. First phases of the park open in 2028.

Twenty-seven years from voters saying yes to seeing cranes. That’s Dallas.

The Dallas Water Commons

Adjacent to Harold Simmons Park is the Dallas Water Commons — an urban wetlands project focused on restoring habitat, improving water quality, and building flood resilience along the Trinity. It’s quieter than the park in terms of headlines, but it’s doing something the park can’t do alone: making the river itself healthier. Cleaner water, restored ecosystems, better connections between the river and the neighborhoods around it. The Water Commons is its own public-private initiative aligned with the broader Trinity River corridor vision.

It won’t generate the splashy announcements. It’ll just make everything around it better.

Therme Dallas

And then there’s this. An Austrian wellness company called Therme Group updated plans this week for an $800 million resort they want to build along the Trinity River just south of downtown — right next door to Harold Simmons Park. Thermal baths, mineral pools, saunas, waterslides, swim-up bars, restaurants, a hotel, a retractable glass roof designed for year-round use. Their first U.S. location. The updated plans added a skybridge connecting the buildings. They’re still working through city approvals, with the developer targeting a 2027 groundbreaking.

Nothing is guaranteed. Therme still needs approvals. Timelines shift. But global companies don’t choose sites in a vacuum. Therme looked at a lot of cities. They picked Dallas. They picked this particular stretch of the Trinity River. That’s not nothing.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Cities change in layers. A public park goes in and creates foot traffic. Foot traffic attracts private investment. Private investment strengthens nearby neighborhoods. Values move. What was once overlooked becomes somewhere people seek out.

We’ve watched that happen in parts of Dallas already. Deep Ellum. The Design District. Uptown before Goldman Sachs was even a rumor.

The Trinity River has always been the missing piece — the amenity Dallas didn’t have, the public space that existed as a vision on a bond ballot while the rest of the city kept building around it. If Harold Simmons Park, the Dallas Water Commons, and Therme all come together, that stretch of the river south of downtown becomes something Dallas hasn’t had before.

Nothing is guaranteed. It took 27 years to get to this point and things can still change. But there are more cranes, more funding, and more visible progress along the Trinity River right now than at any point since Dallas first committed to this vision in 1998.

For years the Trinity River represented what Dallas hoped to become. It may finally be starting to reflect what the city actually is.