The fences are finally down, and MidAmerican Energy’s new Two Rivers Park on the Des Moines riverfront is officially open.
The $15.5 million, 9-acre park, occupying the former home of MidAmerican’s Two Rivers Service Center, anchors the city’s new Market District and offers panoramic views of downtown Des Moines and Principal Park from a dramatic, elevated platform.
MidAmerican, which paid to build the park, will own the land but Des Moines and Polk County Conservation will manage the park, which sits just north of the confluence of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers.
On Friday Oct. 10, the park’s designers and Kathryn Kunert, MidAmerican vice president of economic connections and integration, toured the park with City Council member Carl Voss, City Manager Scott Sanders and other Polk County and Des Moines officials.
MidAmerican created the park to be an asset for the city, county and state, Kunert said. The park sits just across the Des Moines River from the Court Avenue Entertainment District and near the East Village and the Iowa Capitol.
“It’s a connector,” Kunert said before the tour of the park. “It’s connecting the neighborhood, connecting us to the west, and it’s connecting people. It is a place for anybody and everybody to use.”
City officials hope Two Rivers Park will be catalyst for Market District development
Just east of the park, streets and utilities are in place for the Market District for what is envisioned as what the city expects will one day be a conglomeration of more than 3,400 housing units, 210,000 square feet of office space and 135,000 square feet of retail space.
Most of the infrastructure work in the district is done, Sanders said. But early development has been slow and city officials expect the park to spark interest.
Two Rivers been in the works since 2022. But even before it opened, it was a temptation too strong to resist this summer for downtown residents and visitors, who wandered through open gates especially on weekends to take a look or watch the Friday night fireworks at Principal Park, just downriver.
The park remained officially closed as heavy rains this summer slowed construction, and crews only recently finished putting in turf grass. MidAmerican took down the fences and quietly opened the park in October.
On Friday, Sanders, taking in the view from the park’s overlook, recalled that when he arrived in Des Moines in 2011, the area that is now the Market District was filled with dilapidated, city-owned warehouses and garages.
The city even had lean-to buildings “thrown together” under which it parked vehicles, he said. At one point 80% of the city’s public works staff worked at buildings nearby.
“Some of our city facilities we had to take down were falling down on their own already,” he said.
While little of the Market District has been developed, the land is at least cleared of the eyesores, he said.
“It is a complete 180-degree change in how it appears,” he said. “It’s harder to imagine a more dramatic transformation of what was there before and what we’re seeing now.”
Deputy City Manager Matt Anderson, the city’s primary economic development adviser, has said that many companies and developers have been waiting for the park to be finished before investing in the Market District.
“It’s one thing to show someone an artist’s rendering of a park. Now that those developers… can see the park, that is going to get that momentum going,” Anderson said in 2024. “It is going to flip the switch on momentum in the Market District.”
Sanders agreed, saying the development of the district will be a true public-private partnership, like the one with MidAmerican to build and maintain the park.
“There is the anticipation that with something finished like the park and a good deal of the infrastructure we will see the timelines materialize for the actual private development,” Sanders said.
What features does Two Rivers Park have?
The park itself was the site of the MidAmerican service center, which the utility moved elsewhere in 2015. Its most striking feature is the cantilevered viewing platform, similar to the EMC Overlook which provides downtown views from MacRae Park south of the Raccoon River.
Beyond the viewing platform, the Two Rivers Park’s designers, Jonathan Ramsey and Dylan Jones, said they sought to provide amenities to make the park welcoming to everyone. In the center sits an 1,800-square-foot covered shelter with picnic tables and restrooms. It was designed with minimal columns to make it accessible, and has tables with enough space to accommodate wheelchairs.
“We tried to arrange it in a way that allows for different places for people to be even within this area at one time and be comfortable,” Ramsey said, noting that it frames views of the surrounding city.
Concrete walls in the shelter were designed with spaces for picnickers to place their slow cookers and hot plates, with outlets to plug them in. Directional signs have braille on them to aid blind visitors. And the concrete has a rough and uneven surface and edges, making it hard to vandalize or skateboard on, Ramsey said.
As the officials toured the park, bees buzzed around the 90 perennial and shrub species planted in the park. Half of the plantings are Iowa native species, Jones said.
He said the park’s 300 trees, representing 50 species, will grow and change the park over the coming decade.
“Come back here in 10-15 years, and these trees are here, the park is going to feel completely different than it does now,” he said.
Philip Joens covers retail and real estate for the Des Moines Register. He can be reached at 515-284-8184 or pjoens@registermedia.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Opening of Two Rivers Park seen as boost for Des Moines’ slow-to-develop Market District
Reporting by Philip Joens, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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