Downtown Des Moines Has Its Loop Back for the First Time Since 2019

For most of the past several years, walking or biking the Principal Riverwalk meant checking which bridge was closed before you left the house. Court Avenue's bridge was rehabilitated in 2019, Scott Avenue and Southwest First Street followed in 2020, and Locust Street was rebuilt in 2021, part of a sequence that started back in 2015, with the Walnut Street Bridge dragging the project into its final stretch. If you live downtown, you already know this rhythm. What you may not have clocked yet is that the sequence just ended.

The Walnut Street Bridge reopened to auto traffic around May 1 this year, closing out a run of more than $55 million in bridge work that started over a decade ago. With it, the Principal Riverwalk's full loop, a 2.8-mile path connecting the Iowa Women of Achievement Bridge and the Union Railway Bridge, is running without detours for the first time in years, according to city council member Carl Voss's spring newsletter. That single fact changes what a Saturday downtown actually looks like this year, and it's the thread connecting everything else that's shifted along the river this summer.

What Actually Reconnected This Year

A closed bridge doesn't just block a path, it breaks a loop into disconnected segments. For years, getting from the Court Avenue District to the East Village or Gray's Lake on foot meant backtracking or rerouting through downtown streets instead of staying on the river. Now that the Walnut Street Bridge work is finished, including new scalloped fascia panels installed by contractor Cramer Engineering to mimic the original rainbow-arch look, the whole riverfront path functions as one continuous system again.

That matters because the Riverwalk was never designed as a set of separate parks. It was built to link the Court Avenue District, the central business district, the East Village, the Botanical Garden, the Iowa Events Center, and Gray's Lake into a single trail network. A finished loop is what makes it possible to treat a Saturday morning market run and an evening concert as one continuous outing instead of two separate errands, which is exactly what's happening this season.

The Farmers Market Just Got Bigger, Not Just Older

The Downtown Farmers' Market has been a Court Avenue fixture since 1976, when it opened with 15 vendors and about 200 shoppers. The 2026 season, which runs every Saturday from May 2 through October 31, is a different scale of event entirely.

Different outlets round the vendor and geographic counts a little differently. WHO13 puts this year's total at 306 vendors drawing an estimated 28,000 shoppers weekly. Wire coverage of the same season puts the vendor count at 305 and disagrees on the county spread, one report says 74 cities across 55 counties, another says 74 cities across 42 counties. The discrepancy is rounding noise from outlets rewriting the same release, not a real disagreement. Every source agrees the market has grown well past its original footprint and now spans a dozen city blocks in the Historic Court District.

What's easy to miss if you only glance at the vendor total is why growers keep coming back. As market manager Elizabeth Weyers put it:

"It's not about the sales, and it's not about selling our product, it's about the connection that they're making and hoping to get those people to then come to their farm in the off-season and continue to buy from them and learn about where their food comes from."

If you've been going for years, this season also adds 22 Spark DSM vendors, an incubator program run by the Des Moines Partnership that gives small businesses event access and educational support before they graduate to a regular stall. That's a pipeline worth watching if you like tracking which vendors show up as full-timers next year.

The Amphitheater That's Almost Back

The Simon Estes Amphitheater, the outdoor stage between Locust and Walnut streets, has sat dark since 2019 because of the same bridge and elevator reconstruction that just wrapped up. As of this spring, the city was still seeking an operator to run events and concessions there, and full programming in the style of the old Nightfall on the River series isn't expected until 2027.

That gap has been filled, at least for this season, by Water Works Park a few miles southwest. The park's Killinger Family Stage has been running free shows all summer, including the Des Moines Gamer Symphony Orchestra's big-band video game concert earlier this month on August 1. Down the hill, the Lauridsen Amphitheater is running a full ticketed slate for the rest of the summer: Clay Walker plays August 27, followed by Blues Traveler with Gin Blossoms and Spin Doctors on September 10, and a family-oriented Water Works Pops concert is set for September 6.

So the signature downtown venue is still a year out from its comeback, but the informal outdoor concert scene it left behind hasn't waited around. If your Saturday routine used to include "check if anything's happening on the river," this year the answer has moved a few miles west while Simon Estes finishes its slow reopening.

East Village's Chair Shuffle

The East Village has quietly become one of Des Moines' densest restaurant strips, with more than 20 eateries and shops packed into the blocks between the Iowa State Capitol and the river. This summer brought one of the more visible moves in that corridor: The Breakfast Club relocated from its original East Third Street spot to a larger building directly across from Zombie Burger, a shift that happened in early June.

The new space keeps the same bright, playful decor regulars know, along with the full comfort-food menu, pancake tacos and all. It's a small change on paper, a restaurant moving across a street, but it's the kind of move that only matters if you're already ordering breakfast there most weekends, which is exactly the point. The East Village isn't rotating through concepts the way a strip mall does. It's consolidating around the spots that have already proven they can pull people back.

What This Adds Up To

None of these facts is dramatic on its own. A bridge reopening, a market getting a few dozen new vendors, a restaurant moving across the street, an amphitheater still waiting on an operator. Individually they're maintenance items. Together they describe something that hasn't been true downtown in years: you can now walk or bike the entire riverfront loop, hit the market on Court Avenue, cut across to the East Village for breakfast, and catch a free show at Water Works Park in the same day without a single detour sign getting in the way.

That's the actual change this season. Not a new attraction, but an old system finally running the way it was designed to before the bridge work started stacking up delay after delay. If you've been treating downtown as a set of separate errands for the past few years, this is the summer to start treating it as one loop again.

If the pull of a connected riverfront, a growing Saturday market, and a restaurant scene that keeps investing in itself has you thinking about what it would mean to actually live inside that loop, Boutique Real Estate can help you Search Homes across downtown Des Moines and the neighborhoods that feed into it.