Walk to the southern end of Rainey Street and look toward the lake. Until this June, that view ended at construction fencing. The stretch of Waller Creek between 4th Street and Lady Bird Lake had been closed off in some form for years, first as a flood-prone tangle of overgrowth, then as an active construction site tied to the Waterloo Greenway project. If you lived in the Rainey Street Historic District or the new towers going up around it, getting to the lake on foot meant detouring out to Red River Street or Cesar Chavez Street and walking around the gap rather than through it.
That gap is gone now. On June 6, 2026, Waterloo Greenway Conservancy and the City of Austin opened the second phase of the Waterloo Greenway project, a 13-acre stretch called the Confluence, and closed the last piece of missing trail between downtown's residential core and the water. About eleven weeks later, the building that had spent years staring down at that same construction site, the Waterline tower, finished construction and opened its ground floor to the public. Two separate projects, running on separate timelines for years, landed within the same season. That timing is the story here, not the ribbon cuttings themselves.
Why this particular gap mattered
Downtown Austin has had a lakefront trail for decades in the Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail. What it hasn't had, at least not since Rainey Street densified, is a direct pedestrian connection from that residential district down to the trail without walking through traffic at Red River and Cesar Chavez. The land itself was the obstacle. Lower Waller Creek flooded regularly enough that the city couldn't safely build a park there until the Waller Creek Tunnel, a flood control project, was finished in 2018. Everything since has been about turning a now-protected creek bed into something people can actually use.
The Confluence closes that specific gap. It runs along Waller Creek from 4th Street down to the lake, sitting at what the project's planners describe as a crossroads: Palm Park to the north, the Rainey Street Historic District to the east, the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center and Austin Convention Center nearby, and the Butler Trail itself running along the southern edge. An 800-foot boardwalk lets trail users bypass the Red River and Cesar Chavez intersections entirely. Three lattice pedestrian bridges cross the creek at points that previously had no crossing at all. The planting alone, roughly 1,600 new trees and 200,000 plants along the creek banks, is doing double duty as flood mitigation and shade canopy in a part of downtown that had almost none of either.
Two projects, one season
The Waterline tower sits directly across the creek from where this new trail work happened, which is not a coincidence of geography so much as a coincidence of scheduling that took years to actually align. Waterline topped out in August 2025 at just over 1,020 feet, edging past Houston's JPMorgan Chase Tower to become the tallest building in Texas, a title Houston had held since 1981. Construction wrapped in late August 2026, developed by Lincoln Property Company and Kairoi Residential. The tower's hotel component, 1 Hotel Austin, opened its 252 rooms that same month, with interiors by Studio MAI and landscaping from TBG Partners meant to tie the building's ground floor directly into the creek corridor next door.
What that means in practice is that the trail's southern anchor and the tower's ground-floor amenities were built to meet at the same corner of downtown, roughly at the same time, after years of running on independent schedules. If you'd walked this stretch in May 2026, you would have seen active construction on both sides of the creek. By September, you can walk a continuous, mostly car-free loop from Rainey Street, across one of the new lattice bridges, past the Lagoon Overlook and the Cypress Grove and Trailhead Plaza at 4th Street, and arrive at a hotel lobby with a restaurant, a rooftop bar, and a café that didn't exist a year ago.
What's actually open along the route
None of this matters much in the abstract. It matters because of what's now reachable on foot from a Rainey Street address without getting in a car.
| Stop | What it is | Opened |
|---|---|---|
| Neighbors | Ground-floor café and wine bar with entrances from both the lobby and the street, open morning to night | Late August 2026 |
| Alteño | Signature restaurant led by Chef Johnny Curiel, a James Beard Award nominee whose Denver restaurant Alma Fonda Fina holds a Michelin star | Late August 2026 |
| watr | 16th-floor rooftop restaurant and lounge with a Japanese-leaning menu | Late August 2026 |
| Honest Mary's | Grain and greens bowl concept, first downtown Austin location, in Seaholm | July 2026 |
Alteño draws on Curiel's family history in Jalisco's Highlands, described by the hotel's own materials as fire-driven cooking built around an open kitchen. Watr is positioned as the sunset stop, 16 floors above the creek with views back over the trail you just walked. None of these are aimed primarily at hotel guests passing through. Neighbors in particular is designed as a daytime coffee stop with evening wine service, the kind of place that only works if there's enough walk-up foot traffic from people who live nearby, not just people staying upstairs.
The detour nobody's announcing
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the opening-day photos. Beginning in June 2026 and continuing through March 2027, the Butler Trail is rerouted on the north shore near the Confluence and the Austin Rowing Club building, so Austin Energy can install underground electrical infrastructure along the Lady Bird Lake shoreline between Brazos Street and Trinity Street. If you're picturing the full loop as open and finished based on the June ribbon cutting, it isn't, not entirely. A specific segment near the rowing club is going to be detoured for the better part of a year. Anyone planning a regular running or biking route through here should expect to slow down and follow on-site signage in that stretch rather than assume the whole corridor is clear.
What this means if you live here
The headline version of this story is easy to write and has already been written a few times over: new hotel opens, new park opens, downtown gets greener. The version worth knowing if you actually live in the Rainey Street corridor or one of the towers nearby is narrower and more useful. For the first time since this stretch of Waller Creek was closed off for construction, there's a direct, mostly car-free route from home to the lake that also happens to pass a rooftop bar, a Michelin-pedigreed restaurant, and an all-day café along the way. That's a different kind of neighborhood amenity than a park by itself, and it's different from a hotel by itself. It's what happens when two long, separately managed projects finally land in the same season.
If you're weighing whether this kind of change is worth factoring into a longer-term view of downtown living, whether it's about daily routine, resale, or where the next wave of ground-floor retail tends to follow foot traffic like this, that's exactly the kind of conversation Leslie Gossett has with clients who already call this part of Austin home. Let's connect.
