The Truckee Riverwalk Has a Seam, and Downtown Reno Just Found It

Most mornings, the stretch of the Truckee River between Center Street and the Lake Street Bridge is unremarkable in the best way. Someone walks a dog along the water. A commuter on the Tahoe-Pyramid Trail rolls through on a bike, headed downtown before work. The path hugs the north bank, tucked behind the buildings that line First Street, close enough to hear the river and far enough from traffic to forget it's there.

As of this August, that stretch has a locked gate across it, and the reason it's locked exposes something almost nobody walking that path realized: the Riverwalk was never actually one continuous public path. It's two separate paths, built decades apart by two different owners, stitched together so seamlessly that the seam disappeared. Now the seam has come undone, and the city itself is the one admitting it.

Two builders, one riverbank

The history is laid out in a City of Reno staff memo sent to City Council on August 14, 2026, and it starts with a phone company, not a park planner.

Nevada Bell, now AT&T, built the first section of this walkway between 1970 and 1971 as part of constructing its telephone equipment building at First and Center Streets. That segment ran along the river from Center Street east to the edge of the Bell property. It existed because a utility company wanted riverfront landscaping outside its new building, not because the city planned a public trail there.

The city built the second half a year later. In 1972, Reno extended the walkway east to the Lake Street Bridge. Architect Graham Erskine designed that extension at no cost to the city, and the city funded and managed the construction itself. Two different builders, two different motivations, one continuous-looking path along the river.

For most of the next three decades, nobody needed to ask who owned which half. People walked it. The distinction between "the phone company's landscaping" and "the city's public walkway" mattered on paper, not on the ground.

It started to matter on paper again in 2000, when the city secured an express public-access easement across the AT&T portion of the path. That's the legal instrument that guarantees the public's right to use the segment behind the old Nevada Bell building specifically. No equivalent recorded easement covers the stretch behind the building next door, at 180 E. 1st Street, sometimes referred to locally as the Delucchi building. The public used that section too, for decades, without anyone drawing the line between where the guaranteed easement ended and where it didn't.

The memo that drew the line

That's the gap the August 14 memo brought into daylight. City staff told Council the city plans to create a detour around this stretch of pathway, and staff were direct about why: the city has a legal right to some of it, not all of it.

The City holds an express public-access easement across the AT&T property.

That single sentence, pulled from the memo, is the whole dispute in miniature. It confirms the city's legal footing on one half of the path and, by omission, confirms the absence of that footing on the other half, the section behind 180 E. 1st Street.

A gate now sits across that segment, and it's locked. Residents who've watched the corridor for years believe the gate went in as an attempt by the property owner to keep people from camping in an arcade area behind the building, a problem plenty of downtown property owners have wrestled with on their own. Whatever the original reason, the effect today is the same for anyone trying to walk or bike through: the dedicated riverside path simply stops, and the alternative is stepping onto a downtown street that runs one-way against the direction most pedestrians are already moving.

A local resident who bikes the Tahoe-Pyramid Trail into downtown twice a day, described the Lake Street entrance to this stretch as a spot he passes on his regular commute, which is a useful reminder that this isn't only a scenic afternoon walk for tourists. It's part of a working transportation corridor that connects the Riverwalk District to the broader regional trail network running along the Truckee River.

Not everyone agrees on what happens next. A local citizen, Damien Cole, has pushed back on the city's read of its own legal position, arguing that decades of open, continuous public use should carry legal weight even without a recorded easement. City officials have said they lack the authority to simply reopen the path. Independent Reno journalist Dr. Alicia Barber, who publishes the local development newsletter The Barber Brief, has been the one asking the more basic question underneath all of it: why is this being decided quietly through staff memos instead of in front of the public at a Council meeting where residents can actually weigh in.

Why this isn't just one gate

It's worth sitting with the timing here. This is happening in a downtown that's actively spending money to make itself more walkable. The Reno Redevelopment Agency has been distributing facade and tenant improvement grants across downtown, Midtown and the Riverwalk District, part of an effort to bring empty storefronts back to life. A few blocks over, a long-stalled riverfront redevelopment on Island Avenue came back to life late last year after the original developer repurchased the site out of foreclosure. Investment is flowing toward the riverfront corridor from more than one direction at once.

And yet the most basic piece of riverfront infrastructure, the paved strip that lets you actually walk along the water, has a hole in it that nobody closed for fifty years because nobody had to look closely enough to find it.

This also isn't the only piece of downtown public space under quiet pressure right now. A few blocks away, Believe Plaza has its own ongoing fight to stay accessible as public space, a separate dispute but part of the same pattern: in a downtown built up piecemeal over a century, what counts as genuinely public often depends on a document nobody checked until someone locked a gate.

None of this changes what still works along the river. Wingfield Park still hosts its rotation of free summer concerts and movies on the bandstand. Idlewild Park anchors the western end of the walk. Tuesday nights still bring Bike Night, the third Saturday of the month still brings the Wine Walk through Riverwalk District restaurants and shops, and early June still brings River Fest to First Street. The river corridor as a whole is not disappearing. One four-block seam in it just got exposed, and the fix depends on a legal question the city has not yet resolved in public.

What to actually do this week

If you walk, bike or run this stretch regularly, plan on detouring around the blocked segment between Center Street and the Lake Street Bridge for now. Give yourself the extra minute rather than cutting through the locked gate area, since the alternative currently means stepping into a street that wasn't built with pedestrian and cyclist crossover in mind.

If you want to follow where this goes, the clearest ongoing coverage has come from This Is Reno and The Barber Brief, both of which have been tracking the memo, the citizen response, and whatever Council does next. The city's own Redevelopment Agency page is where formal downtown project updates eventually surface, for anyone who wants to see how the riverfront investment conversation and the access conversation intersect over time.

This is still an open question as of today. No injunction has been filed, no Council vote has been reported, and the gate is still locked. That's exactly why it's worth watching if you live here: the version of the Riverwalk that ends up public in five years is being decided right now, mostly in memos, and mostly without much public input yet.

If you're the kind of person who already treats a river walk as part of your daily rhythm here, you already know how much a four-block detour changes the feel of a morning. Jena Lanini lives in this market and tracks these downtown shifts as closely as she tracks pricing, because the two are rarely as separate as people assume. If you want a local read on how a corridor like this one connects to the neighborhoods around it, reach out. Discover Elevated Living. Start the conversation.