Sixteen miles of the planned 26-mile Wolf River Greenway are now open, and organizers say the remaining stretch through North Memphis is finally funded and moving toward construction. Executive Director Erik Houston and Greenway Coordinator Findley Frazier laid out the progress Wednesday night at a community update meeting inside Crosstown Concourse, walking residents through what's built, what's funded, and what still stands in the way of a continuous path from downtown Memphis to Germantown and Collierville.
The meeting, hosted at Crosstown Concourse on August 19, gave neighbors a chance to see how close the decades-old vision has come to reality, according to Action News 5. Once finished, the trail will run continuously from Mud Island on the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis all the way to Germantown and Collierville, according to the Wolf River Conservancy. The Wolf River Greenway project is a public-private partnership, with Shelby County, Memphis Parks, and the conservancy all working together on the corridor, per the same account.
A Trail Meant to Connect, Not Just Recreate
“Every Memphian should have access to the beautiful green spaces around them,” Houston said, according to the station's report. He added that the greenway “will play a huge part in connecting Memphians with their natural heritage,” and said Memphians should care about that natural heritage as a shared community asset. Organizers say they hope more people will use the trail as additional sections come online.
That framing isn't just sentiment. The 26-mile network is designed to link more than 22 distinct Memphis-area neighborhoods, all of which sit within federally designated areas of persistent poverty, according to the City of Memphis Division of Parks and Neighborhoods. Those same low-income neighborhoods along the route have previously suffered high pedestrian traffic fatality rates tied to high-speed road barriers, the division notes, making the trail as much about safety as recreation.
Federal and State Money Unlocked the Final Stretch
The project's remaining segments got a major boost in June 2024, when U.S. Representative Steve Cohen announced a $21.8 million federal RAISE grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to construct the final remaining sections of the greenway, according to the Office of Congressman Steve Cohen. Months earlier, in January 2024, the Wolf River Conservancy had already secured a $10.3 million grant from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to build a 3.9-mile section connecting Kennedy Park to the Shelby Farms Greenline, closing what had long been identified as a critical gap between major park assets.
Together, those two awards represent more than $32 million in recent state and federal infrastructure investment behind a project that started with far humbler ambitions. The toughest engineering left is concentrated in North Memphis, where plans call for a pedestrian-and-bicycle bridge over an active rail line and an underpass beneath Highway 14 at Jackson Avenue, solutions designed to get people safely across barriers that have long cut off local neighborhoods from parks and transit.
From a Volunteer Fight Against a Gravel Mine to a Regional Trail System
The Wolf River Conservancy didn't start out planning a 26-mile greenway at all. It was founded as a nonprofit land trust on April 8, 1985, after local volunteers organized to block a proposed gravel mine along the river near Summer Avenue, according to the conservancy's own account. Since then, the group says it has conserved more than 20,000 acres across the Wolf River watershed, work that laid the groundwork for the greenway itself.
Construction on the trail's first completed segment began back in 2010, running along the river's southern bank between Walnut Grove Road and Shady Grove Road, according to the City of Memphis Bikeway and Pedestrian Program. Early phases focused on suburban eastern Shelby County before construction pushed westward into the city's core. In October 2017, crews opened a 1.2-mile loop on Mud Island, turning 115 acres of a former illegal dumping site into a paved waterfront park at the trail's western terminus, a transformation Smart City Memphis called a striking example of turning urban blight into public space.
Momentum kept building in May 2022, when project partners opened Section 14A, known as Wolf River Crossing, featuring a 270-foot pedestrian bridge over the river and a half-mile elevated concrete boardwalk through Shelby Farms Park. That opening allowed people to travel continuously on foot between Germantown and Midtown Memphis for the first time. Hoodline previously covered a Germantown trail closure tied to safety upgrades on the adjacent greenway network, and also reported on a bomb squad response near a Wolf River trail access point earlier this year.
With 16 of the planned 26 miles now complete and the funding secured for the toughest remaining links, organizers are framing the North Memphis segments as the project's final major hurdle rather than an open question. Whether the rail bridge and highway underpass move from design to construction on any specific timeline wasn't addressed in this week's update, but the money is now in hand to make it happen.
