Downs River Park

Downs River Park is the newest thing to see in Northville, and it’s about as fresh as it gets — the city officially opened this 10-acre riverfront park on June 17, 2026, on the site of the old Northville Downs harness racing track, which ran horses for 80 years before closing for good in 2024. Before it was a racetrack, the site was the Wayne County Fairgrounds, where a young Joe Louis trained in 1939 for the World Heavyweight Championship fight he’d win later that same year — a sports history footnote that predates the horse racing by several years.

The literal centerpiece of the park now is 1,100 feet of the Rouge River, freed from a concrete culvert it had been buried inside since the 1960s and now flowing in the open for the first time in six decades — Friends of the Rouge has already counted nine fish species back in the restored stretch. The park connects directly into downtown Northville and Michigan’s broader trail network (you can technically walk from here to Mackinaw City, or south into Ohio), with two new 70-foot pedestrian bridges, walking and cycling paths, and a relocated historic log cabin serving as a welcome center at the south entrance.

On our radar for watching a genuinely rare piece of urban river restoration up close, for a walk that connects straight into downtown, or for standing on a patch of ground that trained a heavyweight champion decades before it ever saw a horse race.