Three ribbon cuttings happened around Port St. Lucie this year, and each one got covered like its own isolated event. A park opened near the river in March. A trail broke ground on Westmoreland Boulevard in February. A BMX track has been rising out of the dirt in Tradition since last fall. Read the local coverage of each and you'd think the city built three unrelated things in three unrelated corners of town.
It didn't. The distance between two of those projects is a quarter mile, and the city planned it that way on purpose.
What's Already Open: The Preserve
The Preserve at the Port District opened March 4 with a ribbon cutting attended by roughly 60 people. It's a 13-acre conservation area with a 3,000-foot trail network threading through mangroves and upland habitat along the North Fork of the St. Lucie River. Five entrances feed into it, one near the Pioneer Park playground, two along the riverside boardwalk, and two off Westmoreland Boulevard.
It came in under $972,000 to build, with about $400,000 of that covered by a grant from the Florida Inland Navigation District and the rest drawn from the city's Parks Impact Fee, meaning growth fees paid the bulk of the tab rather than general tax revenue. That funding structure is worth knowing if you've ever wondered where impact fees on new construction actually go in this city. This is one answer.
The opening wasn't without a wrinkle. Countywide drought conditions had left some of the new plantings stressed, and Brenda Leigh, the local muralist who spent two years designing a concrete mural of mangroves and wildlife for the restroom near the parking lot, put it plainly at the ceremony: "All we need is a week of rain and everything will be beautiful again." Anyone walking the boardwalk this month should expect some patchy underbrush rather than a lush debut. That's a seasonal condition, not a design flaw, and it should fill back in with normal rainfall.
What's Finishing This Fall: The Wilderness Trail
Here's the piece that connects everything. The Westmoreland Boulevard Wilderness Trail is a 2.1-mile, 10-foot-wide concrete multimodal path currently under construction, with a price tag of $2.77 million, more than double what The Preserve cost to build despite serving a similar walking-and-biking function. Construction started in early February and city spokesperson Scott Samples has said the project is on track for a fall completion, with a new restroom, covered pavilion, picnic tables, and a drinking fountain built in along the way.
The trail is partly funded by a $500,000 Recreational Trails Program grant from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and its route was deliberately drawn to land a quarter mile from The Preserve's entrance. Samples described the intent directly: the design lets someone finish the Wilderness Trail and then make a short walk over to the Preserve Trail. It also ties into the Saints Golf Course and the existing river boardwalk that predates both projects.
That means by the time this trail wraps up this fall, a resident living near Westmoreland Boulevard will have a connected path from their own street, through Wilderness Park, past the Saints Golf Course, and into a 13-acre river preserve, without ever getting in a car. Nobody's marketing that as a single trail system yet because the two halves opened on different timelines under different press releases. On the ground, it functions as one.
If you're closer to Becker Road, there's a smaller companion project worth knowing about too. Duck Court Park, tucked off SW Rad Court, is getting a $236,970 upgrade running through the fall, a modest addition compared to the two headline projects but one more sign that the city's parks investment isn't limited to its flagship sites.
A Different Kind of New, on the Other Side of Town
If you live west of I-95 in Tradition, none of the above is your nearest new amenity. That side of the city is getting something entirely different: a BMX and pump track facility at Tradition Regional Park, a 110-acre site the city calls a public-private partnership with Mattamy Homes.
The centerpiece is a 1,100-linear-foot concrete all-wheel track designed with USA BMX, built to handle BMX bikes, skateboards, scooters, and inline skates, and engineered to be adaptive-compatible for riders with mobility challenges. City officials have described it as the first fully concrete, adaptive track of its kind anywhere. Construction began last fall and the city has targeted a summer 2026 opening for the track and the first phase of the surrounding park, which is also slated to include lighted baseball and multi-purpose fields, a disc golf course, and a canoe and kayak launch.
Given that summer 2026 is winding down as this is written, residents near Tradition Parkway and the Fern Lake Roundabout should expect the opening to land any week now if it hasn't already. Worth a drive-by before assuming it's still a construction fence.
The contrast between the two sides of town is the real takeaway here. The Port District corridor is getting quiet, walkable, river-adjacent green space built for slower use. Tradition is getting an active, competition-grade recreational facility built around a specific sport. Both are city investments landing in the same calendar year, but they're solving different problems for different neighborhoods rather than duplicating the same amenity twice.
The Piece That's Still a Year Out
None of this comes with restaurants yet, at least not in the Port District. The Grove, a planned riverfront dining and entertainment development next to The Preserve, is still under construction. The city's original announcement pointed to a February 2027 opening for the first five venues, Salt River, Italian Disco, Kannon, The Grove Bar, and Tequi Bar, all managed by Atlas Restaurant Group under a $15 million partnership with SūDā Investments. A more recent construction update suggested the timeline may slip toward fall 2027 instead. Either way, it's not a this-year story, and residents walking the new Preserve trails today shouldn't expect a bar to open up alongside the boardwalk anytime soon.
What This Actually Means for a Weekend
If you want to test the connection yourself before the Wilderness Trail officially wraps, start at the Pioneer Park playground entrance to The Preserve, walk the boardwalk loop along the river, and note how close the Westmoreland Boulevard side sits to the active construction zone. That gap is what's closing this fall. Once it does, this becomes one of the few stretches in Port St. Lucie where a resident can string together a park, a golf course frontage, and a river preserve on foot or by bike without touching a car.
The city has been open about why it's building this way. Samples has said residents consistently rank walking, hiking, and biking access as a top priority in surveys going back to 2021, and the Naturally PSL initiative behind these projects treats connectivity, not just square footage, as the goal. That's a different philosophy than simply adding acreage, and it's the reason two projects that opened months apart and got covered as separate news stories are actually one map.
Whether your daily walk runs along Westmoreland Boulevard or your kids are counting down the days until that BMX track opens in Tradition, this is shaping up to be the year Port St. Lucie's outdoor spaces stopped being scattered dots and started reading like a system.
If you're weighing what a home near either corridor, the Port District or Tradition, actually offers day to day, Gina Villanell covers Port St. Lucie as part of her Treasure Coast practice and can walk you through what's finished, what's still under construction, and what it means for daily life in either part of the city. Let's Connect.
