Riverside Drive is the kind of street most cities don’t have anymore — a four-lane road along a major river, with a sidewalk on the inland side that runs uninterrupted for a mile under a row of cottonwoods, sycamores, and a few old bald cypresses. The trees were planted in the 1930s as part of the WPA bluff-stabilization work. Most of them are now sixty to ninety feet tall, and the canopy on the east side of the street is dense enough to read as continuous from Mud Island down to Tom Lee Park.
The walk works best southbound in the morning. The river is to your right and the cottonwoods are to your left, and the building shadow off the Cotton Exchange and the One Commerce Square tower extends out across Riverside until about 9:30. After that the shadows shorten and the cottonwoods take over. The picks below all sit on this mile; the inland streets up the bluff are a separate walk we’ll come back to.