photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The Sixth and New Hampshire entrance to the Riverfront building is pictured on Friday, May 8, 2026.

Though the City of Lawrence isn’t expected to take over the former Riverfront Mall building until next year, staff is already talking with advisory boards and even with the Lawrence Farmers Market about what might go there in the future.

As the Journal-World has reported, the city will be taking over the building next to City Hall as part of a lawsuit settlement that it recently reached with the building’s owners. On May 12, the City Commission voted to approve the settlement, and commissioners were enthusiastic about the possibility of doing a project at the site, possibly by demolishing the current building to create more access to the Kansas River.

One idea the commissioners floated was using the space as a permanent home for the Lawrence Farmers Market, and city spokesman Michael Leos on Tuesday confirmed that the city had already spoken with the market about the possibility.

“Yes, there have been initial conversations about the use of the Riverfront Parking Garage by the Farmer’s Market,” Leos told the Journal-World via email.

The market has been looking for a permanent site for years, and it had been exploring the idea of a pavilion on the northwest corner of South Park near 11th and Vermont before the Riverfront settlement was approved. It’s not clear yet what the settlement will mean for that proposal; reached by the Journal-World on Tuesday, market director Emily Lysen directed the newspaper’s inquiries about the Riverfront idea to city staff.

Earlier this month, a city advisory board heard about some other possibilities from Lawrence’s Municipal Services and Operations leadership.

“There’s a lot of initiatives and projects happening right now that have suddenly got a lot of interest with that settlement agreement being announced,” Melinda Harger, assistant director of MSO, told the Connected City Advisory Board at its meeting on May 18.

Harger said the Riverfront property could affect several things the city is currently planning or studying for the area around the Kansas River. “There’s so many options with the Riverfront property,” she told the board. “So now, with these initiatives going forward, does it change the timeline? Does anyone need to pause and wait?”

One group that will likely have to think about the Riverfront property’s future is the steering committee for the ongoing North Lawrence corridor study. Although Riverfront isn’t in North Lawrence, the corridor study’s area includes a bit of the northern portion of downtown, including Riverfront and City Hall.

The task force next meets on June 10, and Leos said the ongoing study “could provide a process for some community engagement and planning.”

One thing that’s been discussed in the North Lawrence study is how to improve access to the river, and the consulting firm leading the study, Kansas City-based HNTB, has experience with planning projects along rivers. HNTB’s original proposal forms for the North Lawrence study listed a couple of similar projects the firm had done, including planning a regional trail system along the Kansas River levees in Kansas City, Kansas.

“The people we brought on board have a lot of background interacting with rivers,” MSO director Melissa Sieben told the advisory board on May 18.

Sieben, who previously worked for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, has experience with that, too. She told the board that she wrote the grant for the recently opened Rock Island Bridge development in KCK, an entertainment area built on a bridge over the Kansas River that includes an event space and restaurant. She also offered to take the advisory board on a tour of riverfront developments in the Kansas City area to see what might be possible.

“I think those are some pretty awesome opportunities we haven’t tapped here in Lawrence yet,” Sieben said.

Connected City Advisory Board member Hilary Carter was interested in exploring those possibilities. “The riverfront seems very underutilized for what it could be,” Carter said.

The advisory board also discussed how the property might fit in with the Lawrence Loop trail system. One of the Loop’s missing pieces is a route through or around the downtown area, and Harger said the settlement could mean some rethinking of the city’s bikes plan.

“We had been going through the public process, bikes plan, we have looked at that downtown connectivity, and now there’s this big unknown with that area,” Harger told the board.

One thing that’s not being considered right now is using the site as a work space for city employees. The Riverfront building was previously the home of Lawrence Municipal Court and Planning and Development Services, but those departments left the building and moved into City Hall in 2024 because of concerns about the building’s condition.

The condition of the Riverfront building was the issue in the lawsuit, as well. The suit was filed in February 2024 by the building’s ownership group, who alleged that the city and its contractors damaged the building by altering the bank of the Kansas River during a repair project at the Bowersock Dam.

(Full disclosure: One member of the ownership group, Riverfront LLC, is operated by the Simons family, the former owners of the Journal-World. However, the Simons family no longer has any ownership interest in the Journal-World, and the Journal-World has no ownership interest in the Riverfront property.)

Since the departments vacated the Riverfront building, City Hall has had to accommodate more employees, and leaders have said repeatedly that more space is needed. The Journal-World asked Leos whether the city was considering using the property to alleviate those space constraints, either by repurposing the existing building or by constructing a new one there.

“No, not currently,” Leos said. “The building was previously evaluated as a candidate for a City Hall Annex a few years ago and was not recommended.”

What is clear right now is that any future plans for Riverfront will take time. The city will not take over the building until the SpringHill Suites hotel that’s currently there vacates, which must happen no later than April 5, 2027, and Leos said the city isn’t even at the stage of soliciting public input yet on what should go on the site.

“We just reached the settlement, and we are not going in with a predetermined plan for the property,” Leos said.

That means Sieben and other city leaders will have a lot to talk about in the coming months.

“I think it could be very exciting,” Sieben told the advisory board in this month’s briefing, “and I’m glad that others see what I see.”