For a park, it’s tricky to find.
Visitors, usually after driving past it, must go through the sprawling River Place Flats apartment development, recently constructed near 96th Street and Allisonville Road. Look for the iron gates.
The land was donated to the City of Fishers, accounting for its oddball location.
Grants paid for its conversion into a park, including one for $4.7 million from the Regional Economic Acceleration and Development Initiative and another for $1 million from Hamilton County. “It’s always fun to be able to say that not a penny in taxpayer money was spent on this,” says Jake Reardon McSoley, director of recreation and wellness for the City of Fishers.
At 120 acres, it’s Fishers’ largest park.
It boasts roughly 2.45 miles of trails, 5,000 feet of riverfront, a parking lot, a restroom facility, a couple of wooden overlooks where visitors can survey their surroundings, and a kayak put-in.
Amenities are sparse by design.
The majority of the park sits on White River’s floodplain—which may explain why the former owner was so magnanimous in donating it. That fact also accounts for the lack of athletic fields and buildings. During big rainstorms, half of the grounds may be submerged. In fact, construction of the park was halted for a bit last year when the river overran much of the site.
The landscape not only dictated what the park is but also what it isn’t.
The bathrooms, perched on a small plateau, are the most substantial structure on the property. Elsewhere, nature rules. The park’s trail system snakes through the grasslands and trees, and there’s a road down to the kayak launch area. A disc golf course may be added, most likely on the portion of the property outside the flood zone.
It’s what’s known as a “passive park.”
That means there are no employees regularly stationed there and no concessions. Maintenance crews visit as needed. There is, however, a sporadic schedule of programmed events.
It’s a great place for peace and quiet.
Thanks to a quirk of geography (the grounds slope gently down to White River, creating a sonic barrier against street noise), the park is oddly silent. The bustling intersection of Allisonville Road and 96th Street is a literal stone’s throw away, yet at the park, the dominant sounds are wind and birds.
White River is the park’s key attribute.
Unlike Geist Reservoir, the area’s go-to water feature, White River receives comparatively little attention. The park offers the city’s first public put-in to launch kayaks and paddleboards. “I don’t think most Fishers residents consider the White River to be a recreational amenity,” McSoley says. “They probably don’t even think of it as part of their community. But in reality, it is.” White River runs roughly 362 miles through Indiana, with approximately 30 miles flowing through Hamilton County. Of that, about 8 to 10 miles trace along or through Fishers’ western edge, depending on how the meandering is measured. Despite that proximity, much of the river remains visually and practically disconnected from residents, hidden behind development or buffered by floodplain.
It’s part of a much larger network.
The trails link it to nearby Heritage Park, which has been updated with the newly installed Bur Oak Bridge, allowing access to Carmel across the White River. That connection creates a roughly 17-mile pedestrian corridor stretching from Zionsville to Geist.
But wait, there’s more! Or there will be. Across the river and south of 96th from the park sits Town Run Trail Park, a mountain biking area overseen by the city of Indianapolis. The two areas aren’t directly connected, but they might be joined somehow in the future, creating an even more comprehensive network of trails and outdoor spaces.
Wildlife is one of the park’s most visible features.
Deer are common, and an extended family of beavers has established itself along the river. Bald eagles have also been spotted, along with numerous other bird species.
The land retains traces of past uses.
A rock quarry once operated there, and remnants of it remain in the form of scattered concrete ruins. They are easy to miss unless you’re looking for them, but once spotted, they jump out as relics of an earlier time.
It is the latest part of an effort to build up Fishers’ network of public recreational facilities.
Fishers now boasts 23 parks, totaling more than 800 acres and about 120 miles of trails. One of the most notable recent additions is the Geist Waterfront Park, opened on the last undeveloped stretch of shoreline on Geist Reservoir in 2023.
That expansion has not come easily.
Building up a park system in a place like Fishers, where you’re vying with residential and commercial developers for every foot of space, gets tougher every year. But if it isn’t done now, it likely won’t happen, says McSoley. “Once that land’s gone, it’s gone.”
