Walk to the end of North Rio Vista Boulevard where SE 9th Avenue meets the New River and you will notice something missing. The benches are gone. So is the small cluster of furniture that used to make the spot feel like a park bench overlook, the kind of place where a neighbor might sit for ten minutes before turning home. What remains is a bare, tree-shaded strip of land, one-third of an acre, running down to the seawall at 899 North Rio Vista Boulevard.
Longtime residents have called this stretch a park for decades, even though the city never once put up a sign that said so. That distinction, thoroughfare versus park, sounds like a paperwork technicality. It is actually the entire reason two neighbors are now suing the City of Fort Lauderdale, and the entire reason the rest of the neighborhood can still walk there while the case plays out.
A Name That Never Promised a Park
The land carries an official name, Francis L. Abreu Place, and an official designation that predates most of the houses around it. It was dedicated for public use as a thoroughfare more than a century ago, a legal category that means the city holds it open for passage, not for recreation. No playground equipment. No formal park designation. Just a public right of way that happens to run through some of the prettiest waterfront acreage in the neighborhood.
For most of that century, nobody cared about the distinction. Neighbors treated the strip like a pocket park because it functioned like one. You could walk your dog there, watch the river, let your kids run down to the bulkhead. The city maintained it, mowed it, and for years let benches sit on it. Function and legal status quietly diverged, and nobody noticed until it mattered.
Two Neighbors, One Lawsuit
In late March 2025, the divergence became a courtroom problem. Andrew and Lauren Sperber, who live immediately to the east of the parcel, and Colgate Darden IV, who lives to the west, filed suit against the city. Their argument: the land was dedicated as a thoroughfare, but the city has treated it as a park for years, and under Florida law that kind of sustained departure from the original dedicated use can mean the city forfeited its claim. If a thoroughfare stops functioning as a thoroughfare long enough, the reasoning goes, the land can revert to the property owners on either side.
It is worth sitting with what that would mean for the rest of the block. If the Sperbers and Darden won outright, the strip connecting Rio Vista Boulevard to the New River would become part of two private yards. The walkway that generations of residents have used to reach the water would simply end.
Fort Lauderdale answered that argument by leaning into the very label everyone had stopped thinking about. The city's response, filed by early May 2025, said the land has never stopped being a thoroughfare. It still provides pedestrian and vehicular access to SE 9th Avenue and the river. It still carries public infrastructure. Florida Power and Light has equipment buried in the parcel, the city noted, which means a court cannot resolve the ownership question without also affecting FPL's interests. In other words, the same bureaucratic word that felt like an afterthought for a hundred years became the city's strongest evidence that the land was never abandoned to private use.
The case was assigned to Broward Circuit Judge Michele Towbin Singer. The most detailed public reporting on it dates to spring 2025, when the city's response was filed, and no published account since has confirmed a ruling on the ownership question in either direction.
What the Civic Association Told Residents, Twice
Before the lawsuit existed, there was a rumor that it did. In an earlier bulletin, the Rio Vista Civic Association corrected the record for members, writing that no litigation had actually been filed and that the situation was still an informal dispute over the un-driveable portion of the thoroughfare, the part many neighbors had used as if it were a park.
That correction did not age well as reassurance. Not long after, the informal dispute became the formal one described above. What has stayed consistent is the association's posture. Its leadership has said its attorney is working directly with the city attorney's office to keep the walkway open to residents, and has been direct about the tradeoffs that come with that effort.
One of those tradeoffs already happened. When the ownership challenge surfaced, the city removed the benches and other furnishings from the site, a move explained as necessary to preserve the land's appropriate status as a thoroughfare rather than let it read as a maintained park. The association has also reminded members that this stretch has never been a designated dog park. Fort Lauderdale's leash law applies here the same as anywhere else in the city. If you are walking a dog down to the bulkhead, the leash stays on.
What You Can Actually Do There Right Now
For residents planning a normal week, here is where things stand while the case is pending:
- The path between Rio Vista Boulevard and the New River bulkhead remains open for walking.
- There are no benches or seating on site. The city removed them to reinforce the thoroughfare designation.
- Dogs must be leashed at all times. This has never been a designated off-leash area.
- The land is not posted as private property, and pedestrian access has not been blocked during litigation.
- Nothing about day to day access is guaranteed to stay this way if the court rules for the plaintiffs.
None of this is dramatic. It is simply the current, narrow reality of a public strip whose legal footing is being tested in real time.
The City Already Had Plans for This Exact Spot
Here is the detail that makes the timing strange. While the ownership question sits unresolved in Broward Circuit Court, Fort Lauderdale's own $200 million parks bond program, the one funding upgrades across more than 90 parks citywide, lists Francis L. Abreu Place as a planned improvement project. The city set aside money to invest in the same acre of land that two of its neighbors are simultaneously trying to claim as private property.
That is not a contradiction so much as a reflection of how differently the two processes move. The parks bond program is a planning and budgeting exercise, built around the assumption that public land stays public. The lawsuit is a property rights claim that could undo that assumption for this specific parcel. Both are moving forward at the same time, and only one of them can be right about what this land is for.
What to Watch
If you live near Abreu Place, or walk there on your way to the river, the thing worth tracking is not a construction timeline. It is the docket. A ruling from Judge Singer's court will determine whether the city's thoroughfare argument holds, whether the parks bond improvements ever reach this parcel, and whether the path you have been using stays open the way it has for a hundred years. Given how much time has passed since the last detailed reporting, the case may have moved further than what is captured here. The Rio Vista Civic Association has been the most direct source of updates on the dispute, posting bulletins as the situation develops, and residents who want the current status are better served checking there than relying on a single news cycle from 2025.
In the meantime, the walk to the bulkhead is still there. No sign calls it a park, and for the first time in a long time, that has turned out to matter.
For more on how Rio Vista's waterfront geography shapes daily life here, from the New River bulkhead to the Intracoastal side of the neighborhood, see Latitude Key's Rio Vista guide and the team's broader look at Fort Lauderdale's public parks.
If you have questions about how a dispute like this one gets resolved, or what it might mean for property lines and access near the New River, reach out to Devon Miller with Latitude Key. We track this kind of neighborhood detail closely, because it is the kind of thing that only matters once you already live here.
