The Elizabeth River Project opened its $8 million headquarters on North Colley Avenue in Norfolk in 2024, complete with an eco-friendly building and a public boardwalk above reconstructed wetlands on Knitting Mill Creek.
The nonprofit now plans to grow next door, with a public park that will extend restoration efforts and offer more green space for the surrounding neighborhood.
“It’ll be a big expansion of the habitat along the Ryan Resilience Lab and it'll be a place where people can encounter the river any day of the week,” said Luísa Black Ellis, director of resilience and community engagement at the Elizabeth River Project.
Officials are working to finalize the purchase of five lots totaling about a third of an acre, currently owned by a billboard company.
The site includes a grass lawn and some pine and cedar trees next to overgrowth that surrounds a finger of the creek.
The nonprofit did not include the lots in its original designs of the resilience lab, but always eyed the land in a “sure would be nice” kind of way, Ellis said.
ERP’s headquarters is intended to model responsibly living with water as sea levels rise. Officials used a legal mechanism called a “rolling easement” to promise the building will be dismantled when water levels reach a certain threshold.
They also built deep and sloped wetlands to allow the marsh to migrate inward.
The nonprofit can now extend the living shoreline southward to cover the city block between 46th and 47th streets, Ellis said.
She also hopes the park will help draw more visitors. Though the boardwalk and gardens behind the resilience lab are public, they can be hard to spot from the street and are closed outside of the nonprofit’s business hours.
The new park will front North Colley, offering water views from the sidewalk and easier entry to gardens.
“It's really exciting to be able to design this project with the community and open up this space along the creek that so many people already love, and now more people will have an opportunity to fall in love with this free access,” Ellis said. “We see that access to the river is such a huge component of getting the community to care and take action on its behalf.”
To start, the group is installing oyster habitat on the shoreline and helping clear out overgrowth, much of which contains invasive species such as English ivy and a pesky reed grass called phragmites.
Officials will replant the space with native shrubs and trees, and pollinator and rain gardens, which help absorb water.
Ellis said they also plan to build a pathway from the sidewalk to connect with the existing boardwalk.
Interested people can fill out an online survey to share what they want to see in the new park. The survey will be open through 2026.
