On the morning of Thursday, August 27, 2026, the City of Oakland Park will gather at Greenleaf Park to cut the ribbon on a new downtown destination. It is, on the surface, a familiar civic ritual: the ribbon, the officials lined up in a row, and the residents who have waited months to see the finished result. But the park that opens that morning at 10 a.m. is something more than a new amenity in a growing Broward County suburb. It is the first visible piece of a transformation years in the making, and it tells the story of how Oakland Park has spent the last decade quietly remaking the heart of its downtown.
Greenleaf Park is a compact but generously packed public space along Park Lane East. The facility includes a full basketball court, tennis and pickleball courts, a playground, a shaded pavilion, lighting, landscaping, and parking. The city bills it as a place where residents can play, gather, and spend an afternoon outdoors, and by every measure it is designed to do all three. Yet the most remarkable sentence on its official announcement is the one that follows the list of amenities: the park is being delivered by Horizon Oakland Park LLC at no cost to the city.
That sentence is the key to understanding not just the park, but the larger project of which it is the opening act. Greenleaf Park is the first piece of the Horizon of Oakland Park, a mixed-use development built by the joint venture of Falcone Group and Kaufman Lynn Construction. The development brings 311 apartments and 21,000 square feet of retail space to downtown, along with an indoor parking garage that includes 195 public parking spaces. The project also includes a dog park.
The park itself is a relocation of an earlier Greenleaf Park, rebuilt as part of the Horizon project. The new park includes upgraded basketball and tennis courts, two pickleball courts, a covered playground, and an open-air pavilion, built with private dollars to a public standard.
Getting to that moment required a competitive selection process. The city chose the partnership of Falcone Group and Kaufman Lynn Construction, which became Horizon Oakland Park LLC, for the development. The partnership proceeded through planning and construction, delivering the park as the first component of the larger project.
Greenleaf Park opens at a moment when Oakland Park is visibly and deliberately improving its public spaces. This summer has been a season of openings across the city: a new library at City Centennial Park, a renovated Stevens Field, and upgrades at the Richard E. Giusti Heart Par Cours. Royal Palm Park and Veterans Park are next, with additional progress expected into September, and the city has plans for a Glenwood Garden and a five-acre expansion of Centennial Park. Through strategic planning, public-private partnerships, grant funding, and the reuse of public property, the city says it has added or unlocked more than 30 acres of parkland and green space in recent years, and it has secured more than $72 million in grants since 2015 for parks, infrastructure, mobility, and resilience.
The park sits along a corridor the city is turning into a chain of parks, trails, and public spaces stretching from east to west across the community. Greenleaf is meant to anchor one end of that corridor. It is also part of the city's broader effort to prepare for its centennial in 2029, when Oakland Park marks a hundred years of incorporation. For a city that has spent years investing in its downtown, the new park is a central part of that turn.
On the morning of the 27th, all of that context will be behind the ribbon. The people who turn out will have simpler things to do: a court to play on, a playground for the kids, a pavilion where neighbors can meet. That, in the end, is the quiet genius of a park like Greenleaf. It can carry the whole history of a downtown's redevelopment and still, in the most ordinary sense, simply be a place to go outside. On a Thursday in late August, with the sun high over Broward County, it will open as both a finished civic promise and the first step of something larger still to come.