Walk north on Dixie Highway and turn onto Northwood Road on a weekday evening and the first thing that stops you is the mural. Eight stories of color climbing the side of The Spruce, the new mixed-use building that Affiliated Development finished at the heart of the village. It's called Color Field of Northwood, painted by local artist Renee Phillips, and the city says it's the tallest mural West Palm Beach has ever put up. You can see it from blocks away, which is the point.
Keep walking east toward the water and the story changes. Northwood Road narrows, passes the last of the shops, and simply stops before it reaches Flagler Drive. No bridge, no clean sidewalk connection, no obvious route to Currie Park and the Intracoastal beyond it. For a neighborhood that markets itself on walkability, this is the gap that doesn't show up in the brochure copy: the village and the waterfront it sits a few blocks from aren't actually joined yet. That's not a complaint about Northwood. It's the most useful thing to understand about it right now, because the fix is already in motion, on a public timeline anyone can track.
An Eight-Story Answer to an Old Question
The mural is the easiest part of this story to see, so start there. Color Field of Northwood sits atop The Spruce, and when the city unveiled it, Sybille Canthal, the city's Director of Arts, Culture and Community Building, described the piece as "accessible, inclusive, and in harmony with the architecture and surrounding community." That's a diplomatic way of saying the mural was designed to be read from a distance, not discovered on a quiet side street the way the village's older public art tends to be.
Northwood Village has never been short on personality. Every gallery, boutique and café along the strip is independently owned, which is part of why the neighborhood was added to the West Palm Beach Register of Historic Places in 2016. But an eight-story mural on a new building is a different kind of statement. It says the north end of the village can now support density on a scale the neighborhood hasn't seen before, and that the CRA-backed redevelopment push that's been building since the agency formed in 1993 has reached a visible, photographable milestone.
The Park Getting Built Before the Road That Reaches It
A few blocks east, at 2400 North Flagler Drive, Currie Park is already under construction. The 16.5-acre waterfront park, originally deeded to the city in 1920 by then-Mayor George Graham Currie, is in the middle of a redesign backed by a $17.6 million grant from the State of Florida. Construction began in spring 2025 and the project is targeting completion in winter 2027.
What's actually being built there is worth knowing before you plan a visit around it:
- A tidal cove amphitheater and open event lawn for public gatherings
- 1,150 linear feet of restored living shoreline
- 1,181 linear feet of elevated boardwalk along the water
- 1,900 linear feet of improved shoreline frontage overall
- A resiliency hub built to double as an emergency support facility
This is the kind of project that changes what a short walk from the village is actually good for. Right now it's still a construction zone. By winter 2027, on the timeline the city and its engineering partner have laid out, it becomes the waterfront anchor the neighborhood has been missing.
A Road Still Waiting on Its Engineers
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're only watching the mural and the park. The physical link between them, the Northwood Road extension itself, is still in the design phase. The city put out a request for engineering proposals in the spring, officially titled "Engineering Consulting Services for Northwood Road Extension," covering roadway and stormwater improvements as part of a complete streets project in what the city calls the Currie Mixed Use District. That proposal window closed on May 12, 2026.
Closed doesn't mean built. It means the city is now past the point of asking who wants the job and into the process of actually designing the road, the sidewalks, and the drainage that will eventually carry pedestrians from the village core to the park. Nothing about this timeline is unusual for a municipal infrastructure project, but it does mean anyone picturing a finished promenade between Northwood Road and the Intracoastal this year is picturing something that doesn't exist yet.
Here's where the three pieces actually stand, side by side, as of this August:
| Project | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|
| Color Field of Northwood mural | Complete and visible from Northwood Road |
| Currie Park redesign | Under construction, targeting winter 2027 |
| Northwood Road extension | Engineering proposal window closed May 12, 2026; design phase underway |
The mural finished first because a mural is a matter of scaffolding and paint. The road and the park are matters of grant funding, stormwater engineering, and construction schedules, which is exactly why they're moving on a slower, staggered clock.
The Calendar That Already Works
None of this touches the part of Northwood Village that doesn't need an engineering firm to function. Nights in Northwood runs on the fourth Friday of every quarter, and the city has already published the rest of this year's dates: September 25 and November 27. It's the same format each time, dozens of vendors, live music, and merchants staying open late along Northwood Road.
The village is also running through a stretch of summer specials the city announced in late June, with dining deals, wellness offers, and home goods promotions from local merchants running now through September. If you haven't wandered the strip lately, it's worth doing before the specials wrap: Café Centro for Italian and live jazz, Malakor Thai Café, Mestizo Fusion Cuisine for Peruvian flavors, or Herbs & Earth if you're after fair-trade tea and handmade goods rather than a sit-down meal.
That's the useful contrast buried in all of this. The social calendar in Northwood Village doesn't need permits or grants to keep running. It's already mature, already reliable, already something residents build a Friday around. The infrastructure is what's catching up to it, not the other way around.
A Second Main Street, a Century Later
Northwood Road was laid out in the early 1920s with the explicit ambition of becoming West Palm Beach's second Main Street, and the Mediterranean Revival and Mission-style buildings that architects John Volk and William King put up along it still carry that intention. A century later, the plan is finally catching up to itself. The mural announces that the village can carry real density. The park under construction a few blocks away announces that the waterfront is worth a serious public investment. The road extension, still moving through its engineering phase, is the piece that's supposed to connect those two ambitions into one walkable neighborhood instead of two separate destinations a car ride apart.
If you live in or near Northwood Village, the honest read on this summer is that you're watching a century-old street finally get the connection it was always meant to have, just not on a schedule that finishes this year. Currie Park's own projected completion date, winter 2027, is the number worth circling if you want to know when the walk to the water actually becomes a walk and not a workaround.
If you're wondering what any of this means for what a home in the village is actually worth once the road and the park are both finished, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who's been tracking these projects block by block. The Burroughs Team knows this stretch of West Palm Beach well enough to talk through what a finished waterfront connection tends to do to a neighborhood's value, and what it doesn't, before you make any decisions based on a construction timeline.
