The park consists of two 4,000 foot promenades that run along the river on either side of the multilevel 10th Street Bypass and Fort Duquesne Boulevard above.

The idea of riverfront parks for downtown Pittsburgh dates back to 1911 and a plan prepared by the Olmsted Brothers.

The Trust's Public Arts Advisory Committee commissioned a collaboration between artists Ann Hamilton, Michael Mercil, and landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, who is a professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and his firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) to create the new park.

According to Carol Brown, the head of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust at the time, "the challenges of the site became the strengths of the final design of the park.

Two parallel linear spaces dissected by highways, with vastly different elevations and periodic flooding, led MVVA, Hamilton, and Mercil to create an innovative, complex and highly successful design vocabulary for the park".