For four summers, the walk from El Jardin or Los Altos down toward the water has ended in orange cones. The Colorado Lagoon Open Channel Project turned Marina Vista Park's east field into a staging yard, closed Colorado and Eliot Streets to through traffic, and rerouted the after-dinner loop that Park Estates residents used to take for granted. This summer, that changes. Not all at once, and not on a single ribbon-cutting date, but in a sequence that's worth understanding before you plan a Saturday.
The thesis in one sentence: the corridor next door is flipping from construction zone to finished park in stages this season, and the order matters more than the headline.
The reopening sequence, in the order it's happening
The city has stopped promising a single completion date and started publishing milestones. Here is what Public Works has committed to on its project page and at the February 25 town hall, translated into what a neighbor will actually notice.
Roads first. Crews are in the middle of installing a complex sewer siphon beneath the new Colorado Street bridge and are aiming to finish the pipe system so Eliot and Colorado streets can be repaved this summer. That is the milestone that ends the daily detour through Park Avenue and puts the direct route back into service for anyone driving to Wilson High, Blair Field, or the 405 on-ramp at 7th Street.
Field next. The field at Marina Vista Park will be open to the public in late July 2026, after the completion of the sod establishment period. The sod is already down. Sod surface layers have sand from the nursery, contributing to the tint and discoloration that is seen in photos, and is expected to pass through with continual irrigation. So if you have been walking past and thinking the grass looks off, that is the reason.
Channel last. The open water connection is the final phase of a restoration effort that began well over 20 years ago. Crews still need to decommission the lagoon's small culvert and finish excavation up to the Colorado Street bridge before the open channel can go live, and they acknowledge that timelines remain exposed to more buried utilities, hazardous finds, and bouts of bad weather.
Three milestones, three different clocks. A resident who wants to use the field in August will be fine. A resident who wants to kayak from the lagoon to Alamitos Bay through a live tidal channel is still waiting.
Why the channel is the whole point
Skip this section if you already know the history. If you moved into Park Estates in the last decade, it is worth two paragraphs.
The lagoon was not always cut off. The park became less popular for swimming in the 1960s after the channel emptying into Alamitos Bay was turned into a 900 ft-long tunnel that was to be used for a canceled freeway. The freeway never came. The tunnel stayed. Water quality collapsed under it, and locals gave the lagoon a nickname you can find in old newspaper clippings but which does not belong in a real estate post.
What crews are building now reverses that 1960s decision. City project pages lay out the technical goals: opening up the existing 900-foot concrete box culvert to daylight, creating roughly 3.4 acres of new subtidal habitat, and improving tidal exchange for the 18-acre Colorado Lagoon. It involved carving a 12 ft-deep channel through Marina Vista Park and would increase the biodiversity of species in the lagoon and allow for better water circulation.
For a Park Estates household, this is not an environmental abstraction. It is the difference between a lagoon that swims like a pond in August and one that swims like a protected corner of the bay. The playground, picnic areas, and Model Boat Shop have all been there the whole time. The water was the missing piece.
Ground-level guide for the rest of this season
Here is what is already usable, right now, without waiting for the ribbon cutting.
- The swim beach and playground. The site has a sandy swimming beach with restrooms, turf picnic areas and parking on the north and south shores. Water temperatures typically sit in the mid-60s to low 70s in summer, with lifeguards during peak season.
- The Model Boat Shop. The small building near the water has run a summer sailboat program for decades. Recreation Leaders help kids build model sailboats, and races are held each Friday afternoon at the lagoon. It is a drop-in program for children ages 7 and up. If you have grandchildren visiting in July, this is a two-hour block that costs nothing and does not require a reservation.
- The Wetlands and Marine Science Education Center. A concession stand built in the 1960s, and not used since the 1980s was converted to a Marine Science Center operated by the Friends of the Colorado Lagoon. The Friends group has been the community steward here since 1998 and is worth knowing about if you want to volunteer or take a school-age kid to a weekend program.
- The dog walk. The perimeter path is leashed-dog-friendly. It is one of the few flat, shaded loops in East Long Beach that does not require driving to Recreation Park's north side or down to the beach.
- Pedestrian access during construction. If your usual route is blocked, a temporary pedestrian path is open and accessible via the Eliot Street bridge sidewalk from the Marina Vista Park bike path adjacent to the tennis courts and the sidewalk near Paoli Way/Appian Way and 3rd Street.
The paddleboard and kayak crowd should note that the calm, protected water inside the lagoon has always been usable, wave-free, and beginner-friendly. What will change when the channel opens is the option to paddle out toward Marine Stadium rather than in a closed loop.
The friction that has kept this project on the front page
If you have been at any of the town halls, none of this will be news. If you have not, the short version explains why neighbors keep asking whether this summer's dates will hold.
The project broke ground in late 2022 with a completion target of 2024. It has slipped every year since. In 2024, it was delayed again to 2025 and then to 2026. The budget has moved too. In 2021, the city initially estimated the project's cost to be $26.3 million, but once they found a contractor in November 2022 it increased to $32.5 million.
The 2026 overruns are more recent. The Long Beach Post reports the city has spent at least $1.5 million on asbestos surveying and abatement as work continued into 2026, and that the project is at least $4 million over its original roughly $32 million budget. The reason is buried infrastructure that predates modern mapping. Project consultant Michelle Harati told the Long Beach Post that workers have run into unmapped utility lines "17 to 20 times," and said many of those older pipes were lined with asbestos.
Two takeaways for a resident. First, the summer 2026 road reopening is a stated aim, not a guaranteed date, and one more asbestos discovery could push it. Second, the reason it keeps slipping is not mismanagement of the visible work. It is what crews keep finding under the pavement that Park Estates residents have been driving over for fifty years.
What this does to the shape of the neighborhood
Park Estates has always been described in relation to what surrounds it: CSULB to the east, Recreation Park to the north, the Los Altos Center to the southeast, Belmont Shore to the south. The lagoon corridor has been the quietest of those adjacencies for the last four years, less because residents avoided it and more because the roads made it inconvenient.
When Colorado Street repaves and Marina Vista Park's field reopens in late July, the fastest walking route between Park Estates and the coast reopens with it. That is a small change on a map. It is a bigger change on a Sunday morning, when the loop that runs from the interior streets down through the park, along the lagoon, and back up through Alamitos Heights becomes possible again without a detour.
The channel itself will follow later. When it does, the neighborhood will inherit something East Long Beach has not had in living memory: an 18-acre tidal water body directly connected to the bay, with a walking path around it, a swim beach on one shore, and a science center on the other. That is what four years of construction has been for.
If you are thinking about how the reopening changes your own block's value, your walking routine, or your plans for the house, Cynthia Voss and Nathan Walter have been tracking the corridor since ground broke. Reach out for a conversation grounded in what is actually happening on Colorado Street, or request a free home valuation when you are ready to see what the neighborhood looks like on paper.
