A Short History of the Red River District

Long before anyone called it a resort district, the stretch of riverbank along what's now Clyde Fant Parkway was a working waterfront. Cotton bound for downriver markets moved through warehouses here, rail spurs cut in from the yards to the east, and the levee kept the Red River from doing what it had done to the town more than once in the nineteenth century. It was loud, practical, and not particularly scenic — which is exactly why almost nobody thought to build a hotel here for most of the twentieth century.

What Changed the Waterfront

Shreveport's riverfront started shifting in the 1990s and 2000s, when riverboat gaming arrived in Louisiana and cities along the Red River began investing in public river access. Clyde Fant Parkway was widened and landscaped, a public boardwalk went in, and the warehouse district a few blocks inland — long since emptied out by shifting freight patterns — started drawing developers who liked the exposed brick and the proximity to the water more than they minded the deferred maintenance.

Velvet Cove's building was part of that second wave. It started as a cotton and rail warehouse, sat partially vacant through the 1970s and 80s, and was converted into the resort in 2015. Walk through the lobby today and the bones are still visible — the ceiling height, the brick, the old loading-dock openings that now frame the entrance to the Cove Deck.

The Music Came With the River

Shreveport's musical history runs deep and doesn't get talked about outside Louisiana nearly as much as it should. The city was a stop on the same circuit that produced the Louisiana Hayride radio program, and brass and blues have never fully left downtown even as the industries around it changed. When Velvet Cove built the Cove Deck, the idea wasn't to import a jazz-club aesthetic from somewhere else — it was to give a local sound a permanent room to play in every weekend.

The district didn't need a theme. It already had one; it just needed somewhere to put it.

The District Today

Walk the boardwalk along Clyde Fant Parkway now and you'll pass a mix of restaurants, a handful of other hotels, event spaces built into old commercial buildings, and public art installed as part of the riverfront redevelopment. It's still a working district in a sense — barges still move on the river, and the levee still does its job — but the warehouses that once handled cotton now handle overnight guests instead.

For visitors, the practical upshot is that most of what makes Shreveport's downtown worth seeing sits within a ten-minute walk of the resort: the boardwalk itself, a cluster of live-music venues, and easy access to the bridges that cross into Bossier City on the river's east bank.

Planning a stay around downtown Shreveport? See our directions page for parking and arrival details.