Universal Plaza opened in April 2023 with a marching band, a ribbon cutting, and a $5.6 million fountain that city officials called the park's crown jewel. Three years later, that same splash pad has sat dry through all of the 2026 season, and the two-acre plaza on SW Burnham Street has still been the busiest corner of downtown Tigard most weeks since May.
That gap between what the plaza was built to be and what it's actually become is worth understanding if you live anywhere near downtown. The water feature was the headline. It turns out it was never the load-bearing part of the design.
The Fountain That Failed Its Paperwork
The City of Tigard confirmed this summer that the Universal Plaza splash pad will stay closed for the remainder of the 2026 season while staff work through licensing requirements with Washington County and the Oregon Health Authority. The city has been explicit that this isn't a water-quality problem. It's a certification one: the splash pad can't get a county operating license until OHA signs off on system upgrades identified during the required off-season review, and that review turned up more work than anyone expected. You can follow the city's own splash pad updates page for the latest, but the short version for anyone planning a summer outing is simple: don't promise the kids a splash pad day at Universal Plaza this year.
What's notable is how little that closure seems to have mattered to the plaza's actual foot traffic. Sunday mornings and Thursday evenings, the crowd is still there. It's just there for different reasons than the ribbon-cutting suggested.
Thursdays Took Over
Music in the Plaza runs every Thursday evening from 5 to 7 p.m. through the summer, and it's been carrying the plaza's social calendar since the water feature went quiet. Melts in Your Mouth Band opened the July lineup, and White Rhino Marimba played July 23 with vendors Wow Cow, Paradise Grindz & Exotic Eggrollz working the plaza that night.
Layered underneath the Thursday series is the Tigard Farmers Market, which sets up at Universal Plaza every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. through October 25. Between the two, the plaza has a scheduled reason to fill up twice a week from spring through fall, independent of whether the fountain is running.
The boardwalk at the back of the plaza also connects directly to the Fanno Creek Trail, so a Sunday market trip and a walk down toward Woodard Park or Dirksen Nature Park have become a natural pairing for a lot of downtown residents. The plaza was designed around that connection from the start, with the fountain positioned as the visual anchor and the trail link as the functional one. This summer flipped which of those two is actually doing the work.
The Food Carts Were Never the Sideshow
The more interesting story at Universal Plaza isn't the concerts. It's what's happening in the two food carts parked along Burnham Street, because that program has quietly become a real pipeline onto Main Street.
The city bought and outfitted those two carts in 2022 using an AARP Community Challenge grant and support from Washington County's economic development program. Each one is a full class IV commercial kitchen. Entrepreneurs get reduced rent and hands-on business coaching for a 16 to 24 month startup window, with rent stepping up as the business grows, and the expectation is that they eventually move on to a permanent storefront and make room for the next operator.
Juliana Moseley beat that timeline by more than a year. She opened Harvest Moon Experience in one of the Launch Pod carts in 2023, believed to be the first sangria bar in the state of Oregon, and after nine months in the program she moved into a brick-and-mortar space at 12553 SW Main Street, below Senet Game Bar, rebranding as Harvest Moon Sangria Bar.
Her old cart didn't sit empty. Mia Selders moved her ice cream business, Nunny & Pheebs, into it after building a customer base at the Tigard Farmers Market. Jay Kwon, who grew up in Tigard, opened Wow Cow in the second cart, serving Korean-American comfort food built on his family's recipes. Tigard's Economic Development Manager Lloyd Purdy put the demand plainly: "Tigard residents often ask for more restaurants in downtown Tigard and an ice cream shop." The Launch Pod is the city's answer to that request, one cart tenancy at a time.
What's currently parked at Universal Plaza:
- Wow Cow — Korean-American rice bowls, sliders, and Philly cheesesteaks, open Tuesday through Sunday
- Nunny & Pheebs — hand-crafted ice cream and sandwiches, graduated from the farmers market circuit
- West Coast Torta — the plaza's longest-running cart, serving since Universal Plaza's 2023 opening
That's a faster and more visible turnover than most downtown storefront cycles, and it's happening in a city-run program most visitors walk past without realizing what they're looking at.
What's Happening to the Trail Underneath It All
The Fanno Creek Trail that runs behind Universal Plaza is part of a 15-mile regional trail system that parallels I-5 and Highway 217 from Tualatin to Garden Home, and Tigard has spent years closing the gaps in its own stretch of it. That work is still very much in progress, and the most consequential piece of it right now doesn't even run through downtown.
The Ash Creek Nature Link, a proposed pedestrian bridge and greenway that would connect the Metzger area to Washington Square and the regional Fanno Creek Trail with an overpass over Highway 217, was described by city officials as shovel-ready pending roughly $4 million in additional Metro grant funding. That funding didn't materialize as expected, and Tigard Mayor Yi-Kang Hu and other city leaders filed a formal appeal ahead of Metro Council's July 21 meeting, arguing the project delivers exactly what voters approved a regional parks bond to fund. Whether that appeal changed Metro's decision hadn't surfaced in local coverage as of this writing, but the land donations that make the project possible are time-sensitive, and a long delay could unwind agreements that took years to put together.
None of that touches the boardwalk behind Universal Plaza directly, but it's the same trail network, the same funding mechanisms, and the same city leadership fighting to finish what's still an incomplete system. If you use the Fanno Creek Trail regularly, it's worth watching.
The Plaza Was Never Really About the Fountain
Step back and the pattern is clear. Universal Plaza was marketed around a splash pad, and that splash pad has been offline for an entire season without licensing officials calling it a safety issue, without attendance collapsing, and without downtown losing its Thursday and Sunday rhythm. The park's actual infrastructure turned out to be its programming: a weekly concert series with a rotating vendor lineup, a Sunday farmers market that runs the length of the growing season, and a food cart incubator that's already sent one business to a permanent Main Street address with two more in the pipeline behind it.
That's a different kind of proof of concept than a ribbon cutting. It suggests the city built something more durable than a fountain, even if the fountain was the thing everyone showed up to photograph in 2023.
If you're already spending your Thursday nights at Universal Plaza or your Sunday mornings at the farmers market, you've probably felt this shift without naming it. And if you're thinking about what it says about downtown Tigard's direction, or wondering how a corner like this one shapes what a home nearby is actually worth, the team at Place Portland knows this stretch of Washington County well enough to walk through it with you. Schedule a strategy session whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
