Town and Country's Four Parks Aren't Interchangeable Anymore

This month, the Board of Aldermen took up a small line item with a bigger story behind it: a double reading on what the city agenda calls the Preservation Park Pickleball and Bike Playground Project, heard at the August 10 meeting. Read on its own, it looks like one more amenity upgrade in a city that has spent three years renovating playgrounds. It is actually the last step in something more specific: a plan that assigned each of Town and Country's four parks a distinct job, based on what residents said they wanted when the city asked them directly.

A resident survey, not a landscape architect, drew the new map

In February 2021, the city hired SWT Design to assess every playground in its park system and build a replacement master plan. The old ones were showing their age. Anne Nixon, the city's director of Parks and Recreation, has said the pour-in-place surfacing from 20 years earlier was failing and the equipment, while technically ADA compliant, no longer met what the city now considers an inclusive standard.

What happened next is the part worth knowing if you live here. The city ran three open houses and two surveys to ask residents what they actually wanted in each park, and the answer was not "more of the same, everywhere." Originally, Nixon has said, the playgrounds shared a cohesive look that branded the parks as a matched set. Residents pushed back on that. They wanted different features in each location, and they explicitly did not want a playground at Town Square.

Residents preferred to keep Town Square for adult activities like "walking, concerts and dinner on the patio," Nixon said, as the city built out its playground master plan.

That single preference reframed the whole project. Instead of four parks doing the same thing at different scales, Town and Country ended up with four parks doing four different things. Preservation Park's pickleball courts and pump track are the final piece completing that sort, not a standalone addition.

Drace went first, and it stayed small on purpose

Drace Park, nine acres off Cedar Valley Road, was the first to get the new treatment, with construction wrapping in the summer of 2023. The design leans into what already made the park distinct: a restored Kropp Log Cabin sits inside a historic area of the grounds, so the new playground uses real wood posts, a log bridge, a saucer swing, and a treehouse-style tower rather than the standard-issue plastic-and-steel kit you'd find at a typical suburban park.

The budget tells its own story about how the city runs these projects. Drace was estimated at $525,086 and came in at $479,694.69 with no change orders, a detail Nixon called out specifically because it rarely happens on public construction jobs. The county's Municipal Park Grant Commission covered $416,686 of that cost, money that comes from a sales tax St. Louis County voters approved back in November 2000, one of those quiet civic facts that most residents driving past a renovated swing set never think about but that directly funded the swing set.

Longview absorbed almost everything else

Longview Farm Park, at 30 acres the largest park in the system, came next in the sequence and got the biggest playground along with the widest range of programming. Its overhaul cost an estimated $594,000, offset by a $465,000 grant, and construction crews needed two to three months on site once work began, according to Nixon, while the farmhouse, tennis court, barn, and trails stayed open the whole time.

But Longview's identity was never just about the playground. The gardens surrounding the farmhouse are maintained by the Mason Ridge Garden Club, a group of Master Gardeners led by president Claire Chosid who have logged more than 10,000 volunteer labor hours since 2002. The barn and pastures house horses managed by Equine-Assisted Therapy, a nonprofit that runs therapeutic riding programs for children facing physical and developmental challenges. The lake allows catch-and-release fishing for anyone holding a valid Missouri Department of Conservation permit. And the calendar built around the park includes the Turkey Trot, the Holiday Boutique, and the Art, Wine & Music event, on top of tennis lessons and summer camps.

None of that overlaps with what Drace does. Drace is a contained, single-purpose nature playground for younger kids. Longview is the anchor: the park that hosts events, houses animals, and absorbs the traffic that comes with being the system's one true destination.

Preservation Park breaks the kids-only pattern

Preservation Park has a history that most residents driving past it probably don't know. The city originally acquired 32 acres for the park, 12 of which remain as Preservation Park today, dedicated in April 1999. The other 20 acres were sold to Christian Brothers School, known locally as CBC, which built CBC Cadet Park on the land. Town and Country residents can still use those athletic fields and tennis courts free of charge on a first-come, first-served basis when the school isn't using them, a detail worth knowing if you've ever wondered why a 12-acre city park backs directly onto a private school's sports complex.

What's left of Preservation Park today has a picnic pavilion, restrooms, a sand volleyball court, and a multi-use asphalt trail. The project up for approval this month, listed on the city's agenda as the "Preservation Park Pickleball and Bike Playground Project," adds two pickleball courts, a pump track for bikes and scooters and skateboards, and a small hillside play area, all backing up to the wooded, trail-laced section of the park. Nixon has framed the addition around demand rather than novelty: pickleball, she's said, is an exploding sport, and residents specifically wanted a place where adults could play alongside their kids rather than a park built around one age group. There's also stated interest in adding mountain bike jumps in the adjacent woods, something the city says could happen in a future grant cycle if this phase moves forward cleanly.

That is the part that makes Preservation Park different from Drace and Longview. It isn't a playground redo. It's the system's first dedicated adult recreation space outside of Town Square, and it completes a lineup where every park now does one thing well instead of four parks all trying to do everything.

How the pieces sort out

Queeny Park, the large park that sits right next to Town and Country, is not part of this system at all. It's owned and maintained by St. Louis County rather than the city, which is why it doesn't show up in any of the planning documents behind this project.

What this means for your fall calendar

Longview Farm Park hosts the city's Fall Fire & Ice Festival each October. In past years the format has run roughly 5 to 8 p.m. with food and drink trucks, bounce houses, and a live band, including local acts like the VooDoo Players, closing with fireworks over the lake. The same August 10 board agenda that took up the Preservation Park project also included a contract with Fantasy Drone Shows to design and run a drone show at this year's Fire & Ice event, a new addition for 2026.

If you're the kind of resident who tracks these things, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Drace and Longview are finished projects you can use right now. Preservation Park's courts and pump track are close but not yet built, and based on how quickly the Longview playground moved from groundbreaking to open once its contract cleared, it's reasonable to expect the pickleball courts to be playable well before next summer if the board approves the bid this month. Town Square stays exactly what residents asked it to be: the one park in the system built for walking a loop after dinner rather than chasing a toddler across a playground.

That's the actual shift here. Not four parks that happen to exist in the same city, but four parks that residents, through open houses and surveys most of them may not remember attending, sorted into a system where each one has a job the others don't try to do.

Whether you've lived in Town and Country for twenty years or you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, Susan Hurley Homes knows this market at the level of which park hosts the Turkey Trot and which one just added pickleball courts. If you're thinking about your next move here or anywhere in the St. Louis area, request a complimentary consultation and let's talk through what fits your family's next chapter.