How Queeny Park in Town and Country Is Changing
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Walk into the new playground at Queeny Park and you'll notice it before you can name it: a low shelf of angled gray rock, worn smooth in a way none of the surrounding equipment is. Everything around it is new. Rubber safety surfacing. A game-board theme with a hippo-shaped entryway. A climbing structure modeled after Connect Four. And then, tucked against one edge, this one strip of stone that looks like it wandered in from a different decade.
It did. That rock is what's left of the stone pyramids that stood on this spot for close to fifty years, the playground where generations of West County kids scraped their knees and ignored their mothers' warnings about jumping off the top. When the county and the nonprofit Unlimited Play sat down to design a replacement, families who grew up on those pyramids pushed back on a clean demolition. Chuck Nielsen, the nonprofit's director of operations, told St. Louis Public Radio the negotiation ended with a compromise: about 20 feet of the original angled climbing rock would stay, built into the new design as a physical bridge between what the park used to be and what it's becoming.
That detail is the whole story of Queeny Park, and it's a story most write-ups about the new playground miss entirely. This isn't a place that gets reinvented for people discovering it for the first time. It's a place that gets renegotiated, piece by piece, by people who never left. If you already live in Town and Country and treat this park as background noise, that pattern is worth noticing, because it explains a lot of what's quietly changed here over the past year.
The playground that came down was completed in September 1974, designed by Roland W. McFarland through a bequest from Ethel S. Queeny, whose family's estate became the park after St. Louis County bought the land in 1970 with 1969 bond issue funds. By the time it closed, the structure was condemned, and the tunnels and rock-climbing slopes that had made it locally famous were also its liability: kids who used wheelchairs or had physical limitations couldn't use most of it.
Its replacement, the Teddy and Friends Inclusive Playground, opened August 24, 2025, meaning it's about to pass its first full year in the park. It's named for Teddy Gooch, a West County kid born with achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, whose mother Erin Gooch spent years watching him sit out at conventional playgrounds before she called Unlimited Play and started the process that raised roughly $3.2 million to build something different. The finished design leans into imaginative play rather than away from it: a hippo-shaped entry, a "Don't Break the Ice" rope piece built for parallel play, a car from The Game of Life that doubles as a glider, and a candy-striped house pulled straight from Candy Land, all engineered so kids with and without physical limitations can use the same equipment side by side.
None of that required keeping a strip of fifty-year-old rock. The county could have cleared the site and started from nothing, the way most playground replacements work. Instead, the negotiation that came out of resident input treated nostalgia as a design constraint worth honoring, not an obstacle to plan around.
If Queeny Park were the only place this happened, you could call it a one-off. It isn't. Town and Country ran its own playground master planning process starting in February 2021, hiring SWT Design and holding three open houses and two resident surveys to figure out what people actually wanted in the city's own parks. The answer surprised the planning team: rather than matching playgrounds with a shared look, as the old system had done, residents wanted each park to feel different. Drace Park, at 2310 Cedar Valley Road, got its new playground first, opening in 2023 on a budget of just over $525,000. Longview Farm Park, the largest and busiest park in the city's system at 13525 Clayton Road, got its new playground built around the existing red barn, where Equine Assisted Therapy already runs classes with horses for kids with special needs, according to the city's own reporting on the rollout.
Then there's Town Square, where the city deliberately chose not to build a playground at all. Parks and Recreation director Anne Nixon has said residents preferred to keep that space open for what they were already using it for: walking, evening concerts, dinner on the patio. So the free Friday-night concert series that runs there through spring and summer, featuring local acts like Vince Martin and Hubb & the Heavy Hearts, with free shuttle service running from Town Square out to nearby church and school lots, stayed exactly as adult and exactly as unhurried as residents wanted it. The city didn't add a feature because it was trendy. It preserved a use pattern because that's what the people already there had asked for.
The same instinct, keep what's already working and leave the rest alone, shows up in how little Queeny Park's trail system gets used relative to how big it is. The Hawk Ridge Trail skirts the park's perimeter, alternating between paved and gravel sections as it passes North Twin Pond and a stretch of open field lined with equestrian jumps. From there, the shorter Owl Creek Trail, roughly half a mile, connects Hawk Ridge to the White Oak Trail, crossing its namesake creek before climbing toward the historic house at the top of the property. Reviewers who've walked the full loop describe it taking close to an hour and covering roughly three miles, longer than most people assume from the parking lot.
A few things worth knowing if you're finally doing the whole loop instead of the short paved circuit near the recreation complex:
Most residents know one piece of this system well and have never walked the rest, which says less about the trail and more about how people relate to a park they assume they've already seen.
Fewer things illustrate this pattern better than what happened to Jarville House, the 1854 Greek Revival mansion at 1721 South Mason Road that anchors the top of the property. For thirty years it held the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog, which moved there from New York City in 1987 and became a genuine, if under-visited, regional attraction. The museum closed on September 30, 2017, and reopened in Manhattan the following February, ending three decades of Queeny Park being the museum's home. County parks director Gary Bess said at the time that the plan was to keep the historic house running as a museum and event space, and it has continued to operate as a rentable venue since, without much fanfare.
That's nearly a decade of a landmark quietly switching purposes, and it's entirely plausible you've driven past the house without knowing the dogs left. It's the same story as the rock shelf in the new playground: a change that happened gradually enough that it never registered as news, even though it changed what the building actually does.
None of this means Queeny Park is standing still. The Greensfelder Recreation Complex went through an $11 million remodel, closing in May 2021 and reopening in October 2022 with a redone lobby, locker rooms, and a new seasonal ice rink package, and it now hosts the Queeny Art Fair, a book fair, and trivia nights through the warmer months. Change is happening constantly here. It just tends to happen underneath things people already recognize, rather than replacing them outright.
That's worth knowing if you live nearby and have started treating this park as a fixed backdrop rather than a place still being shaped. The playground's first birthday lands on August 24. Before then is a reasonable excuse to walk the far side of the loop you've never finished, or to stand at that rock shelf and notice what it took to keep it there.
If you're weighing what it actually means to put down roots near a park like this, whether you're a longtime West County family or considering a move into one of the neighborhoods that treat Queeny Park as an extension of the backyard, Sandra Mesker knows this stretch of Town and Country block by block. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what's changing here and what it means for your next move.
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