Most people who love Queeny Park have never walked all the way around it.
They know their corner. The dog park regulars know the valley off Mason Road and nothing past the second gate. The playground families know the western edge near the new equipment and turn back before the woods start. The art fair crowd knows the inside of Greensfelder Recreation Complex in every season but has maybe never set foot on the trail that circles the building they've visited a dozen times. Hawk Ridge Trail runs the full perimeter of the park, a loop of a little over four miles, and it stitches every one of those private routines into a single walk that almost nobody who lives near Town & Country actually finishes end to end.
This fall is a good moment to do it anyway, because for the first time in a couple of years, nothing at Queeny Park is behind a fence or half built.
Two Gates, Two Different Parks
Queeny Park has two entrances, one off Weidman Road and one off South Mason Road, and they don't feel like the same property. The Weidman side puts you at Greensfelder Recreation Complex, the park's built-up center, where the county finished an $11 million remodel of the lobby, locker rooms, and seasonal ice rink in October 2022. The Mason Road side drops you into something quieter almost immediately, a wooded valley that holds the Tails and Trails dog park and, just up the hill, the 1854 Jarville House.
| Weidman Road entrance | Mason Road entrance | |
|---|---|---|
| First thing you see | Greensfelder Recreation Complex | Wooded valley, dog park |
| Character | Built, programmed, indoor-outdoor | Historic, wooded, quieter |
| Best for | Events, ice season, tennis | Trail access, dog walking, history |
The park's recreation complex manager has described Greensfelder as functioning like a convention center from March through mid-September, hosting the Queeny Art Fair, train shows, a book fair, trivia nights, and even a roofing expo, before the building pivots in October to nightly Mid States hockey games and practices on the seasonal rink through February. Two different calendars are running inside the same building, and which one you've experienced probably depends on which season you actually go.
Why Part of the Loop Sat Unfinished for Two Years
If you haven't walked the western stretch of Hawk Ridge Trail lately, here's what changed. The old playground near the Weidman Road side closed in October 2023 over safety concerns after years as a neighborhood fixture. It sat closed for nearly two years while a nonprofit called Unlimited Play worked with the county and Little Tikes Commercial to design something bigger in its place, an inclusive, board game themed playground named for Teddy Gooch, a West County kid born with a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, whose family pushed for a space where balance and stature wouldn't leave him on the sidelines.
The project needed $3.2 million, most of it raised through donations rather than tax dollars, and it finally opened on August 24, 2025. It's built around a hippo shaped entryway, a Connect Four climber, a parallel play piece modeled on Don't Break the Ice, a Game of Life car that doubles as a glider, and a candy cane house that leans into the board game theme all the way through.
That two-year gap is easy to miss if you never walked past that corner of the park, which is exactly the point. A part of Queeny Park was genuinely under construction for most of two years, and unless the western loop was part of your regular route, you may not have registered that anything was missing at all.
The Stretch of Trail Most Regulars Skip
Hawk Ridge Trail is rated highly by the people who use it, with thousands of reviews on AllTrails and an average rating over four and a half stars, but trail activity logs on Trailforks tell a quieter story. Only around fifty recorded activities and sixty check-ins show up for the full route, a low number for a trail this well regarded, which suggests most of that praise comes from people doing a piece of the loop near whichever gate they used, not the whole thing.
If you do walk it end to end, the middle section is where the park stops feeling manicured. The trail crosses through mature woods, oaks and hickories close to seventy feet tall, past a scattering of champion trees two to three centuries old that the county has marked with identification plaques. It's also where an invasive shrub, bush honeysuckle, has taken over large stretches of understory. Crews have cleared it in sections near the entrances, but along the middle of the loop the honeysuckle is still winning, shading out the native dogwoods, redbuds, and spicebush that used to fill that layer of the forest.
Past the woods, the trail opens into a field near North Twin Pond where you'll see equestrian jumps set up in a pasture the county still uses for horses. From there it crosses Owl Creek and runs alongside Jarville Lake before climbing to the Jarville House itself, a Greek Revival home built in 1854 by Hyacinth Renard and listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1984. The American Kennel Club ran its Museum of the Dog out of that same house from 1987 until 2018, when the collection moved back to New York. The building has been quietly historic for longer than most of the park's current amenities have existed.
None of this shows up if your version of Queeny Park starts and ends at the dog park gate.
What's Left on the Calendar Before the Ice Comes Back
The park's fall schedule gives you a reason to see the built side of Queeny at its busiest before Greensfelder shifts over to hockey season. The Labor Day Weekend Art Fair runs Friday through Sunday, September 4 through 6, inside the climate controlled recreation complex, with up to 130 juried artists from 20 or more states showing original work, alongside live music and food from local vendors. It's a smaller sibling to the spring Queeny Art Fair, which marked its 50th year this past March with 120 juried artists and a quarter of them coming from outside Missouri.
A few other things worth knowing before summer tips into fall:
- The Brick Convention LEGO event took over Greensfelder for two sessions each on August 1 and 2, so if you missed it, the next indoor draw at the complex is the Labor Day art fair.
- The Tails and Trails dog park remains membership based, with day passes available at Greensfelder during weekday hours only, not weekends.
- Once the ice rink season starts in October, expect Mid States hockey practices and games most nights through February, which changes the feel of the Weidman Road side considerably from its summer use as an event hall.
Doing the Whole Thing
None of this requires a special occasion. The loop is walkable in under two hours by most estimates, with a modest elevation gain of under 300 feet, easy enough for an evening after work if you start early enough to catch the light. What it gives you that a shorter walk doesn't is the contrast: the manicured, programmed Greensfelder side giving way to the quiet valley by the dog park, then the working woods where centuries old trees and an unchecked invasive shrub are having it out in real time, then the climb to a house that predates the park itself by well over a century.
Queeny Park sits just north of Manchester Road, right against the border of Town and Country, close enough that plenty of residents treat it as their own backyard without ever having walked the whole thing. This fall, with the playground finished, the recreation complex remodel long since settled in, and the honeysuckle still there to see for yourself, it's a good season to finally close the loop.
If you're weighing what it actually feels like to live near a park like this day to day, not just visit it, that's the kind of neighborhood detail worth talking through with someone who knows the area block by block. Nika Leoni works with buyers and sellers across Town and Country and the surrounding West County suburbs, and would be glad to schedule a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
