Linden Hills is a quirky neighborhood with a lot of amenities, but yesterday was the first time I had ever stopped at the community park there. Set a few blocks from the Linden Hills “town center”, the park stretches across a couple city blocks and packs a lot into the space. Four tennis courts, two basketball courts, two bocce ball courts, four baseball diamonds with space for a soccer field, a traditional Minneapolis rec center, a circular pool and a play area, to be exact. Everything in this park has the feeling of being new in the last ten years, and has excellent shade trees and green grass.
The Pool
As usual, I’m here for the playground and pool. The pool is interesting because it has a typical shallow wading pool, 15 inches deep, but a secondary “lobe” that comes off it that is only 10 inches deep. This tot pool is separated from the larger pool by a low wall– easily climbed, but a barrier nonetheless. I haven’t yet come across another Minneapolis pool that has this kind of separate shallow pool, though I imagine that the newer zero-depth entry style supplants the need for these tot wading pools and I don’t expect to see any new ones to be built.
Despite that interesting tot pool design, the general feeling about the pool as a whole is that it is rather featureless. There are no sprayers/fountains, no slides, nothing beyond just the shallow splashing about. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fun, but it’s something to know ahead of time.
The pool does have shade trees around it, and at various times of the the day the shade hits different parts of the pool such that you can either stand in the shady part or the sunny part. There are a couple of benches under some shade structures, as well, so it’s a pretty comfortable pool for parents to sit around.
The Playground
The Linden Hills play area spreads out under towering shade trees, and doesn’t feel constrained to some small area by geography or design. It is a Landscape Structures play set, and has the full range of 2-5 year old and 5-12 year old composite structures as well as some swings, a younger tot structure, and a dedicated sand pit (the rest is EWF mulch).
With only two trips to this playground under my belt, I haven’t noticed anything particularly missing from it. It’s got the standard stuff: swings, monkey bars, spinners, rockers, nets, slides, ladders. I did note that this playground does offer fairly good accessibility in terms of points where poured-in-place rubber paths reach from a paved perimeter walkway. The structures aren’t fully inclusive (no ramps) and it’s still a mulched playground, but it doesn’t suffer from paths that go nowhere or are otherwise unusable.
My littlest one enjoyed the small tot house. It’s a small “house” but also a fire truck, featuring a drivers seat and steering wheel. On the other side is a small slide. It’s nice to have the play area work for such a broad range of ages, all together.
Between the play areas are curved paths that wind around trees. It seemed a likely spot for budding bicyclists to practice and a bucolic scene for parents to enjoy from one of the benches.
Overall, really nice park to spend a day at. The local area also has a lot to offer. A few blocks away on the main street you can easily walk to the small Linden Hills Library, Sebastian Joes Ice Cream, Wild Rumpus children’s bookstore, Pinwheel Toys toy store, and a number of upscale restaurants. A little further you run into the west bank of Lake Harriet, which can connect you to the Minnehaha Creek parkway all the way back to Longfellow. Or, head north along the lake and head to the large playground at Lake Harriet Bandshell.
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