Walk the trail at Deer Creek Preserve on any weekday morning and you will pass a small wooden box on a post near the trailhead, stocked with paperbacks, donated a while back by a Washington University student. Cross the bridge over the creek. Read one of the interpretive signs explaining what used to grow here before the plantings went in. It reads like a finished park, the kind of small civic amenity that gets built once and then simply exists.
It isn't finished. What opened here in the spring of 2024 was Phase I of a plan the city has been working for years, and the argument over what Phase II should look like, specifically where a scenic overlook should sit, is happening right now in city meeting rooms most residents never see. If you live near this stretch of South Forty Drive, the shape of your park is still being decided.
From Mulch Pile to Master Plan
The land itself has an unglamorous origin. The City of Ladue bought the roughly 14-acre parcel along Deer Creek from Ameren in 1988 and ran it for decades as a mulch processing site for the city's leaf and brush program. The site even carries the name of a former mayor, Edie Spink, who served from 1975 to 1995. The mulching operation was discontinued in 2017 after the city found that only about 11 percent of residents were actually using it, a participation rate too low to justify the rising cost of running it.
That left the city with a long, narrow strip of land along a creek and no clear plan for it. In 2019, the Ladue Garden Club and the Garden Club of St. Louis began working with the city's Beautification, Open Space and Tree Advisory Committee, known locally as BOSTA, to figure out what to do with it. The landscape architecture firm SWT Design led the planning process, and that September the Ladue City Council approved a master plan calling for a shared-use path and natural landscape restoration across roughly 11 of the parcel's acres.
Then the timeline stalled. From 2021 to 2023, the Metropolitan Sewer District's Deer Creek Sanitary Sewer replacement project cut straight through the site, delaying construction while the city waited for that work to clear. Phase I finally opened in the spring of 2024, with a ribbon cutting on Arbor Day, April 27 of that year. What residents got was an initial trail loop, a bridge over the creek, scattered benches, and a first round of native tree planting, 69 trees installed through the city's Living Legacy tree-donation program alongside contributions from the two garden clubs. A pollinator garden went in too, designed and planted by the Ladue Garden Club to draw bees, butterflies, and moths.
What's Built, and What's Still a Proposal
It helps to separate what actually exists on the ground today from what is still a concept plan waiting on funding and a grant application.
| Status | Feature |
|---|---|
| Built (2024) | Initial trail loop, creek bridge, scattered benches, 69 native trees, interpretive signage, pollinator garden, Little Free Library |
| Proposed (Phase II) | Second looped trail, additional benches, viewing platforms and a scenic overlook along the creek |
The planting plan calls for 43 more trees beyond the 69 already in the ground, so even the landscaping isn't done. And the second loop is the piece that turns this from a short out-and-back walk into an actual destination worth a longer visit, which is exactly why the siting of it has become the thing people are arguing about.
The Overlook Nobody Fully Agreed On
In late 2025, the city put out a community survey asking residents what they thought of the proposed Phase II loop and scenic overlook. That input matters for a practical reason: the city needs documented community engagement data to support its 2026 application for a Municipal Parks Grant, the same state funding source that helped pay for Phase I.
By early 2026, the survey had drawn close to 40 responses, and the sentiment recorded in committee minutes was overwhelmingly supportive of adding the trail loop and overlook. But not everyone was on board with where the overlook itself would sit. Residents in the Twin Springs subdivision, whose properties back up close to the preserve, raised concerns specifically about that feature. City staff walked the site with a few of those residents to point out the proposed locations and talk through what a scenic overlook would actually involve, presumably sightlines, foot traffic, and how close it would sit to backyard fence lines.
That is not a story about a neighborhood fighting a park. It is a story about how even a well-liked, mostly uncontroversial civic project still has a specific point of friction once you get granular enough, and that friction is exactly the kind of detail that never makes it into a generic "parks and trails" writeup.
The Bigger Bet Is Connectivity, Not Just Acreage
Here is the part that actually changes how useful this park becomes: Deer Creek Preserve, on its own, is a short loop on an 11-acre sliver. Great Rivers Greenway operates roughly 300 miles of connected trails across St. Louis County. Right now, this preserve isn't meaningfully wired into that network. It's an island.
The city has applied for federal Transportation Alternative Program funding to change that, specifically to extend the shared-use path along South Forty Drive so it connects the preserve east toward the Trails End subdivision and west to the intersection of Clayton Road and South Forty. If that funding comes through, a resident could conceivably walk or bike from a neighborhood street straight into the preserve and out the other side toward a genuinely larger network, rather than looping back to the same parking area.
That's the quieter, more consequential project sitting behind the more visible fight over one overlook. A scenic overlook changes a single afternoon. A connected path changes a commute, a dog walk, a kid's bike ride to a friend's house. It's the difference between a park you visit and a park you use.
Rodes Park Is Getting the Same Treatment
Deer Creek Preserve isn't the only patch of city land getting this kind of attention. Rodes Park, the small corner lot at the intersection of Ladue Road and Warson Road, has quietly been a Garden Club of St. Louis project for years, mostly known for the daffodil bulbs its members plant each fall with help from local daffodil expert Jason Delaney and for a dogwood tree planted in memory of club members who have passed. The city is now working with both garden clubs on a longer-term plan for that park too, including a bridge, paths, benches, and native plantings, the same basic formula used at Deer Creek Preserve.
Two small parks, two different origin stories, the same slow civic pattern: identify an underused piece of city land, bring in the garden clubs and BOSTA, get a master plan approved, and build it out over years rather than months. If you've noticed Ladue's public green space quietly getting more usable over the past two years, this is why.
If You Want a Say
The BOSTA Committee generally meets the second Thursday of the month at 7:30 a.m., and these are public meetings. The Phase II design, the overlook location, and the fundraising campaign the city has said will launch to help pay for it are all still open questions, not settled ones. The 2026 grant application is built partly on resident input, which means the record isn't closed just because the survey period has passed.
For a lot of Ladue residents, Deer Creek Preserve is simply the place they walk the dog or let the kids ride bikes on a Saturday. It's worth knowing that the version of it you're using today is roughly half of what's planned, and that the choices being made about the other half are happening in a small meeting room a few times a year, not behind closed doors.
Ladue's outdoor spaces have a habit of turning municipal leftovers, an old mulch site, a leftover corner lot, into something residents actually use. That takes years, a few garden clubs, and occasionally a disagreement over exactly where a bench should go. It's a slower way to build a park than most cities manage, but it's also why the ones Ladue does build tend to stick.
Patton Properties has spent years watching Ladue change one project at a time, from the parks residents walk every day to the homes around them. If you're curious what any of that means for a property you own or one you're watching in this neighborhood, contact us and we're glad to talk through it.
