Walk the curve of Grand Boulevard past Sherwood Lane this September and the corner reads differently than it did in the spring. There's a pond now, with a footbridge crossing it, and a stone wall with names carved into it facing the water. Dozens of new trees stand in rows still thin enough to look freshly planted, because they are. If you hadn't walked this stretch since early in the year, you'd wonder when the city got around to funding this. The answer is that the city mostly didn't. Your neighbors did.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, and it's the thing that separates how Nichols Hills grows its public space from how almost every other city its size handles the same job.
The park count that won't sit still
Ask how many parks Nichols Hills has and you'll get a different answer depending on which page you're looking at and when it was last updated. As of this August, the city's own Nichols Hills Parks, Inc. page puts the figure at 35. Local coverage from this past May, filed right after two new projects wrapped, counted 37. Neither number is wrong exactly. They're just measuring a total that moved twice in the same year, which is the part worth sitting with.
Most cities add parkland through a bond election or a line item in a capital budget that gets debated at a council meeting and then forgotten. Nichols Hills does that too, but a meaningful share of what actually gets built here starts with a private citizen deciding to write a check, then recruiting neighbors to match it. The park count isn't a fixed civic fact. It's closer to a running tally of who decided, this particular year, that a corner of their two square miles was worth personally underwriting.
2026 was an unusually active year for that mechanism to fire, and it fired twice.
Two projects, one funding model
The two additions couldn't look more different on paper, but they share the same DNA underneath.
| Redbud Park | Westminster Park | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Grand Blvd & Sherwood Lane | 1800 block of Westminster Place |
| Cost | $2.24 million | $1.4 million |
| Funded by | Resident capital campaign, led by a $500,000 gift from Robert and Karen Browne | City-funded |
| What changed | New fountain, pond, pedestrian bridge, donor plaza wall, dozens of new trees | Two residential lots purchased and converted into the city's first public park in Ward 3 |
| Champion | Capital campaign co-chaired by Nancy Herzel and Jamie Farha | Championed by Mayor Steven Goetzinger |
Westminster Park is the more conventional story. The city bought two residential homes on the west end of the block and turned that ground into a cul-de-sac park with nature-inspired playground equipment, sidewalk trails, new trees, and a water feature. Planning and site acquisition had been underway since 2023, and construction itself took less than a year once it started. It's the first public park Ward 3 has ever had, which is its own small landmark for a city this compact.
Redbud Park is the one that shows the donor culture at work. The $2.24 million redesign updated a master plan for the corridor first drawn up in 2008 by the Nichols Hills Grand Boulevard Park Committee, co-chaired by Peter Hoffman and Pete Everest. Landscape architect Scott Howard designed the current version, and general contractor GreenShade Trees LLC built it. But the money behind it came overwhelmingly from residents. Beyond the Brownes' lead gift, the city reported that neighbors donated more than $1.1 million toward the total. That's not a rounding error on a municipal budget. That's a meaningful fraction of a $2.24 million project paid for by people who live within walking distance of the finished pond.
Put the two projects side by side and you get a fuller picture than either tells alone: Nichols Hills fills obvious gaps in ward coverage through city funding, and it upgrades and re-imagines existing public land through private philanthropy that runs on a scale most subdivisions never attempt.
The nonprofit behind the checkbook, with a new name at the top
The organization that makes the private half of that equation possible is Nichols Hills Parks, Inc., a nonprofit that has quietly run the city's planting, upkeep, and beautification since 1983. For over four decades, it had one chairman: Susan Marshall, who led the group from its founding.
This year that changed. Casey Williams, who had already spent 14 years chairing the volunteer committee for Woods Park, stepped into the citywide role as the completion of Redbud and Westminster coincided with the leadership transition.
Williams has been open about what she wants to add next, and some of it points to a shift in what residents might see funded going forward.
"My husband and I have lived in Nichols Hills for 40 years."
"I would love to see public courts built, a dog park, or a picnic pavilion."
That second line is a departure from the pattern. Nearly everything Parks, Inc. has funded to date has been green space: trees, plantings, medians, the kind of upkeep that keeps the city's curving streets looking the way they've looked for close to a century. A dog park or a set of public tennis and pickleball courts would be a different category of amenity entirely, and Williams has said the idea would depend on additional land being gifted to the city, the same mechanism that made Westminster Park possible.
She's also floated something more immediate. Parks, Inc. has discussed launching a Winter Carnival in Kite Park the Sunday after Thanksiving, with a lighting ceremony and hot chocolate. Nothing about it is confirmed yet, but if it happens, it would land on November 29 this year, and it would be the first new recurring event the nonprofit has proposed in some time.
Where to actually walk this fall
If you want to see what four decades of this funding pattern has produced, in one afternoon, without much driving:
- Start at Redbud Park, on Grand Boulevard at Sherwood Lane, and cross the new pedestrian bridge over the pond before the trees fill in and block the sightline to the water.
- Follow Grand Boulevard toward the North Grand corridor, where the median plantings Parks, Inc. maintains give the whole stretch its consistent look block to block.
- Cut over to Kite Park for the gazebo and playground, and keep an eye out for any signage about a winter event later this fall.
- Finish at Westminster Place in the 1800 block, where the newest park in the city sits on ground that was two residential lots as recently as last year.
None of these are secrets to anyone who has lived here more than a season. But the fact that two of the four stops on that walk didn't exist in their current form as of last spring is easy to miss if you're not paying attention to how the numbers on the city's own pages keep changing.
What this actually tells you about the neighborhood
The obvious takeaway is that Nichols Hills got two nice new parks this year. The more useful one is what that says about how the city actually operates day to day. When a place funds a meaningful share of its public realm through resident philanthropy rather than municipal debt, the pace and shape of what gets built tracks who's willing to lead a campaign and write the first big check, not what a five-year capital plan says is due. That's a different kind of civic rhythm than most suburbs run on, and it's part of why a walk through this city in September looks different than it did in April.
If you're already living here, it's worth knowing the mechanism, if only so the next ribbon cutting doesn't come as a surprise. And if you're the kind of person who might one day be the name on that plaza wall, or just wants to understand how a neighborhood like this actually works before you commit to a block, the team at Stetson Bentley knows Nichols Hills at this level of detail because it's the kind of thing we track for our own clients here. Book an appointment or request a home valuation when you're ready to talk specifics, no pressure either way.
