Some parks get a good score because of how they feel, and some parks accumulate a good score because of the amount of things they have for people to do. Oak Park is the latter. 

In fact, it’s the only park in the city with washrooms, a spray park, all-purpose fields, a baseball diamond, tennis and basketball courts, and a place for ball hockey.

Is that list a little bit cherrypicked? Perhaps, but those sorts of amenities form the backbone of a park system, and you can enjoy all of them at Oak — and only Oak.  

There’s more to park than just a collection of amenities though. Oak also has a quirky 80s vibe to its entire design, a spooky batting cage and large lights that allow for nighttime sports. The playground has three separate structures for different ages, and the spray park has a number of bridges and areas where water springs up, providing variety for a child’s experience. It’s definitely a top-10 park for kids, even if there’s no wow factor (though again, that’s the theme at Oak).  

And while most of the park’s amenities are bunched up together in the north, the tennis courts are in a quieter area in the south separated by trees, which solves the aesthetic problem that large fenced-off tennis courts in the middle of parks often create. 

There’s pretty much no things to do or places to eat near Oak Park, and it’s one of the last parks in this journey where we can’t say it’s absolutely essential for Vancouverites to visit if they’ve never been. Construction on a new modern community centre within the park is scheduled for 2023, with completion a couple years after that, at which point the area might become somewhat more of a destination.

Still, we judge most parks by how well it serves its intended purpose — and Oak does that and then some.

When you think of the best family parks in Vancouver, Tecumseh wouldn’t necessarily come to mind, but this smallish park in city’s southeast is popular for a reason. 

First, there’s the playground: it was the centrepiece of a $500,000 renovation to the park a decade ago, and it shows. There are swings and a climbing apparatus, a bendy tree that seems to be upside down in the centre, a sandy pit with play equipment…and most importantly a tractor. A big old, honest to god tractor, one that kids young and old can climb on top of and feel very silly and joyful, and if that does not sound appealing we express regret for your lack of childlike imagination. Tractor!

A lot of your enjoyment of Musqueam Park will depend on how much you enjoy Pacific Spirit Park or the inland Stanley Park trails.

That’s essentially the draw of Musqueam Park — named for the First Nation (one of three whose unceded lands include Vancouver) with extensive lands next to the park — and your mileage for this score will vary a lot depending on those feelings. Outside a couple generic sports fields, there’s not much here other than those trails.

But they are lovely: serene, tree-lined, with plenty of birds in the air and creeks and ferns on the ground, some dramatic river valleys and some areas that feel as though they haven’t been touched in centuries. It’s part of the Musqueam Park Walk, a 5km loop that has a number of pieces of art and markers of Musqueam culture and history along the way. 

With Queen Elizabeth Park just across the street, it’s easy for Riley Park to get lost in its shadows. But the truth is, this smaller family park is nearly as good.

A lot of that is owed to the modern renovation done about five years ago — what was once some baseball diamonds next to aging play equipment is now a modern, multi-use park, with much more space due to the community centre moving across the street to Hillcrest. 

There’s a small forest, giant climbing rock (possibly the best in the city), and two separate play areas for kids, each with a different theme (one a big sandy pit, the other a more basic play structure, but with a zip line). And there’s still enough room for a couple community gardens and ample parking space.  

The baseball field is pleasant, the field house well used by a number of groups in pre-pandemic times, and outside of game days at the baseball stadium, the traffic is fairly minimal. There’s energy and variety to Riley, but enough quiet nooks as well.

And then there’s the added bonus of a farmer’s market — one of the best in the city, right in the park, creating a dynamic atmosphere on Saturdays,. 

Yes, you’ll take the visiting relatives to Queen Elizabeth, but this is the type of excellent, self-contained community park that you’ll keep coming back to long after they head back east. 

It’s beautiful. It’s sprawling. It’s central. 

And it’s overrated. 

Queen Elizabeth Park was created in the 1930s, converted from a quarry site on the side of Little Mountain (its actual name), which had been used to build many of the roads in the quickly-growing city. With its majestic views and central location, it has been described as one of the jewels of Vancouver. If you were to go by marketing and general awareness, it would probably be the second best park in the city. 

And there’s *some* justification for that: befitting a mid-20th century park named for royalty, the park has a languid, regal splendor — if you like pretty flowers, there’s pretty much no better walk in the city, with three separate gardens to peruse. 

The Bloedel Conservatory is a lovely place to see exotic birds at an affordable price, the duck pond a relaxing place to see more common ones for free, the restaurant and surrounding viewing areas of downtown Vancouver a very solid (if overdone) setting for weddings or graduation photos. There’s a fairly good pitch and putt course, a passable disc golf course, and a giant arrangement of tennis, pickleball, basketball and ball hockey courts all slammed together. For our score, Queen E ranked only behind Stanley, Sunset Beach and VanDusen Botanical Gardens when it came to enjoyment for adults. 

John Norquay was premier of Manitoba in the 1880s, and visited Vancouver once during that time — if he had a greater connection to this city, it certainly hasn’t been highlighted by local organizations. 

Nevertheless, that begat Norquay Street, and Norquay School, and the Norquay Ratepayers and Community Association, which in 1926 successfully lobbied the municipality of South Vancouver to name the new park at Kingsway and Wales for Norquay as well, and that’s how you get the name of a neighbourhood, not through any real thought or explicit declaration, but by the slow advancement of average ideas until there’s no real alternative.

Enough about Crosstown though.

We’re here to talk about Norquay Park, and it’s a good one, once again thanks to a well-executed renovation by the park board about a decade ago. 

It’s a tale of two parks, really: the unrenovated part in the south is an unremarkable field, a couple of lightly maintained baseball diamonds but little else, the type of green space you can find anywhere in the city.

For a park barely a decade old, Hinge sure feels timeless. 

Part of that comes from the little touches of history in the park, namely the rusty submarine-looking bridge that crosses a creek and the railway ties at its southern end. 

Part of that comes from the wetland that takes up the southwest portion of the park — someone new to the city would scarcely believe it was so new, with the beavers and waterfowl that make their home in the area. 

Part of it comes from how lived-in the park feels, even though it was an industrial area transformed as part of the Olympic Village: it’s incredibly popular for the thousands of people who live in the neighbourhood and don’t have a larger nearby park, so it ends up serving a lot of different needs. 

And part of it comes from the sense of exploration the park affords: there are all sorts of little hills and rock circles and walkways over the wetland that give multiple options for getting to know the park.

20 short notes on Vancouver’s 20th best park.

1. Yes, Habitat Island is its real name. Not “Beer Island”. 
2. Why is it called Beer Island? Well, it’s a man-made island (technically a peninsula where you have to cross), and people like to drink there. 
3. People like to drink pretty much anywhere, of course. But Habitat Island is a relatively secluded waterfront area with many places you can sit, in an area highly populated with childless Millennials, so you do the math. 
4. Overall, its reputation as “Beer Island” is overblown — on any day you’ll see a few people quietly imbibing somewhere on the island or rocks surrounding it, but more people just enjoying the view,
5. And the mystique of Beer Island takes away from the park’s actual backstory, which is plenty fun itself: the federal government required the city to create more shoreline when it took some away to create Olympic Village. An island was certainly one way to create a lot of artificial shoreline in a concentrated area. 
6. As the story goes, it was created from 60,000 metres of rock and gravel and sand from related Olympic construction.
7. They also planted 246 trees
8. And 20,929 shrubs.
9. They also added a few little trails that go nowhere, and there’s enough big rocks and little bushes that it’s a fun area to explore for small kids.
10. There used to be more trees and foliage before — that was probably more fun for people clandestinely drinking, but likely makes it a little more safe overall.