For a while it was branded as “the biggest free water park in North America”, and while we’re not sure if that was ever objectively true, Granville Island’s water park is objectively awesome. 

The biggest attraction, of course, is the mini-waterslide, and while it’s not particularly fast, it is a FREE MINI WATERSLIDE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CITY, IF YOU’RE SIX AND NOT EXCITED BY THIS WHAT ARE YOU DOING.

Sorry, got a little excited there. 

But there’s also a little tunnel and tons of hoses, a large expanse of more generic water park features, all in one of the most unique urban areas in all of Canada. If your kid doesn’t like water? Well they are a coward have other options, with a standard playground that has slides and a tiny climbing structure that rotates. 

So, yes, best park for kids in the city (though you could make an argument for a few others, if you wanted). There’s not a lot of reason for adults to stop here if they’re not with young ones, but there’s a number of convenient places to watch over the young ones — including a huge covered picnic area right next to the park, which we may have taken advantage of once or twice during the pandemic.   

That pandemic meant the waterslide part of the park was closed the last two years — may it be once again be open in 2022, and with it the sound of screaming kids getting to delight in one of the city’s best free attractions, largest in North America or not. 

Grays Park is a fascinating and fun example of what happens when a community takes over the purpose of a park from a government. 

That’s a little unfair: after all, the lawn still gets mowed at Grays, the garbage gets taken out, the small playground is modern enough, the tennis, basketball and ball hockey courts are still in good condition, and the washroom gets cleaned, all courtesy of the park board. 

There’s also a number of mosaic art pieces, plenty of benches, a small walking trail and a covered area with a table. 

Even if Tatlow wasn’t one of the oldest neighbourhood parks in the city (built in 1907), even if it wasn’t literally the park in Robert Altman’s 1969 film That Cold Day in the Park, it would be worth talking about.

For one, there’s the split level design — the northern half, closer to the ocean, has casual winding paths and a quiet pond, something of a regal nature next to the Killarney Manor. 

Aberdeen is one of the three parks making up the triad of amenities in the Collingwood village of condos and townhomes created at the beginning of the 21st century. The three parks are all within two blocks of one another, and while Gaston focuses on baseball/soccer and Melbourne on tennis/basketball, Aberdeen is the chill hangout/playground area of the three. 

We think it’s the best of them — and while that *could* be because our ranking group generally prefers chill hangouts over playing sports, it also has to do with the design of the park. 

A Vancouver koan riddle: where does Spanish Banks end and Locarno begin? And where does Locarno end and Jericho Beach begin? 

Most people would probably give short shrift to the boundaries of Locarno, even though it extends out quite a bit — from Jericho Pier in the east to Tolmie Street to the west, its many beach logs and volleyball courts dotting the sand. 

That’s because aside from being stuck between two more iconic beaches, Locarno Park is also a less integrated area, with a collection of parts that have no real connection to one another. There’s the marvellous beach of course, and the clumping of trees across from the beach, and the baseball field further inland, along with the middling field that functions mostly as an off-leash dog area.

Complex and complicated is probably the best way to describe Andy Livingstone Park. 

Built for $7 million in the 1990s, partly funded by Concord Pacific as part of the city’s post-Expo north False Creek development, the park broadly consists of two parts: the giant artificial turf complex on the eastern half, and the hilly green space and playground on the western half, with an overhead bridge linking the two. 

It’s a technically impressive park. The fields are always very busy, the new playground (part of Crosstown Elementary) has excellent steep slides and climbing structures for all ages and difficulty levels. There’s also a passable dog park, washrooms, a tennis court and basketball court (again adjacent to the school), checking off a lot of boxes for a great park. 

And yet, it isn’t.

Part of that is due to the cramped nature of the space and the constant noise from the viaducts and SkyTrain, making it less a place to relax and more a place to go for a specific purpose. Part of it is the turf fields are starting to show their age, becoming easily waterlogged after a normal day of rain in Vancouver, which is to say 80% of the time from November to April.

When the first world war ended, there were technically three separate municipalities in Vancouver — Point Grey, South Vancouver, and the Vancouver we know today — and they each built separate parks to honour those that served. But while Vancouver named its memorial “Victory Square”, both South Van and Point Grey opted for “Memorial Park”, which is how we ended up with the geographic signifiers of “West” and “South” being added after the three communities amalgamated.

Now that you know that boring origin story, we can enjoy what a balanced park Memorial West is. It’s another park with a community centre, but rather than putting the building in the centre and awkwardly surrounding it with a bunch of fields, the Dunbar Community Centre is in the far northeast corner, allowing the rest of the park to flow naturally together. 

And that greatly helps: one section of the park is devoted to baseball, another to a play area (it’s old and wooden, but there’s a zip line), another to lawn bowling and tennis, and another to a small forest, with a couple walking paths and benches amongst the trees and meadow grass.  

In the middle of this lies a charming old wooden field house, along with public toilets and a concession stand for baseball. All told, four city blocks, all used up efficiently.

It’s all very pleasant, all well-proportioned, all old-fashioned without being excessively so, all good but not great, all very Dunbar.

Of the 241 parks in the city, the accurately named Burrard View is the only one to get a B grade in all four of our categories — which is to say, a mark between 7 and 7.5. Let us explore why there is such consistency in this unique park.

For Kids: the playground is quite old, with the smaller play structures for smaller kids in need of significant TLC. But those play structures are quite extensive, and the old wooden teeter totter and main play area hold ample charm, even if the gravel and rock bottom loses it some points. The underused wading pool is an underused wading pool.  

For Adults: There’s a small but good off-leash dog area, with a gentle hill and a few rocks and bushes that provide some variety. There’s also two tennis courts on the far south side of the park, and several benches to take in the view of Burrard Inlet. And there are washroom facilities as well, which are never a bad thing.

Sunset is a mid-sized but well-balanced space that understands parks are used for more than just sports or playgrounds in 2020.

Major renovations completed just a few years ago mean there’s ample places to sit across the park — be it large boulders and logs that come together like an amphitheatre, a covered seating area, and a few simple benches. There’s a modern playground, with a disc swing and a delightful rotating bubble kids can jump inside of and be swung around. And there’s a large off-leash dog park, fenced in but with a nice walking path around its perimeter. 

Renfrew Community is one of those places that is more a laundry list of things you can do than a fully integrated park, but those things are all very solid. 

For starters, there’s the recently refurbished forested area around Still Creek (better staircases and an accessible walkway were added), which has surprisingly immersive small trails for being no more than 20 metres away from open air at all times. A fun bonus is the eerie Fruiting Bodies sculpture at the bottom, inspired by a Renfrew Ravine squatter named Ted Twetie who lived until he was 107 years old (what a sentence to write!) 

With the renovations came a new off-leash dog park, one with a nice woodchip base and the excellent ambiance of the forest next to it. 

As for the more traditional part of the park, a slope from the playground down to the sports fields gives some nice texture to the place, and there’s a rare lacrosse box in the northwest corner. 

It’s the last park on our list that doesn’t attain “great” status — the play equipment is pretty old, there’s no clear journey through the park, and outside of a great pizza place on the southwest corner there’s not a lot nearby — but Renfrew is plenty interesting for a park anchored by a community centre.