Walk the loop around BaratHaven Park's 15-acre lake on a Saturday morning and you'll likely pass someone in cricket whites. That's not a typo or a mistake in the parks brochure. BaratHaven has a dedicated cricket pitch, an amenity you won't find at most St. Charles County parks, tucked in alongside soccer fields and three miles of trail. It's the kind of detail that makes a new resident stop and ask what else this park is hiding.
The answer, as it turns out, has less to do with what's already built and more to do with what isn't. The city's own parks and recreation planning documents identify a specific gap in the trail network: there is currently no dedicated connection between City Hall and BaratHaven Park, even though both anchor the same greenway system. Dardenne Prairie is choosing between two ways to close that gap right now, and residents get a say on October 13.
A Park Built Around Water, Not Just Turf
City records put BaratHaven at 93.58 acres, maintained entirely by the City of Dardenne Prairie. A landscape architecture firm that worked on the site describes the core park at 80 acres, a figure that likely reflects the park before its eastward extension into neighboring Bluebird Meadow. Either way, the design center of the property is the lake, not the fields.
The amenities list reads like this:
- A 15-acre lake with wetlands built in to support native wildlife and plant habitats
- Three scenic overlooks along the water
- A three-mile loop trail that winds through the surrounding BaratHaven residential community
- Soccer fields
- A cricket pitch, reserved as a combined booking with both soccer fields when in use
BaratHaven was the first project built under the Dardenne Greenway initiative in St. Charles County, which tells you something about how the city thinks about growth here. Rather than treating the park as an isolated amenity for one subdivision, planners built it as the starting segment of a longer connected system, one meant to eventually link neighborhoods, schools, and conservation land across the city.
The Loop That Doesn't Close Yet
That connected system has a hole in it right now, and it's not a minor one. The Dardenne Prairie Parks and Recreation Master Plan specifically recommends prioritizing a trail connection between City Hall and the Dardenne Greenway inside BaratHaven Park. If you live in one of the neighborhoods near City Hall Park and want to walk or bike to the lake at BaratHaven, there currently isn't a dedicated route that gets you there without relying on road shoulders.
The city has two route options on the table, and each one runs through different parts of town:
| Route Option | Path |
|---|---|
| Option 1 | Begins near City Hall, connects to Technology Drive, ties into the existing Dardenne Greenway |
| Option 2 | Travels south along Hanley Road to Highway N, east along the existing WingHaven Blvd shared-road route, south on Bates Road, east at Redhawk Parkway, then south on Henning Road into BaratHaven |
Option 2 is the longer, more circuitous path, but it stitches together infrastructure that already exists in pieces, including the WingHaven shared bike route and the Bryan Road multi-use path that already runs along the east side of Bryan Road between Feise Road and Veteran's Memorial Parkway. Whichever option the city picks, the plan notes that a new physical connection will still be needed between Henning Road and the greenway itself, since the trail currently passes underneath a Henning Road overpass without a direct tie-in.
None of this is finished. That's the point.
Where the Greenway Is Headed After That
The trail gap near City Hall is the immediate problem, but it's a small piece of a much longer plan. East of BaratHaven, the greenway already extends into Bluebird Meadow Park, a separate 74-acre property where a restored wetland and prairie landscape create a transition zone rather than an abrupt edge. From there, the long-term vision carries the greenway further east toward the August A. Busch Conservation Area, eventually following Dardenne Creek north to connect with the St. Louis Youth Soccer Association's soccer complex, with additional links planned to reach St. Charles Community College.
That's a genuinely ambitious stretch of connected green space for a city this size, and it explains why the trail gap near City Hall matters more than it might seem. It's not just a missing sidewalk. It's the piece that would let someone start a walk at City Hall Park, pass through BaratHaven's wetlands and cricket pitch, continue into Bluebird Meadow's restored prairie, and eventually reach conservation land, all without leaving a connected trail.
The Rest of the Calendar Already Assumes You Can Walk There
The irony is that City Hall Park already functions as the city's main event hub, trail or no trail. Prairie Day, the city's signature annual celebration, filled City Hall Park this past Saturday with live entertainment, inflatable bounce houses, a climbing rock wall, tie-dye activities run by ICD School, and face painters, with Hanley Road closed to accommodate the crowd. It's the kind of event that assumes residents will show up on foot from nearby streets, even in neighborhoods where no formal trail connects them to the park.
The same Saturday, a few minutes down the road, The Falls Golf Club hosted Bemo's 6th Annual Charity Golf Scramble, one of several fundraising tournaments the course has run through the club this year alongside the 2nd Annual Ryan Forgach Golf Tournament in August, the Center for Autism's 22nd Annual Golf Tournament, and the 14th Annual Michael E. Boehle Golf Tournament. That's four named charity tournaments at one course in a single season, which says something about how much civic and philanthropic activity this city channels through its recreational spaces even when those spaces aren't formally linked by trail.
Put together, Prairie Day and the golf tournament calendar make the case that Dardenne Prairie residents already treat these public spaces as connected, showing up at City Hall Park one weekend and a golf course the next. The physical trail network just hasn't caught up to that habit yet.
How to Weigh In Before the Route Is Chosen
The city is holding a Barathaven Park master planning open house on Tuesday, October 13, from 5 to 7 PM at City Hall. This is the point in the process where residents can see both route options laid out, ask questions about timeline and cost, and register a preference before anything gets finalized. If you live near either proposed route, whether that's along Hanley Road and Highway N or closer to Bates Road and Henning Road, this is the meeting where your daily walk or bike commute to the park actually gets decided.
The Historical Society also meets later that same month, on October 22 at City Hall, for residents who want a longer view of how the city's public land has evolved. But the October 13 open house is the one with an actual decision attached to it.
If you've been eyeing a home near the Dardenne Greenway corridor, or you already live along one of the streets under discussion for the new trail connection, The Cheri Norton Team spends enough time in this part of St. Charles County to keep track of how these plans move forward. Reach out if you want a heads up on how the trail decision shakes out or want to talk through what living near an expanding greenway means for your specific street.
