City: New park coming to Crestview Bluff neighborhood

A new park is coming to Albuquerque’s southwest quadrant next year, the Parks and Recreation Department announced Thursday.

The park will fill a gap that previously left thousands of residents without a green space within walking distance.

“When I ride my bike around the neighborhood, I see kids playing in the street because we don’t have a park,” said Alfred Otero, a Crestview Bluff resident and vice president of the neighborhood association.

Located at Gonzales and Old Coors in the Crestview Bluff neighborhood, the new 1-acre park will include a playground, BMX bike pump track and basketball and futsal court, as well as a food truck plaza and lawn. The project is still in the design process, with construction expected to begin sometime next summer, according to Parks and Recreation Director David Simon.

The project initially drew some safety concerns from residents, Otero said, because the park abuts a busy four-lane road. However, residents were told that the park will be fenced, assuaging fears about traffic accidents, Otero said.

“The design is really gorgeous,” Otero said of the preliminary plans.

The city has yet to announce how much the park will cost, although $3.6 million in municipal and state funding is already attached to the project. The project is funded by 2025 general obligation bonds, a state grant and city councilor discretionary funds.

Residents can expect to stroll, bike and lounge at the new park in the summer of 2027, Simon said.

The new addition slightly improves Albuquerque’s park score, a measure of how much access residents have to green spaces in their city. The score calculates how much of the population lives within a 10-minute walk of a park — in Albuquerque, 91% people fall into that category, according to statistics from Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit advocacy group. Once built, the new park will up that score by half a percent and provide a walking-distance park for 3,000 additional residents, according to a city news release.

The national average among the nation’s 100 most populated cities sits at 76%.

The city is still accepting public input about the park’s design and comments can be sent to city planner Cheryl Somerfeldt with the Parks and Recreation Department at csomerfeldt@cabq.gov.