Walk the loop at Deer Creek Preserve on a weekday morning this fall and you will not find a construction fence or a "coming soon" sign. You will find a paved path, a bridge over the creek, a scattering of benches, and a pollinator garden that the Ladue Garden Club planted with bee balm and coneflower to draw in butterflies and moths. It looks done. It has looked done since a ribbon-cutting on Arbor Day, April 27, 2024. And yet the city's own committee minutes tell a different story: this project is not finished, and the reason it is not finished has almost nothing to do with money and almost everything to do with one proposed bench.
That contradiction is worth sitting with if you live anywhere near South 40 Drive, because it explains why the pace of change here feels slower than the amount of goodwill behind it.
From mulch pile to trail
The site itself has an unglamorous history. The City of Ladue bought the 12.5-acre parcel from Ameren back in 1988 and ran it for decades as the transfer station for the city's leaf and brush program, informally known as Edie's Mulch Site after longtime mayor Edie Spink. That program was discontinued in 2017 once resident participation dropped to roughly 11 percent and the economics of hauling and processing yard waste stopped making sense for the city to run alone.
What happened next is the part most residents actually know: a 2019 planning grant, a master plan adopted that September, then years of delay while the Metropolitan Sewer District ran a sanitary sewer relief project straight through the property between 2020 and 2023. Once that work wrapped, Phase 1 moved fast. The city and its consultant, SWT Design, along with the Beautification, Open Space and Tree Advisory Committee, finished the initial trail system, a creek bridge, and native plantings in time for that 2024 Arbor Day opening. The total cost ran about $750,000, covered mostly by the sewer district and a municipal grant, with the Ladue Garden Club and the Garden Club of St. Louis chipping in for trees and the pollinator garden through the city's Living Legacy tree-donation fund. Volunteers from both clubs have also been showing up for what they call Honeysuckle Hacks, working sessions to pull invasive bush honeysuckle out of the creek corridor before it chokes out everything the new plantings are trying to establish.
If you have walked the preserve, this is the version you have seen: a straight shot of shared-use path along Deer Creek, functional and already showing the kind of foot traffic that suggests people actually use it rather than admire it from a distance.
What Phase 2 was supposed to add
The plan on paper for Phase 2 is not complicated. It adds a second trail loop, more benches, and a scenic overlook with a viewing platform along the creek. The city ran a community survey through the fall and winter to gather input the state will want to see attached to a Municipal Park Grant application due sometime this year. Roughly 40 residents responded, and the committee's own January meeting notes describe the sentiment as overwhelmingly in favor of both the loop and the overlook.
Overwhelming support usually means a project is close to shovel-ready. This one is not, and the reason sits in a single line buried in those same minutes: staff also heard concerns from residents near Twin Springs about where the overlook would actually sit.
The one sticking point
Here is the mechanism worth understanding if you live in this part of Ladue. A trail loop is a shared benefit spread across every household within walking distance. A scenic overlook is a fixed point, and fixed points have exact neighbors. The households whose yards back up closest to the proposed overlook location are the ones absorbing whatever changes in sightlines, foot traffic, or evening use come with a bench and a platform, while the benefit of that same bench gets split among everyone else who might stop there for five minutes on a longer walk.
That is not a story about opposition to the preserve. City staff, including project manager Anne Lamitola, met with Twin Springs residents on-site to walk through exactly where the overlook was being proposed and what it would involve, which is the kind of one-on-one conversation cities do not bother with when a project is genuinely stalled over hostility. It is the kind of conversation that happens when almost everyone agrees on the destination and a few people are negotiating the exact spot the path stops.
If you want a short version: the loop is basically settled. The overlook is still being sited.
The missing link nobody walking the current trail can miss
There is a second, more practical piece of unfinished business, and it affects anyone who has tried to reach Deer Creek Preserve on foot rather than by car. Right now, getting to the preserve from several nearby blocks means walking a stretch of South 40 Drive that carries real commuter traffic. The city has already secured federal Transportation Alternative Program funding to fix that: a shared-use path extension that would connect the preserve east to the Trails End subdivision and west to the intersection of Clayton Road and South 40 Drive, with pedestrian signal improvements built in at that intersection. The engineering contract went to Horner & Shifrin, approved by the city council in October 2024, which puts this project a design phase ahead of where the overlook debate currently sits.
Put those two threads together and the picture is less "Deer Creek Preserve is stalled" and more "Deer Creek Preserve is being built in the order these things actually get built." The trail exists. The safe walk to the trail is in design. The one debatable amenity is still being negotiated street by street.
Rodes Park is quietly following the same pattern
A mile or so away at the corner of Ladue Road and Warson Road, Rodes Park has spent years as the kind of small city park that mostly runs on volunteer goodwill. Garden Club of St. Louis members have planted daffodil bulbs there for years with the help of local daffodil expert Jason Delaney, and the club plants a dogwood there each year in memory of members it has lost. The city is now working with both the Ladue Garden Club and the Garden Club of St. Louis on a longer-term plan for Rodes Park that includes a bridge, paths, benches, and native plantings, essentially the same formula that turned the old mulch site into Deer Creek Preserve.
That is worth knowing if your daily walk includes Rodes Park rather than Deer Creek, because it means the same volunteer network and the same city committee are already thinking about your corner next.
What to actually watch for this fall
If you want to track this rather than wait for a sign to go up, the useful markers are these:
- The Municipal Park Grant application, which the city needs to file sometime in 2026 using the survey data it already collected
- Any further site visits or public comment specifically tied to the overlook location near Twin Springs
- Progress on the South 40 Drive shared-use path design, since that connection is arguably more consequential for daily use than the overlook itself
- The BOSTA Committee's monthly meetings, held the second Thursday of the month at 7:30 a.m., where these updates surface first
None of this requires you to do anything. It just means that when someone posts on a neighborhood group asking why the loop trail hasn't broken ground yet, you will know the honest answer is not bureaucracy. It is one overlook, one set of neighbors, and a city trying to get the siting right before it spends grant money on it.
If you already call this stretch of Ladue home, the preserve is one more thing that makes the daily walk here a little richer than it was two years ago, honeysuckle removal and all. And if a conversation about the preserve ever turns into a conversation about a house near it, whether you're thinking about staying put, adding on, or eventually listing, Maureen Onder has spent more than three decades getting to know exactly these kinds of blocks. Call for a local market consult whenever you're ready to talk about what's next.
