Hi my name is Marcie Billen. I live in Norman, Oklahoma and I want to show you around some of our parks that we have in our city and explain some of the stuff that’s around those parks. I am a realtor in Norman, Oklahoma and I’ve lived here for around 13 years. You may have seen some of my other videos about living in Oklahoma and if you haven’t, go ahead and check those out the best one is right here.
When I say I’m gonna show you around the parks, I’m gonna go I’m gonna how you around the city parks. Now I haven’t hit every single city park because some of them obviously are very tiny and we don’t really need to go over those, but the ones where people gather, where we have events, where you may get a feel of the culture for the city, I definitely wanted you to see what these are like.
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Legacy Park
The first one that I’m going to show you is Legacy Park. So Legacy Park is one of our newest parks; it’s small and I said I wasn’t gonna go over small parks, but here I am going over a small park. This park is actually in the middle of one of actually our biggest shopping districts, so we call it like around Target, right? When I moved to Norman there was nothing around Target at all and now there’s everything around Target. It’s really built up over the past 15 years.
This park actually sits next to one of my favorite restaurants which is Red Rock Canyon Grill – we go there all the time they have a great happy hour typically, an excellent dinner, and then a really good brunch also. You can actually see this park straight from Red Rock’s patio, where we typically sit to eat. And this park of course, has an amphitheater, a walking trail kind of around it and it’s all concrete, but it has this beautiful sort of man-made pond with fountains too.
We really like this one; it’s a great place to stroll after you eat. Other restaurants around this are you know, Bad Daddy’s Burgers, McAllister’s, Torchy’s, and then of course, we have tons of shopping around at like DSW, and Academy, and all these things. It’s a great perk to look at if you’re thinking of maybe moving to Norman or you just want a nice evening stroll after you eat at one of those awesome restaurants. There aren’t really any houses around this park at all; they’re doing a big development near it and right now there’s an apartment complex and then they’re building some other single-family residences as well as well as putting in our new Aqua Center for swimming.
Griffin Park
From Legacy Park, going up Robinson Street to the east, we’ll hit Griffin Park Next. Griffin Park is one of the biggest parks in Norman and it has a lot of sports fields, so you may end up there especially if you have kids who are playing soccer or baseball, or something because this is where those activities are typically done in Norman. Robinson Street’s actually one of the easiest streets to travel in Norman because it has an underpass for the train and also because it’s been redone and it’s very wide. It’s an easy street to travel in Norman, as opposed to some of the other streets that we have, which can have a really low speed limit on them, or they just have a ton of red lights and stop signs that you always hit. Griffin Park is right next to right next to those soccer fields and those baseball fields, like I told you.
There are several playgrounds around; one of the biggest things that people go here for of course, is the dog park and then there’s this really awesome pond and people typically go to fish. During the work week, people come out on their lunch break to go fishing and feed the fish as well. You can also play disc golf at this park too. The kinds of houses around this park; you can usually find some very affordable homes anywhere from sometimes $100,000 up to of course $250,000 all within the walking range of this park. A couple neighborhoods if you’re really interested in living near a park; a couple neighborhoods to look at maybe Set Place and then Park Place.
Saxon Park
Now I’m going to take you all the way across town, all the way south down to Highway 9 and we’re going to look at Saxon Park. Now I’m going to be perfectly honest with you – I lived in South Norman for a couple of years and I had no idea this park existed; it may be very new. This park is really not at all like the other two parks I showed you. It’s basically a really great walking trail and when I say great, it’s amazing! You have some great views, of course, you can hear some of the road noise, but I mean all in all, if you need to take a walk or you need to take a run and know exactly how far you’re walking or running, this would be the park to do it in.
Andrews Park
Andrews Park is one of the most popular parks in Norman. I personally like to go there first of all, because it’s close to the public library and the public library in Norman it’s brand new. It got to open for a few months before lockdown happened, but look at this amazing building! Like this building is one of my favorites, probably in Oklahoma – it’s incredible and going inside, even better. I’ll definitely be doing a video about the inside of this beautiful library. Andrews Park is actually behind the police department, so there’s a group of buildings and some of them don’t have anything in them because the library moved from this old building into the new building that it’s in now in late 2019.
Andrews Park has playground equipment, it has a lot of picnic tables, a great little walking path around it. It also has a splash pad that’s open in the summer, has basketball courts, it has restrooms that are open in the spring, fall, and summer. There’s also a skate park and an amphitheater. The ampitheater did blow down in a storm very recently, but it’s a great place for music right here and is one of the focal points whenever Norman has the Norman Music Festival. Andrews Park is very close to downtown, meaning that you can just walk there – it’s really easy. Downtown consists of two streets: it consists of Main Street, which only travels East in downtown, and then Gray Street which only travels West in downtown. They’re definitely one-way streets and there’s a lot of great restaurants and things down in downtown – I have done some posts about downtown Norman, specifically and you can find those here.
Andrews Park is very core Norman, meaning that it’s like the oldest part of Norman it’s very close of course, to the courthouse and stuff too since we’re in downtown, basically. The types of houses you’ll get around Andrews Park are definitely going to be houses that are cute bungalows. So these houses um around Andrews Park are so cute, excellent bungalows. Some of them are very small, some of them are very big, some have been completely rebuilt, some need a lot of work, but this is definitely where you’ll find the original history of Norman, which is really fun.
Reeves Park
All right our next park is Reeves Park. This is another very large park in Norman it’s very close to what we would call South Campus. OU of course, is basically a giant kind of rectangle and Reeves Park sits at the south end of it. Across from Reeves Park are some old apartments that if you went to OU, you remember as being like really cheap and excellent places to live and there’s some other apartments around it too. There are some houses within walking distance, but you’d have to walk quite far, it’s just a lot of apartments typically, but it’s a great place to tailgate.
Tailgating is huge at Reeves Park, also the Renaissance Rair every April occurs at Reeves Park as well, so of course we’re gonna have big open fields, we have some nice playground equipment, in Reeves Park, and some great shelters where you can have some bigger parties if you need to, and then some nice little tables as well to just have a picnic outside. And there’s also sand volleyball at Reeves Park and then of course, there’s basketball courts as well. And typically in the summer time there are typically restrooms open also.
Lions Park
Okay Lions Park is the last one, and this is maybe my favorite park. I think it’s the one that we go to the most; it’s very much so what I would kind of call, a campus park as well. It’s fairly close to campus so the houses around it are cool little bungalows, older homes you can see some of these that I took these shots of like I love these houses and it would be such an amazing place to live because there’s houses basically all around this park.
Lions Park typically you’ll see people out walking because they have this amazing trail that’s you know you know how far you’re walking of course, there’s a great shelter, and we go to eat there a lot to eat with friends, and then there’s also the Firehouse Art Center at Lions Park and so that’s why we see a little bit more art stuff around because they have a lot of classes and some different exhibits and things like that. Of course there’s also tennis courts, and playground but this is a small park, but honestly one of the coolest parks in Norman, in my opinion.
I hope this helped you get an idea of what Norman is like. Norman is a beautiful town and if you have more questions, I really suggest you reach out to me!
Marcie Billen | [email protected] | 918.691.8982
