Ask the city what's actually at Netherwood Park and the answer is short: a hill, grass, and trees. No playground, no splash pad, no basketball hoop bolted to a pole. Ask the people who use it every week and the list runs much longer: casting practice, ballroom classes, sunbathers who show up like it's their job, and crowds who climb the ridge every October just to watch balloons clear the rooflines.
That gap between the park's official inventory and what neighbors have quietly built on top of it is the more interesting story here, more interesting than the years-long argument over whether to add swings.
What the Ridge Actually Does for a Living
Most of Albuquerque sits flat enough that calling anything a hill feels generous. Netherwood Park's earns the word. A ridge runs east to west parallel to Morrow Street, bends north to run parallel to Princeton Drive, and rises somewhere between 32 and 35 feet above the bowl it forms on the park's west side. That kind of elevation is unusual for this stretch of the city, where the terrain flattens out fast in almost every direction, and it turns out to be doing a lot of unpaid work.
Walk up there on a Saturday or Sunday and you'll likely find a fly-fishing class working the open grass, using the height and clear sightlines to practice casts with no water in sight. Dance classes claim the same ground through the warmer months. Sunbathers show up daily without anyone organizing it. Come Balloon Fiesta season, the ridge turns into an informal grandstand for anyone whose own yard doesn't clear the roofline. Any solar or lunar event pulls a crowd too, for the same reason.
None of that required a grant, a resolution, or a line item in a state budget. It required a ridge and neighbors who figured out what to do with it. The park sits next to La Selva de Albuquerque, the neighborhood's own name for its stretch of urban forest, which means residents here have two green spaces worth knowing by name instead of one generic label on a map.
The $200,000 That Didn't Survive One Phone Call
The push for an actual playground had real momentum behind it before it hit a wall. The Netherwood Park Neighborhood Association ran a vote that drew 486 participants, a record for the group, with 61 percent backing a city study into adding one. Separately, the city told reporters that roughly two-thirds of the resident emails it received on the subject supported the idea. State Senator Gerald Ortiz y Pino used that momentum to secure $200,000 in capital outlay funding during the legislative session.
Then Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham struck the funding with a line-item veto. Her office's explanation to reporters was direct:
"The neighborhood wasn't unified behind the Netherwood Park playground proposal."
The veto followed a phone call from a nearby resident, former Lieutenant Governor Diane Denish, who asked her friend the governor to cut it.
Two separate counts, a neighborhood association vote and a batch of resident emails, had already put support well north of 60 percent. Whatever "unified" meant inside the governor's office, it wasn't a majority the neighborhood or the city had actually missed. That's worth remembering if you ever petition the city about anything on your own street: a strong vote total settles the question most of the time, and then sometimes one phone call from the right person outweighs 486 ballots.
The County Tried to Step In, Then One Commissioner Walked Out
Bernalillo County doesn't run city parks, but that didn't stop a commissioner from trying anyway. Steven Michael Quezada, whose own district doesn't include Netherwood Park, introduced a resolution urging the governor to reconsider after spending time at the park himself and concluding it saw light use compared to what it could offer families in the surrounding apartment complexes.
The resolution never got a hearing. Quezada walked out of that commission meeting after an unrelated dispute over the county manager selection process, and without him in the room, his own motion failed to find a second. The commission chair closed the matter by saying it wasn't the county's call to make in the first place. It's a city park, he said, and it's on the community and the city to work out.
The disagreement didn't end there. Opinion pieces in the Albuquerque Journal kept the fight alive well past the veto, with residents defending the hill's traditional uses against coverage that suggested the neighborhood broadly wanted a playground. One writer called the proposal a threat to turn the park into a "concrete jungle" and accused the paper's own editorial board of "gross journalistic malfeasance" for getting the balance of opinion wrong. Residents on that side also point out that a playground already exists six blocks away at Summit Park, and that attempts to add play structures at Netherwood go back further than most current residents realize, with failed pushes in 1962, 1967, and 1992 before the most recent round.
What's Actually Drawing a Crowd Right Now
None of that paperwork stopped the association from running the one program that never needed a capital outlay bill to begin with. Netherwood Park's own Movie Night series kicked off its 2026 season on August 1 with a screening of The Goonies, popcorn from Cornivore, and blankets spread across the same ground the city describes as just a hill and some grass. No funding request, no veto, no commission vote required. Neighbors wanted movie nights on the ridge, so the association built movie nights on the ridge, the same way earlier neighbors built a Sunday fly-casting habit and a fall balloon-watching tradition without asking anyone's permission.
That's the pattern worth noticing if you already live here. The formal channel for adding something new to this park has stalled for over sixty years and counting. The informal one keeps succeeding because it never waits for a line item to clear. The hill's real job description was never on a city amenity list. It's whatever roughly 900 households decide to do with it that weekend.
If you live on one of the streets bounded by the old AMAFCA flood control ditch to the west, I-40 to the north, and Indian School Road to the south, you already know all of this. If you're weighing whether daily life in a neighborhood built around a fight over grass and elevation actually fits how you want to spend a Saturday, that's a conversation worth having with someone who knows the block and not just the listing sheet. The Lovely Home Company can walk you through what a place like Netherwood Park is really like day to day. Schedule a free consultation to start the conversation.
