Review: Royal Palm Park (Phoenix, AZ)

Royal Palm Park is sometimes known as Butler Park (its northern boundary is Butler Dr.).  But it turns out there's another Butler Park as well (though that one's in Glendale).  So perhaps it's just an attempt to avoid a wacky mistaken-identity movie. Or maybe not.

Well, assuming you can find your way here (southeast of 15th Avenue and Butler Dr.), Royal Palm Park is a decent little neighborhood playground.  Remodeled fairly recently (2008, maybe?), it features a fairly large L-shaped climbing structure for the big kids and a smaller separate structure for the preschoolers.  There are a couple swings apiece for the big kids and toddlers, plus a couple springy sit-upons, all of which are placed amongst a large expanse of sand with little to no shade.  If there wasn't a nice tree in the northeast corner of the play area, it'd be virtually devoid of shade -- unsurprisingly, it's that corner of the area that gets most of the sand play.

In fact, if I had to come up with one distinguishing characteristic it's that kids seem to do a little more imaginative play here.  There's a play "snack stand" and all the shade and sand under the play structures (and tree) seem to be filled with kids digging and pretending.  Which is a good thing.  The only other distinguishing characteristic I can think of is that the rest of the park is basically one big L-shaped patch of land that lends itself to dogs playing.  Not really sure why, but I see plenty of dogs here, at least more so than I do at other parks.  I've even seen dog training classes here.

So there's relatively little reason to visit this park if you're from out of town, or even a different Valley city.  But it's part of our regular rotation.

Details

What: Royal Palm Park
Where: 15th Avenue and Butler / Phoenix, AZ (map)
Parking: Parking lot of sufficient size.  I think it's served by bus.
Amenities: No bathroom, little shade, steps for sitting on. Also, in a neighborhood, so no services nearby.  Now that I write that, I'm wondering why we spend as much time here as we do.  Maybe because there are always kids here.
Bottom Line: Perfectly fine neighborhood park and playground.