Walk down Prewett Drive on a Saturday morning now and you will hear it before you see it. Kids on the dragon climber. A parent calling someone down from a turret. The sound has been missing from that corner of Folsom for the better part of a year, and its return on June 30, 2026 has been treated, understandably, as the headline. But if you have lived in The Parkway through the closure, you already know the real story is what happened in the gap, not the ribbon cutting itself.
Castle Park, known officially for most of its life as the Folsom Kids Play Park, closed in early September 2025 for a full rebuild. For ten months, the wooden castle that has anchored this corner of Folsom since 1996 simply was not there. And in that gap, Parkway families did what families always do when their default spot disappears. They found the rest of the system.
What Actually Came Back on Prewett Drive
The park at 201 Prewett Drive was not getting a cosmetic refresh. The original structure, built in 1996 by more than a thousand volunteers and designed by Robert Leathers, had reached the end of its useful life as wood construction, and the $1.1 million rebuild replaced aging materials with Trex composite decking, new subsurface drainage, and safety surfacing that meets current accessibility standards. Leathers and his firm came back to lead the 2026 version, which matters if you remember the original: the dragon climber and the castle turrets survived the redesign. The city did not build a generic playground on the footprint. It rebuilt the thing people already loved, with materials that will last.
The funding tells you something about how this neighborhood operates. The city put in $778,688 from its Parks and Recreation Equipment and Capital Fund plus another $135,000 in Measure A trail dollars, but the nonprofit Folsom Kids Play for Generations raised the rest, and by the time the ribbon was cut, 54 community organizations and local businesses had contributed more than $260,000 in donations, sponsorships, and in-kind work. Mayor Justin Raithel put it plainly at the reopening: "This project was truly built by the community." That is not a line from a press release. It is a description of how Folsom actually gets its playgrounds rebuilt, dollar by dollar, business by business.
The Ten Months When the Castle Was Gone
Here is the part that does not show up in the coverage of the reopening itself. For ten months, the families who would normally default to Castle Park had nowhere to default to. And The Parkway, as it turns out, had somewhere else to send them the entire time.
Econome Family Park sits at 1900 Parkway Drive North, a twelve-acre park that opened in the fall of 2016 and has quietly become one of the more complete recreation spaces in Folsom. It has two lighted tennis courts, bocce ball courts, natural and synthetic turf fields for soccer and lacrosse, a ropes climbing structure, and a giant ground-level slide, all wrapped by a half-mile perimeter walking path that ties directly into The Parkway's trail system. The park is named for brothers George and Nick Econome, who ran Model Pharmacy in Folsom for three decades starting in 1961. It is not a secret park. It is just not the one everyone defaults to when the castle is standing.
Closer to home, Darling Park gave families a quieter option. It is a mini park, small enough that most people drive past it without noticing, with cobblestone walls forming an entrance beneath a white trellis that leads to a compact playground and a strip of lawn. And for anyone with a dog rather than a toddler, The Parkway Neighborhood Park kept its dog-friendly trail running the whole time, obstacles and shaded seating included, no closure required.
None of these parks are new. What changed is that for ten months, Parkway residents had a reason to actually use all of them in the same season, rather than orbiting Castle Park and treating the rest as backup.
The Loop, Mapped
If you want to walk it the way the trail system was designed to be walked, here is the version that connects the pieces rather than treating them as separate errands.
- Start at Castle Park, 201 Prewett Drive, right next to Oak Chan Elementary.
- Pick up the internal trail spine heading toward Parkway Drive North and Econome Family Park, roughly a mile depending on your entry point, using the half-mile perimeter path once you arrive if you want the full loop around the turf fields and courts.
- Cut back through the neighborhood to Darling Park for a shaded pause under the trellis if you have a stroller or a toddler who has had enough turf for one morning.
- Finish at The Parkway Neighborhood Park if the dog came along, or continue out to Folsom Square on Blue Ravine Road, about two miles from the Parkway core, where a Trader Joe's and a Target sit ready for whatever the walk reminded you to buy.
That is a real morning, not a marketing route. The Parkway was built with more than 200 acres of open space and miles of nature trails specifically designed to link riparian and wetland habitat into a continuous corridor, one that supports more than 200 species of native vegetation and wildlife according to the community's original planning documents. The system was always there to be walked end to end. Most people just never had a reason to do it in one trip until the castle went dark.
A System, Not a Single Stop
Zoom out and the same pattern shows up at the city level. Folsom marked July 2026 as "Parks Make Life Better" month, pointing residents toward its 49 parks, 38 playgrounds, three splash pads, and more than 60 miles of scenic trails, with the newly reopened Castle Park and the newly redesigned Folsom Bike Park called out as the season's two big wins. The bike park, at Cummings Family Park on Creekside Drive, reopened on May 16, 2026 after a rebuild led by trail builders Randy Spangler and Greg Watts in partnership with the Folsom Auburn Trail Riders Action Coalition, funded in part by more than $31,000 raised by the local riding community plus a private gift from Claudia Cummings and a matching grant.
That is not The Parkway's park, and it sits on the other side of town. But it is the same story told twice in one year: Folsom's recreation infrastructure keeps getting rebuilt as connected systems rather than isolated amenities, and the money to do it keeps coming from residents who show up with checkbooks before the city finishes its share. The Parkway's version of that story just happens to run through a wooden castle, a pharmacist family's twelve acres, and a trellis most people drive past without a second look.
If you already live here, the castle reopening is a good excuse to walk a loop you have probably never finished in one trip. If you are watching this neighborhood from outside it, the ten-month closure is a small but real data point about what kind of place this is: one where residents fund the rebuild, use the substitutes while they wait, and keep walking once the main attraction comes back.
If you are curious what any of this means for your own address in The Parkway or elsewhere in Folsom, The Friedrich Team tracks these neighborhood shifts as part of how we talk to clients about timing and value. Request a free home valuation when you are ready to see where your property stands, or browse our Parkway neighborhood guide for more on what makes this corner of Folsom work the way it does.
