Tonight the bandshell at McKennan Park hosts the last show of the season. The El Riad Shrine Last Call Band closes out this year's Mondays at McKennan with a horn-driven set of rock from the 1950s through the 80s. The band doesn't pass a bucket for themselves. Any tips go to the Shriners' patient transportation fund, the vans that carry kids to the Shriners Hospital in Minneapolis and, when the case is serious enough, to the burn hospital in Cincinnati. Frontman Dave Rowe put it plainly to a local reporter this week: people walk in, drop a lawn chair on the grass, and don't have to pay a dime to enjoy the music.
That sentence, more than any brochure copy about "historic charm," explains what McKennan Park actually is. It isn't a neighborhood the city maintains for its residents. It's a neighborhood residents keep re-funding, rebuilding, and showing up for, on their own initiative, year after year. The concert series is decades old and still free because Parks and Recreation and a rotating cast of local bands keep choosing to put it on. The park's newest capital project, a $4.4 million wading pool and bathhouse that reopened this past May, exists in something close to its current form because two people who live in the neighborhood decided to help pay for it.
If you live in McKennan Park, you've probably noticed this pattern without naming it. This is the summer to name it.
A Pool the Neighborhood Helped Build
The old McKennan Park wading pool was built in 1971. By the time crews broke ground on its replacement last year, the pool and its bathhouse were more than 50 years old and, in the language of Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation, no longer up to modern standards. The fenced-in pool with its old gradual entry is gone. What opened at 1 p.m. on Friday, May 29, is a fully zero-depth pool with an interactive spray feature built specifically for younger kids, a two-person slide, and a bathhouse with five new restrooms, a concessions area, and an indoor gathering room the neighborhood can use for programming.
"We also have new spray features for the kids. We have an interactive spray feature as well for the younger kids in the zero-depth area," Adam Livermore, the city's Aquatics Recreation Center Coordinator, said when the pool opened. "Also, the entire pool is zero-depth entry. The former one was not, so it's really gradual to get in."
Here's the part that separates McKennan Park from a routine parks-department upgrade. The $4.4 million total didn't come from city funds alone. Part of it came from Pierce and Barbara McDowell, who live in the neighborhood, channeled through the Sioux Falls Area Community Foundation. Andy Patterson, the foundation's CEO, described the arrangement without much fanfare: "When there are donors that have a passion and interest, we'll try to make those connections, and you've seen it in places like Jacobson Plaza." He added that the foundation hopes more neighbors will be inspired to reinvest in the parts of the city they actually use.
That's a different funding model than most public pools get, and it's worth sitting with for a second. The McDowells didn't pay to have their name etched somewhere. They paid because they use the park, live near it, and wanted the zero-depth entry and the shaded seating to exist for the kids who'll be using it long after their own families have moved on from strollers and floaties. It's a small, specific version of the same instinct that keeps the concert series alive on volunteer labor and tip jars.
The renovation wasn't universally uncontroversial when the original pool was built, either, which tells you something about how long McKennan Park has been arguing with itself over its own amenities. In 1970, roughly 18 McKennan Park residents opposed putting a wading pool in the park at all, arguing the city should have built it in Hilltop instead, where kids were being bused to other parks for recreation. The dispute went as far as an injunction against the city over a procedural technicality. It took months, a formal "resolution of necessity," and a city commission vote before construction could proceed. Hilltop eventually got its own pool, at Frank Olson Park, a year later in 1972. More than five decades on, that same Frank Olson Park facility is now slated for its own large-scale indoor-recreation renovation, with construction expected to start later this year.
The point isn't that the neighborhood fights over its parks. It's that the neighborhood has never treated its parks as finished. Every generation renegotiates what McKennan Park is for, and every generation ends up paying into it again.
The Last Free Concert of the Summer
Mondays at McKennan returned on July 6 this year and runs through tonight, August 31. It's a Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation program that's been running for decades, and it hasn't needed to change its format to stay relevant: bring a lawn chair, bring your dog on a leash, show up at 7 p.m. under the bandshell, and don't pay anything.
Wendy Peterson, the city's Recreation Program Coordinator, described this year's lineup as deliberately varied. "Folk to country to rock to 50s and 60s," she said. "So a little something for everyone." The closing stretch of the season bore that out. Jerry Scheckle and The Ramblers brought country on August 10. Audrianna Greyson Schulz played a variety set on August 17. Surfin' Safari, a 50s and 60s tribute act, closed out August 24. Tonight it's the El Riad Shrine Last Call Band, closing out the season the way this program always closes, with a full bandshell and a lawn full of chairs that showed up for free.
None of these acts are touring nationally. That's not an oversight, it's the design. The series exists to give neighbors a reason to walk to the park on a Monday night instead of driving somewhere else, and it's worked long enough that it's become one of the fixtures locals plan their late-summer weeks around without thinking too hard about it.
The bandshell itself dates to 1926 and was restored to keep hosting exactly this kind of programming. It sits inside a park that also holds the Mediterranean Sunken Gardens and the Pillars of the Nation, four stone pillars at the park's entrance, each carrying rock from one of the then-48 contiguous states. They were erected in 1941, a gesture of unity assembled in the middle of a world crisis by people who wanted something permanent to stand in a park they walked through every day. That's the same civic instinct showing up eighty-five years later in a couple willing to help fund a new pool, or a nine-piece rock band donating its tip jar to a children's hospital transport fund.
What This Means If You Live Here
None of this is a pitch to move to McKennan Park. If you're reading this, you likely already know where the bandshell sits, which side of the park catches shade in July, and whether your kids prefer the old playground equipment or the new spray features. What's worth noticing is the mechanism underneath the amenities you already use: this neighborhood's public spaces get better because the people living around them keep choosing to make them better, not because a city budget cycle eventually got around to it.
That's not a small distinction. It means the park you walk through tomorrow morning is, in some real sense, the product of decisions your neighbors made, not decisions made for you. The pool your kids will splash in next June exists partly because the McDowells decided their neighborhood was worth a direct investment. The music you'll hear next July exists because a rotating cast of local musicians decided a free Monday night concert was worth their time for one more season.
If you've been thinking about what your next chapter in Sioux Falls looks like, whether that means staying in McKennan Park for another decade or exploring what a different Sioux Falls neighborhood might offer your family, Danielle Konechne has spent two decades watching how neighborhoods like this one actually work, not just how they're marketed. Reach out for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in what's really happening on the ground here, not a generic pitch.
