La Mesita Park — Attraction in La Mesa

We love this park. My daughter absolutely loves this park, and the other kids here are always the sweetest! They pretty much end up being BFFs by the end of every play session!

The real trouble , and the reason for me docking 3 stars, comes when you need to romp up the hill and use the bathrooms. You will swear you walked into a third world country. One stall has a door(disabled), the other doesn’t. Both are littered with toilet paper and feminine products because there are NO trash cans in the stalls or even by the sinks!! This stinks!! You can catch a disease by sitting on toilet “seats” like this! Oh, where do you go to wash your hands of this filth? The sinks that rarely have soap, and the “antique, patinated” air drier which we know does more spreading of germs than actually drying and sloughing off, like paper towels do.

I hate having to write this review, because otherwise our experiences with this park have been mostly pleasant. I do want to say that I am speaking for the women’s bathrooms, but I have asked men about the condition of their bathroom and they say it is the same. This kind of thing should be gone and retired to some “God, can you believe we survived this as kids??” bs clickbait piece.

Every time we come here, I shudder... but that speaks to how nice the park and the people are. Definitely not the facilities (and you also know the park equipment has been touched by people using these families). Purell everything and...

Evening pickleball culture is the worst. One must put a paddle up for play on just one court and they allow winners to stay on the court. This means that better players never leave the court and can play several games in a row without having to wait while 20-30+ players are left out having to wait a long time to play IN A PUBLIC PARK! Stupid and rude.

Came back a few months later. Got kicked off the court because it was reserved for lessons but there was no sign about it and the teacher of the lessons could have given us a heads up about that about to happen but chose instead to wait until it was rudely demanded we leave NOW. I said there was no indication of a reserved court and I was told “everyone knows this.” Visiting from out of town I couldn’t know and that claim is impossible mind reading. Challenge courts are not marked clearly.

Everything about the culture of this PUBLIC PARK is a culture set up by the better players to assure that the “lesser” players must wait longer and get to play fewer games. (I am a good player. That does not give me preferential rights.) I believe it should be set up so everyone gets equal access to play instead of this rude mess. I kept being told “this is the way we do it here and everyone knows it” which is not true. Doing things this way just because some snobbish player in the past set it up that way is a bad argument. “This is the way it has always been done” is the end of...

My parents took me to Dallas Park (that's what we called it) as a kid to ride our bikes. It was the perfect park for it. You could start on the flat basketball-court-sized cement area then move to the ring around the flat cement. After mastering both of those, most of the rest of the park has a cement track running around it, perfect for kiddos like mine to fine tune their bike (or skateboard or inline skates) skills.

I would say not much has changed about the park, but a few years ago it received a brand new play area for the kids to enjoy. It's not as awesome as Harry Griffith Park's play area but it's nothing to scoff at either. On the right day there's sometimes enough wind to pop a kite in the air. On the south side of park you'll find tennis courts, a YMCA, and skate park if that's your thing as well.

In short, La Mesita has a lot to offer and I highly recommend it for learning how to ride a...