Anyone who drives Keele Street between Teston and Kirby has looked at that chain-link fence for years and assumed the same thing: still under construction, check back later. It's become part of the scenery, the kind of barrier you stop registering after the fortieth pass. But the park behind it has quietly stopped being the place most Maple residents remember. Some of it opened without much fanfare fourteen months ago. More of it is landing this year.
North Maple Regional Park, or NMRP as the City shorthand goes, is a 900-acre site the City of Vaughan has been building out in stages since 2018. If your mental picture of it is two turf soccer fields, a gravel trail, and a hill good for sledding, that picture is accurate for roughly the first six years of the project and out of date for the version standing there now.
The Park Most Of Maple Remembers Is Already Gone
Phase 1, finished in 2018, gave the park its bones: two FIFA-certified artificial turf soccer fields with built-in spectator seating, a pavilion with washrooms and changerooms that opened in 2019, a parking lot, and roughly 5 kilometres of granular-surface trail through terrain shaped by the Oak Ridges Moraine and the Don River. That's the park that shows up in most people's memory when someone mentions NMRP. It's also the park that stopped being the whole story in the summer of 2025.
On June 5, 2025, the City held an evening event to mark the official opening of Vaughan's first cricket field, a facility inside NMRP with three artificial turf wicket areas, batting cages, a digital scoreboard, and dedicated spectator space. Mayor Steven Del Duca attended along with members of council. It was ready for permitting that same month. If you haven't been past the park since before last June, this is one facility that simply didn't exist the last time you looked.
That alone would be a meaningful addition to a neighborhood park. It's not the biggest thing happening at NMRP this year.
| Phase 1 (2018–2024) | What's landed or is landing (2025–2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Sports fields | Two FIFA-certified turf soccer fields | Cricket field (opened June 2025), Vaughan Soccer Club dome under construction |
| Trails | About 5 km of granular nature-walk trail | Additional accessible multi-use pathways tied to the family recreation build |
| Parking | Original lot at the Keele Street entrance | 200 more spaces being added alongside the dome project |
| Family amenities | Open lawn, picnic tables, pavilion | 15-acre Family Recreation Area: playgrounds, waterplay, winter skating trail, pondside boardwalk, picnic pavilion, gardens |
The Part Still Coming, And Why It's The Bigger Deal
In July 2025, the City broke ground on a 15-acre Family Recreation Area inside NMRP, a project the province backed with a $10 million contribution through the Community Sport and Recreation Infrastructure Fund. The funding announcement came with the kind of language governments use for ribbon cuttings, but the underlying scope is specific: nature-themed playgrounds, a waterplay zone, a winter skating trail, a pondside boardwalk with accessible pathways, a large picnic pavilion, flower gardens, and a new parking lot with its own washroom pavilion.
At the groundbreaking, one official summed up the timeline plainly:
"Shovels are officially in the ground for a new Family Recreation Area at the beautiful North Maple Regional Park."
The City's own project page lists the Family Recreation Area as anticipated to open for public use in 2026. That's this year. For a neighborhood park, a winter skating trail and a pondside boardwalk are not small additions. They're the kind of features that change what a Tuesday evening in February looks like for a family three streets away, and they're arriving on a calendar that's already in motion rather than a vague future date.
The other piece worth knowing about is the Vaughan Soccer Club dome, a partnership between the City and the club to build an 11-a-side artificial turf field under an air-supported dome, meant to bring indoor, year-round soccer to the same Phase 1 grounds where the original two turf fields sit. Construction started with an event on July 29. The City's own update page had it on track to be ready for play by the end of 2025. Alongside that project, the existing parking lot is being expanded by 200 spaces, a detail that matters if you've ever circled the Keele Street lot on a Saturday morning looking for somewhere to park before a game.
So the list of what's changing this year, in one place:
- Cricket field: open since June 5, 2025
- Family Recreation Area (playgrounds, waterplay, skating trail, boardwalk, pavilion, gardens): anticipated to open in 2026
- Vaughan Soccer Club dome: construction began July 2025, with a target completion by the end of that year
- Parking: 200 additional spaces being added alongside the dome project
A Park Built On A Landfill, Briefly
None of this would exist on this footprint if not for what the land used to be. Before it was NMRP, this site held the Keele Valley Landfill, once the largest landfill in Canada and the third largest in North America. It closed in December 2002, a result that a group of Maple-area residents called Vaughan CARES had pushed for. The City's 2018 concept plan grew out of that closure, and the eventual 900-acre vision was endorsed by council that same year. Everything discussed above, the cricket field, the dome, the Family Recreation Area, sits on ground that was a working landfill within the lifetime of most people currently living nearby.
The park also keeps its wilder side intact. The trail system runs through habitat for Midland Painted Turtles, Eastern Gartersnakes, Red-bellied Snakes, and American Toads, and the City has installed bat habitat boxes around the grounds to support species affected by white-nose syndrome. Dogs are welcome on leash. None of that is changing. What's changing is everything built around it.
Worth A Second Look This Fall
If your last real visit to NMRP was a walk on the nature trail two or three summers ago, you've missed roughly a year of construction that's already delivered a cricket field and is about to deliver a skating trail, a boardwalk, and a proper family play area on a 15-acre footprint. The City is also running a longer master plan process for the remaining acreage, gathering input from residents on what the next decade of the park should include. More than 1,000 people have already weighed in through past surveys and workshops.
None of this requires a special trip or an event calendar. It's the same park at the same Keele Street entrance you've been driving past. The difference is that a fair amount of what's behind that fence right now didn't exist the last time most people looked, and more of it lands before the year is out.
For homeowners weighing what to do with a Maple property, or for anyone curious about how these kinds of neighborhood investments tend to shape value over time, Kevin Lin Homes puts local detail like this to work every day. Reach out anytime to talk through what's changing in your corner of York Region.
