If you hadn't been to Funland in a few years before 2023, you knew what you were walking into. The Tilt-A-Whirl groaned. The Ferris wheel looked like it had been circling since the Ford administration. Half the ride operators you needed on a Saturday weren't there, and the train broke down often enough that regulars stopped being surprised. It was still worth the trip, in the way a favorite diner is worth the trip even when the booths are sticky. It was Burns Park's Funland, and it had been that way for decades.
Then, on March 31, 2023, a tornado tore across the park's 1,700 acres and took the decision out of the city's hands. What reopened two years later in March 2025 isn't a restoration of what stood there before. It's a different park, and most of what makes it different has nothing to do with weather recovery. It's an upgrade the tornado made possible, not one it merely repaired.
What Actually Blew Down
The numbers from that storm are still the baseline for everything that came after. An estimated 10,000 trees came down across the park in a single afternoon. Funland was damaged badly enough that it stayed closed through the rest of 2023. FEMA agreed to cover 75 percent of the park's lost value, which left North Little Rock to fund the remaining share, estimated at $10 million, out of its own budget.
That gap is where the real story sits. A straight insurance rebuild replaces what existed. A $10 million local match, on the other hand, is a decision about priorities, and the city council made that decision unanimously on December 27, 2023, when it voted to enter a contract to rebuild Funland from the ground up rather than patch what the storm had left standing.
The Rides That Didn't Come Back
Here's the part that a "Funland has reopened" headline glosses over: it reopened as something else. The mechanical midway rides, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars, are gone. What replaced them is a modern playground built around slides, swings, and climbing structures, with accessible equipment designed for kids who couldn't have used the old rides at all.
That's not a downgrade dressed up in press-release language. It's a different kind of park attraction, one that trades novelty rides for equipment that works for more kids more often, and that doesn't depend on a mechanical operator showing up for a shift. The one holdover from the old Funland is the train, which still runs on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., the single thread connecting the park you might remember to the one that exists now.
Water That Was Never There Before
The splash pad is the clearest evidence that this rebuild added rather than replaced. There was no splash pad at Funland before the tornado. It debuted for the first time in summer 2025, and this year the city published its full 2026 schedule: open Fridays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. from May 1 through May 21, then shifting to its full seasonal schedule after Memorial Day weekend on May 25.
That's a genuinely new category of amenity, not a repair. Burns Park's identity for most of its history was built on team sports facilities, golf, and a small legacy amusement park. A free, city-run splash pad wasn't part of that identity three years ago. Now it is, and it's drawing families who never had a reason to make Funland part of their weekend rotation before.
The Courts Nobody Was Asking For in 2020
The same window that rebuilt Funland also delivered something the park had never had at all. On November 8, 2023, the city cut the ribbon on a 12-court lighted pickleball complex at 12 Funland Drive, free to the public, with individual light switches at each court so players can use them well past sunset.
"Pickleball is the fastest growing sport around. I am glad we now have such a nice, outdoor facility for the pickleball community to enjoy."
That's how Mayor Terry Hartwick put it at the opening, and the timing matters. This complex went in during the same recovery cycle as the Funland rebuild, which means the tornado didn't just force the city to fix what broke. It gave North Little Rock a reason to add an entire recreational category the park's older layout never accommodated.
The Woods Are Still Being Rebuilt Too
The rebuild isn't finished, and the most recent proof of that has nothing to do with playgrounds. In March 2026, the North Little Rock Parks and Recreation Department carried out a prescribed burn across roughly 250 acres of the park, split between the Pavilion Section, the Green Section, and the White Oak Overlook Section. Officials picked the day for its wind conditions and warned residents across central Arkansas that they might see or smell smoke.
A prescribed burn isn't cosmetic. It's a forestry tool used to clear underbrush and reduce fuel load, and in a park that lost roughly 10,000 trees to a single storm, it's a sign that the recovery work is still active three years later. That's a different story than a ribbon-cutting. It's evidence that someone is still managing the ground itself, not just the amenities sitting on top of it.
What Never Left
Not everything at Burns Park needed rebuilding, and the parts that survived the storm are worth remembering, because they're the reason the park still feels like Burns Park and not a brand-new development wearing an old name. The covered bridge over the east fork of White Oak Bayou is still there. So is the Union Pacific caboose, the World War II army tank, the pre-Civil War log cabin, and an old iron jail cell the city once used, all still scattered through the grounds the way they've been for years. The park's connection to the 15-mile Arkansas River Trail loop, which links to both the Big Dam Bridge and the Clinton Presidential Bridge, was never touched by any of this either.
That continuity is part of the point. Burns Park isn't a park that got demolished and replaced. It's a park where the sports fields, the trails, and the historical oddities held steady while the family-facing side of it, Funland, the splash pad, and pickleball, quietly turned into something newer and more useful than what came before.
If You Haven't Been Back Since Before 2023
For anyone whose mental picture of Burns Park is frozen somewhere around 2019, here's what's actually true right now:
- Funland's modern, accessible playground has been open since March 2025, with the train running Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
- The splash pad runs weekend hours in early May before shifting to its full schedule after Memorial Day.
- The 12-court lighted pickleball complex has been free and open since November 2023, with courts available well into the evening.
- The city is still actively managing the park's ecology, including a 250-acre prescribed burn as recently as March 2026.
- As recently as August 8, the city handed out free backpacks and school supplies at Funland's Back to School Bash, one more sign that programming here keeps expanding rather than settling back into what it used to be.
Three years is long enough that a park can change shape without most of its neighbors noticing all at once. Burns Park did exactly that. The rebuild didn't hand North Little Rock its old amusement park back. It handed the city a better set of reasons to show up on a Saturday.
We spend a lot of time at Capital SIR paying attention to the small, unglamorous changes that add up to a neighborhood's real character, the kind of detail that never makes it into a listing photo but shapes how people actually live somewhere. If you're curious what else has shifted in North Little Rock lately, or you'd like to talk through what a corner of this market looks like up close, schedule a complimentary market consultation with our team.
