Most people who park at the roundabout on Parkview Drive take the same first step onto the same trail without ever checking whether it is the right one for what they are doing that day. That trail is the Meadow Trail, and it drops fast and steep to a footbridge over North Brook before most walkers have decided whether they wanted a workout or a stroll. A hundred feet to the east, a flat paved path called the Southbrook Trail heads the same general direction with none of the descent. Almost nobody uses it, because almost nobody knows it is there.
That gap between what people default to and what actually fits their day is the whole story of Andy Lewis Community Park at Haverford Reserve. The reserve is often described in one line: 124 acres, two first-order streams, four water retention basins, a native grass meadow. That line is true and it tells you almost nothing about which of the park's trails you should actually be on with a stroller, a mountain bike, or a dog who pulls on technical footing. The trails are not interchangeable. They were built for different surfaces, different grades, and different uses, and Haverford Township has mapped and named each one specifically for that reason.
The Trailhead Decides Before You Do
Walk in from the Parkview Drive roundabout and the Meadow Trail is the obvious choice because it is the one you see first. It is also the steepest entry point in the park, descending sharply from the trailhead to a footbridge over North Brook. To its east, the Athertyn Trail and the PECO Trail, the latter running under a power line easement, offer a more gradual grade down to the same brook. None of the three is marked as the "main" trail. They are simply three different ways to lose the same elevation, and which one you land on usually comes down to which direction you happened to be facing.
The Southbrook Trail solves a different problem entirely. Its initial section, running from the Parkview Drive sidepath, has a paved macadam surface, which makes it the one segment of the park that works reliably for a jogging stroller, a wheelchair, or anyone who wants a walk without watching their footing. It connects to the Switchback Trail before the surface shifts back to natural ground. If you need a guaranteed flat, dry loop rather than a scenic one, this is the trail that actually delivers it, and it is easy to miss if you only ever enter from the roundabout.
Six Trails, One Meadow, Different Reasons to Take Each
Once you are past the initial descent, the reserve opens into a network that loops around the central meadow and the wooded acreage beyond it. Each trail has a distinct character, and the Friends of Haverford Trails has color-coded and mapped every one of them.
| Trail | Surface | What it's like | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Southbrook | Paved macadam (initial section) | Flat, level, accessible | Strollers, wheelchairs, easy dog walks |
| Meadow | Natural, unimproved | Steep descent to a footbridge | A quick workout, not a leisurely stroll |
| Athertyn / PECO | Natural, gradual grade | Gentler alternates to Meadow's descent | Anyone avoiding a steep drop |
| Northbrook / Veterans | Natural, near the CREC building | Connects toward the environmental center | Loop walks with a destination |
| Old Gray / Scout | Natural, wooded | Loop through the woods west and north of the meadow | Fewer people, more tree cover |
| Lenape | Natural | Splits off the Meadow Trail, runs along the brook | Shorter out-and-back walks |
Off-road bicycles are permitted on most of these natural-surface trails alongside walkers and joggers, under guidelines set by the township's parks and recreation department. The mix of surfaces is not an accident of terrain. It reflects a park built to serve joggers, mountain bikers, dog walkers, and school field trip groups on the same acreage without funneling everyone onto the same quarter mile of ground.
Beyond the trail loops, the park carries the amenities that make it a daily habit rather than a weekend destination: sports fields, a playground, and a dog park sit alongside the trailhead. Haverford Township's recreation department also runs environmental education field trips out of the reserve, using its streams and meadow as an outdoor classroom with a fifteen-to-one student ratio, which tells you the park was designed with year-round, multi-generational use in mind rather than as a single scenic loop for weekend visitors.
Check the Trail Before You Load the Car
The condition of any given segment is not fixed. Trail-tracking services that monitor the reserve flag individual named segments for erosion, washouts, or other seasonal issues rather than rating the whole park with one blanket status. That distinction matters practically. A washed-out section of the Old Gray Trail does not mean the paved Southbrook Trail is impassable, and a flooded footbridge crossing on the Meadow Trail does not mean the Lenape Trail along the same brook is closed. If you are heading out with a stroller or a bike and the weather has been rough, it is worth a quick look at current segment status rather than assuming the whole network is fine, or the whole network is out, based on one bad report.
The Wednesday Nights That Turn a Walk Into a Ritual
For a stretch of most years, the reserve becomes a scheduled gathering rather than a solo habit. The Haverford Reserve Trail Running Series, which has run since 2019, holds low-pressure 5K races and a one-mile walk option on Wednesday evenings at 9000 Parkview Drive, with the course looping the reserve's trails and hills. It is built explicitly for people at every level, from first-timers to seasoned runners, and race proceeds go directly back into maintaining the trails. It is a small detail, but it says something about how the township treats this park: not as static infrastructure to be built once and left alone, but as ground that a community shows up to fund and maintain in person, one Wednesday at a time.
Where the Trail Actually Goes If You Keep Walking
The park's least appreciated feature might be the Pennsy Trail, which repurposes a former Pennsylvania Railroad branch line into a paved connector linking the Skatium and nearby neighborhoods to the Haverford Area YMCA and a signaled pedestrian crosswalk at Eagle Road. It is easy to think of Haverford Reserve as a contained loop you drive to, walk, and leave. The Pennsy Trail is proof that the network was designed to extend past its own boundary, tying the park into the rest of the township's daily foot traffic rather than sitting apart from it. For residents on the north side of the reserve, it can function less like a recreational trail and more like a sidewalk that happens to run through the woods.
None of this changes the basic fact that Haverford Reserve is one of the township's best pieces of shared ground. What it does change is the assumption that any entrance and any trail will get you the walk you actually wanted. The reserve rewards a little bit of local knowledge, the kind that tells you Southbrook is the one to take with a stroller, Meadow is the one to take if you want your heart rate up, and the Pennsy Trail is the one to take if you are just trying to get to the Y.
That kind of granular, block-by-block familiarity with a place, not just its median home price or its school boundaries, is what the Houder Nuñez-Strid Team spends its time building. Meghan Houder and Trish Nuñez-Strid work the Main Line the way a longtime resident does, trail by trail and street by street, which is exactly the kind of detail that ends up mattering once a client is deciding not just whether to live in Haverford, but where in it. If you are weighing a move to this stretch of the Main Line and want a conversation grounded in that level of detail, reach out to schedule a confidential market consultation.
