On a Saturday afternoon at City Lake Park, the crowd collects in the same three spots. Families line up at the marina window for a fishing pass or a canoe rental. Kids beg for one more lap on the purple miniature train. Someone's cooler is already open at a picnic shelter before noon. It is a familiar rhythm for anyone who has grown up in High Point or Jamestown, and on a busy summer weekend the park pulls in somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 people, according to park supervisor John Rife.
What most of those visitors do not realize is that the park they think they know is only the front half of something larger, and it is quietly in the middle of a change that will play out over the next several years.
The Park You Already Know
City Lake Park sits at 602 W. Main St. in Jamestown, though the address is a little misleading. Cross onto the property and you are technically inside High Point city limits, even though the park reads like it belongs to its Jamestown neighbors. The park spans more than 300 acres around Arnold Koonce City Lake, and the amenities are the kind that get passed down through generations of the same family. The carousel is original in spirit if not in every part. The miniature train, painted its trademark purple, was donated by High Point University back in 2017 and still circles the edge of the lake. The marina, rebuilt in 1996 and fitted with covered docks in 2014, rents kayaks, canoes, pedal boats, and fishing gear to anyone who walks up.
The newest addition is the Meeting and Events Center, which replaced the park's old gym and now overlooks a redesigned pool. It is the kind of upgrade that happens gradually enough that regulars barely register it as new, even though it changed the whole southern end of the park.
"It's just a beautiful park," Rife said, describing what keeps families coming back year after year.
The History Most Visitors Walk Past
Here is where it gets more interesting than a nice afternoon out. The High Point Museum built an audio walking tour of the park into its free app, and it turns the same paths regulars have walked for years into something closer to a self-guided history lesson. The dam that created the lake was finished in 1928, built for High Point's municipal water supply, and the amphitheater near the marina went up in 1933 using dirt excavated during construction of the pool. That amphitheater is not just a picnic backdrop. In 1941, Olympic diving trials were held there, with platforms built directly on the dam itself.
Most people who have visited the park a hundred times have never connected those dots. The train ride and the diving trials happened feet apart, decades apart, and nothing at the park tells you that unless you know to look.
Where the Park Actually Ends, and Where It Doesn't
Here is the part that changes how you think about the place. City Lake Park is not a closed loop. It is a trailhead.
Walk from the park entrance and you can pick up the High Point Greenway, which connects the park to the Piedmont Environmental Center just 0.4 miles away. From there, the trail system keeps expanding rather than stopping:
- Piedmont Environmental Center to City Lake Park: 0.4 miles
- University Park to Piedmont Environmental Center: 1.2 miles
- Piedmont Environmental Center to E. Fork Road: 1.1 miles
- E. Fork Road to Gibson Park: 2.2 miles
The Piedmont Environmental Center itself sits on 376 acres of hardwood and pine forest along the lakeshore, with 6.6 miles of natural surface trails and an unusual centerpiece: a 70-foot by 30-foot walk-on topographic map of North Carolina called the NC Mapscape. It is also where the Bicentennial Greenway begins, a trail that eventually threads north toward Gallimore Dairy Road and, in pieces still being connected, toward Jamestown Park and Gibson Park.
The point is not the mileage. It is that most people treat their trip to City Lake Park as a closed errand. Drive in, do the marina or the pool, drive out. The greenway makes it possible to walk out of the park gate and keep going for the better part of an afternoon without ever crossing a street, through three different named parks, without most locals ever having tried it.
The Ten-Year Clock Nobody Mentions at the Marina
None of that history or trail mileage changes anytime soon. The dam underneath it all is a different story.
The dam that created Arnold Koonce City Lake in 1928 is nearing 100 years old, and it no longer meets current dam safety standards. High Point has been studying what to do about it since at least 2021, and the city has settled on an answer: build a new dam downstream rather than repair the old one. The City Council has already awarded a $3.73 million contract to Schnabel Engineering South of Greensboro to design a replacement, described as a roller compacted concrete dam topped with a piano key weir. Once the new structure is finished, the old dam will be demolished.
The number that puts this in perspective is the total project cost, estimated at $32.5 million. High Point is asking for $20 million of that from the federal government, structured as a reimbursement through the 2026 Water Resources Development Act, rather than direct management by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which the city says would slow the project down further. Design work alone is expected to take about 25 months, with roughly 12 months of permitting layered on top that could run concurrently or could push the timeline out further. Realistically, construction will not start before 2028, if the funding lines up at all.
The city has already bought two properties on Knollwood Drive in Jamestown to make room for construction access, so this is not a hypothetical on a planning document. It is underway, just slowly and mostly out of view.
None of this means the lake you paddle on this fall looks any different than it did last year. The park keeps running, the marina keeps renting kayaks, and the shoreline stays exactly where it has always been for now. But the version of the lake that exists today has a shelf life measured in years, not decades, and almost nobody walking the marina dock this weekend knows that a $32.5 million construction project is the reason the shoreline they are standing on will eventually move a little further downstream.
Take the Walk While It's Still the Same Walk
If you have lived here long enough to think of City Lake Park as a known quantity, this fall is a good time to actually use the connection you have been driving past. Pull up the High Point Museum app before your next visit and let it walk you through the dam, the amphitheater, and the marina with the history attached. Then, instead of turning around at the parking lot, follow the greenway 0.4 miles to the Piedmont Environmental Center and see what 6.6 miles of trail and a walk-on map of the whole state feel like when they are treated as part of the same afternoon instead of a separate errand.
The park is not finished changing, and the lake you know today is on a longer clock than most people realize. That is exactly why this is the season to walk the whole thing while it still looks the way it has for the last hundred years.
If you are thinking about what it means to actually live near a place like this, not just visit it on a Saturday, Melanie Pipes can talk you through what High Point living looks like day to day, no pressure, no jargon, just straight answers.
