Kitty Clark Fritz/Special to the Tribune

Kevin Becker relaxes on the grass in Hidden Park as his daughters Zoe, 6, and Brigit, 2, dance to music emanating from a nearby backyard open mike night. Surrounded on all four sides by houses, the park is formally known as McDuffie Park for the developer who donated the land. "It's wonderful, because you get so few people," Becker said. "It's quiet."

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Here's an Albuquerque riddle: What's shady, peaceful and grassy, as big as a city block but invisible unless you know just where to look?

If you live near the corner of Lomas and Carlisle boulevards Northeast, you probably know the answer.

Accessible only by alleyways, tucked behind houses and backyard fences on all four sides, there's a refuge known by its regulars as Hidden Park.

Throughout the day and early evening, the park is loved by many as a place for Frisbee golf, volleyball, walking dogs, jogging and people-watching. At other times, it's utterly serene.

Buckner Creel, whose house backs onto the park, says he likes to watch the "really slow, really bad martial arts people" from his window as he studies graduate level physics.

Parties pop up in houses adjoining the park in summer months.

On a recent evening, Doug and Eileen Parker hosted an open mike night in their backyard and opened it up to passersby in the park.

The makeshift stage - rigged with amplifiers and microphones and lit by patio and household lamps - brought together a diverse group of musicians and an audience to match.

Guitarist Dave Bates, tanned and wearing a cowboy hat, was discovered by Doug Parker in the park. Bates says he has been visiting since he attended Jefferson Middle School. He now lives in Four Hills Mobile Home Park, but he commutes so he can play his guitar in "real quiet" so he can actually "hear all 12 strings" of his guitar.

Leo Neufeld, wearing pink-tinted sunglasses and a faded Costa Rica T-shirt, and Kathy Josefson, wearing a Bohemian green shift dress, discovered at the get-together that they are neighbors.

Dan Drennan, who was having a few guests on his patio for the evening, heard the live music at the Parker house and decided to shut off the music playing from his iPod and listen to the neighbor's. Drennan says he likes the "tight-knit neighborhood" that is made up of "underground Nob-Hill-ish university people that care about the park." Previous residents of the Drennan home include the neighborhood's developer, Charles McDuffie.

Formally known as McDuffie Park, Hidden Park was named for its developer. McDuffie is credited with building a house each week during 1936 as a way to combat the housing shortage at the time, according to a city history of the park. He was also the first in the area to capitalize on the mass-produced housing that would characterize Albuquerque's post-World War II construction.

McDuffie and his wife, Martha, sold the empty space that would become Hidden Park to the City of Albuquerque for $1, in exchange for a promise that the city would develop it, according to Charles D. Biebel, who wrote a history of Depression-era parks in Albuquerque.

In 1961, the park was almost vacated because the city felt that abutting property owners disproportionately benefited from the park, according to city historical files. Luckily for the park's devotees today, residents couldn't come to an agreement on how to divide the land and pay property taxes.

Debbie Butcher, who researched the park for a college class, lived near it in the 1950s. She remembers flying kites that were "made of tissue paper on toothpicks, flown on thread." That was before the park's elm trees had reached their stately height of today.

Originally, all the houses around the park had white picket fences. Today, they've mostly been renovated to match their residents' eccentric tastes.

For instance, Jewel Reid's red-roofed home doubles as a tortoise rescue shelter. She has about 40 tortoises, and the neighbors often donate their garden snails in tin cans to feed them.

Drew Lyman of Phoenix went for a walk and stumbled into the park. "This is foreign to me. I don't see this out there, at least not where I am living," he said.