Brick and wrought-iron fenced, abandoned, overgrown, the park lay amid urban back ends, ringed with loading docks and gravel parking lots For Employees Only. Nobody could recall its name, being listed simply as “park” even on the earliest surveys of town from the 1820s. The brickwork and iron were probably a later addition, likely from in or near the Gilded Age, but again no contemporary records of any such improvements exist.

When the downtown area was still largely open, it was apparently a popular destination for constitutionals. Photographs from the city archives clearly show this sort of use ca. 1875, before the bricks were installed, and in 1887, afterwards. Once the downtown area began to grow, though, its location ringed by four main thoroughfares became a liability. Storefronts sprang up on the street, blocking off the line of sight between the road and the park, and it was eclipsed in both literal and figurative terms.

Now, whenever someone stumbles on the park, it’s usually late at night following a bender on one of the bars nearby. The crumbling brick and wild, gnarled trees do give the area an aura of menace, it’s true, and more than one dare has been given to spend a night under those ancient and ill-tended boughs. As far as can be ascertained, no one has followed through on it.

And, all things considered, perhaps that’s for the best. For if the true nature of that weedy enclave were ever known, surely the complacent cloud that often hung over downtown would be swiftly and brutally ripped away.

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