Twelve Mile Circle published a very rare guest post in March 2011 discussing Geo-Oddities of Portland, Oregon. It featured several unusual items including the famous Mill Ends Park (map).
The Notion
Readers might be familiar with the spot. It’s garnered a lot of attention from mainstream sources over the years because of its diminutive size. Some say it might be the world’s smallest municipal park. However, naysayers question whether something the size of a flowerpot could truly qualify as a “park” or not. Even so it’s become something of a tourist attraction.
Regardless, the city of Portland considered Mill Ends a park and who am I to argue:
“In 1946, Dick Fagan returned from World War II to resume his journalistic career with the Oregon Journal. His office, on the second floor above Front Street (now Naito Parkway), gave him a view of not only the busy street, but also an unused hole in the median where a light pole was to be placed. When no pole arrived to fill in this hole, weeds took over the space. Fagan decided to take matters into his own hands and to plant flowers. Fagan wrote a popular column called Mill Ends (rough, irregular pieces of lumber left over at lumber mills). He used this column to describe the park and the various ‘events’ that occurred there. Fagan billed the space as the ‘World’s Smallest Park.’”
That was good enough for me. It was a park.
My Quest
I thought about Mill Ends park from time-to-time. That happened for no obvious reason other than this type of minutiae sticks in my mind. I wondered what the smallest park in my community might be. What is the most diminutive public space in the smallest self-governing county of the United States, Arlington County, Virginia? This overall quest also connected with one of the very earliest concepts discussed on 12MC, Unusual Goes Very Local from June 2008. It posed the very simple notion that geo-oddities exist everywhere.
This park idea remained on my notoriously every-growing spreadsheet of potential 12MC topics for several years. I never did anything with it, and never had the heart to delete it either. Then I stumbled upon a sliver of land a couple of weeks ago as I pursued my quixotic Bike Every Street in Arlington project.
Nauck Garden
Arlington County actually considered this triangle bound by residential streets (map) a park. So they covered the mound with attractive landscaping and declared it Nauck Garden. I’d discovered my smallest park, or so I thought, although I didn’t want to celebrate too quickly until I could confirm it. Going online, I learned the county published a Public Spaces Inventory with associated acreage. Unfortunately the file lacked a certain precision for my purpose although it helped me winnow the possibilities. It listed several sites including Nauck Garden as 0.1 acres.
This narrowed the candidates to:
- 18th Street North and North Lincoln Street Park
- 23rd Street South and South Eads Street Park
- Arlington View Park
- Belvedere Park
- Cleveland Park
- Nauck Garden
- Oakland Street Park
Arlington provided great real estate maps with precise parcel sizes for every privately-owned piece of property. It did not do the same, however, for public lands. So I turned to the Arlington Parks maps.
I did my best to transfer approximations of the seven candidate park boundaries to a mapping application that measured acreage within a polygon. I would have preferred greater precision. That wasn’t available so I made do with what I had at hand. Nonetheless this crude approximation was good enough to demonstrate that Nauck Garden was in fact not the smallest park in Arlington.
23rd St. S. and S. Eads St. Park
My renderings pointed to the rectangle known as 23rd Street South and South Eads Street Park (map). It calculated roughly to ~0.069 acres (e.g., ~3,000 square feet or ~280 square metres).
I used to drive straight down 23rd Street twice each workday for nearly six years when I worked in Crystal City. Yet, I had no memory of ever seeing that particular park. Naturally it became a great excuse to hop on my bike this morning and check it out.
My photo didn’t differ materially from what was available on Street View. However, at least now I could say I’d visited Arlington’s smallest park and that was important too.
The tiny public space featured a couple of trees, a weird multicolor swirly design on concrete, a trashcan, two metallic tables with matching toadstool chairs complete with evidence that vagrants had been drinking there recently, and an inexplicable mailbox with graffiti. After visiting in person and comparing the space to the Arlington Parks Map, I believe it probably also included the sidewalk plus the landscaping behind the mailbox in order for it to equal 3,000 square feet.
Second place went to Oakland Street Park. That one was a blocked segment of roadway neatly landscaped and designed to prevent cut-through traffic (map).
Excluding 12MC readers from Portland, Oregon, does anyone have a bona fide public park any smaller than mine?
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