This is Mill Ends Park in downtown Portland, Ore. The park had humble origins as the base for a light pole that never got filled in. It remains humble, consisting of just 452 square inches — or, as a city website helpfully points out, 0.00007205784 acres. Its tiny stature is its claim to fame. As an official Portland city park, it’s the smallest in the country.
Sitting in a pedestrian median along SW Naito Parkway, there’s not much more to it than a sign and a concrete planter, containing a micro-pine that lists slightly to the southwest. Yet it remains a stop on every downtown walking tour. Posting pictures on social media, some visitors have bragged about the “seconds” it took them to walk around it.
It was born just after World War II. A newspaper columnist named Dick Fagan had an office with a view of the hole where the light pole was meant to go. It stayed empty long enough to grow weeds, so Fagan decided to spruce it up with some flowers. Once there, so the legend goes, he saw a leprechaun who granted him his wish for a park, only he made it this tiny one.
Fagan breathed life into the idea by writing about the space and its leprechaun colony in his column. People have decorated the park at times with a Ferris wheel and a miniature swimming pool, complete with a diving board for butterflies. When snail races took off as a St. Patrick’s tradition, Fagan would bring his wife’s china as a racecourse.
Fagan died in 1969 but Mill Ends, named for his column, became a city park on St. Patrick’s Day, 1976. By then, it had already claimed the title of world’s smallest park from the Guinness Book of World Records five years earlier.
It lost that distinction in February. Guinness named a park in Nagaizumi Town, Japan, which occupies less than a quarter of a square meter, as the world’s smallest. As yet, no leprechauns have been spotted there.
(Alan Greenblatt/Governing)
