The World's Smallest Park Is In The US; Can You Guess The Name?

Public parks in the vicinity of your residence can serve you with many benefits. They are ideal locations for morning or evening walks, aerobic exercises or just to hang out with friends. A spacious park can also allow playing grounds for children, while basking in the beauty of nature. There can be umpteen activities you can think of doing in a park. There is one park in the world, where there’s not much you can actually do. To be precise, there is hardly anything you can do at this park. Wondering why? Let us explain.

When you picture a day at the park, Mill Ends Park might not immediately come to mind. This is due to the fact that this little urban park situated near Portland, Oregon in the US is officially the World’s Smallest Park. This designation has been officiated to it by the Guinness Book Of World Records. The park is a tiny circle measuring 60.96 cm (24 in) in circumference and 2,917.15 cm² (452.16 in²) in area.

Mill Ends Park was named the official park of the city of Portland on March 17, 1976.

The small park is now managed by Portland Parks & Recreation, which shouldn’t require too much labour, considering its small size. According to the Portland.gov website, in 1946, an army man named Dick Fagan returned to Oregon after the Second World War and started working as a journalist at the Oregon Journal. A busy street was visible down from his office. A big pit was made there in which the light pole was to be installed. When many days passed and the pole was not planted there, then Dick thought of planting a tree at that place.

At that time, Dick used to write a column in newspapers under the name Mill Ends. In this column, he used to write reports on different parks of the city, in which he used to give information about the programs happening there. For this reason, he started giving information about his little plant as well, including it as one of the parks he wrote about. He named it after his pen name.

According to popular local myth, the tiny park is inhabited by leprechauns, fictional elf-like characters from irish folklore.