Brief
Though it was closed and demolished last year during road construction along Naito Parkway, the world’s smallest park is now back along Portland’s waterfront.
Insight
The new and improved Mill Ends Park includes a miniature park sign, a few tufts of grass and a single shrub. That’s because the park is only 2 feet across. It’s located in a traffic median near the intersection of Naito and Southwest Taylor Street.
The city’s announcement of the park’s reopening comes as the “Better Naito” project — to create a permanent two-way bikeway and sidewalk along the west side of Waterfront Park — nears completion.
As part of the construction process, the mini-park was reconstructed and replanted 6 inches west from its previous location. The new version of the park is tucked inside the concrete outline of a cloverleaf, a nod to the leprechaun colony that lives there, according to legend.
With a total area of 452 square inches, Mill Ends holds the distinction of being the World’s Smallest Park, a title formally bestowed by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1971. The park’s name comes from the late Oregon Journal newspaper columnist Dick Fagan, who had a column called “Mill Ends,” so named for the odd bits and pieces among lumber mill scrap.
Though the founding of the park is shrouded in some myth and legend, newspaper archives seem to point the park’s founding in 1954. That year, the city of Portland was in a battle with the city of Columbus, Ohio, which claimed to have opened “the world’s largest municipal rose garden.
” Employees of the Oregon Journal helped drum up a publicity stunt for Portland to plant the “world’s smallest rose garden.” They chose an empty hole in a median in front of the Journal offices, on what was then Front Street. It was a spot where a light pole had supposedly been planned but never installed.
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