THE BULLETIN • THURSDAY, APRIL 8, 2021 A3
LOCAL, STATE & REGION
How Portland ended up
with what is officially the
LEFT: Daniel
Misner with
Portland Parks
& Recreation
adds red
hook sedge
beneath the
Vanderwolf’s
Pyramid
limber pine
tree at Mill
Ends Park.
WORLD’S
SMALLEST
PARK
Samantha Swindler/
The Oregonian
BY SAMANTHA SWINDLER • The Oregonian
E
arly on St. Patrick’s Day, Daniel
Misner, a horticulturist with
Portland Parks & Recreation,
visited Mill Ends Park to re-landscape the
entire grounds. It t took less than 10 minutes.
This is no surprise to Portlanders familiar
with Mill Ends Park, located on a traffic island
in the middle of Naito Parkway at the intersec-
tion with SW Taylor Street. With a total area of
452 square inches, Mill Ends holds the distinc-
tion of being the World’s Smallest Park, a title
formally bestowed by the Guinness Book of
World Records in 1971.
“One of the biggest challenges is … it’s in the
middle of a roadway,” Misner said. “We do have
to replace the plant material on a regular basis
due to traffic not being able to stay in their lane.”
The park has seen many changes over nearly
seven decades. Not only because cars regularly
run over it, but because as the street itself has
been redesigned and repaved, so too has the park,
whose founding has become a bit of local lore.
Over the years, signs — homemade and offi-
cial — have appeared and disappeared, along with
plastic dinosaurs, toy soldiers and Christmas or-
naments on the park’s usual lone, diminutive tree.
“Because the public cares so much about this
park and they love it so much, we often get a lot of
guerrilla planting that happens with material that
we would prefer not to have in there,” Misner said.
On April 20, 2018, for instance, someone
planted cannabis in the park. The city of Port-
via
Oregon Journal ian
The Oregon
The original caption for this Oregon Journal
photo when it ran in the March 7, 1954, Oregon
Journal was: “CIVIL WAR set in recently when
smallest rose garden in nation was planted
in safety island in front of Journal building.
Commissioner Ormond Bean (right) argues it
should be named ‘Envoy park,’ while Dick Fagan
center maintains it should be titled “Mill Ends,”
for his column in the Journal. George Gutfleisch,
Roses for Portland head, supports Bean.”
land kindly requests folks don’t do that.
“We always come out here on St. Patrick’s Day,
just to clean it up and dress up the park because it
does have that lore about it,” Misner said. “Many
people don’t know Mill Ends is home to the only
leprechaun community outside of Ireland.”
Oh, did we forget to mention the leprechauns?
Mill Ends Park was named by the late Dick
Fagan, a reporter who worked for the Oregon
Journal newspaper throughout the 1940s, ’50s
and 1960s.
Bill Fagan said his father was an Iowa na-
tive who came out to Portland to work for the
News-Telegram. When the paper folded, he joined
the Oregon Journal , where he was an assistant ed-
itor and had a regular column called Mill Ends,
named for the scraps of lumber left over at a mill.
“Mill Ends means bits and pieces,” said another
son, Pat Fagan, “so he’d pick up a lot of quips and
things that were happening in the neighborhood
or in town and put those in his column.”
Legend has it that Fagan’s office window at the
Journal looked down on what was then Front
Avenue, and today is Naito Parkway. In his line
of sight was a spot where a streetlight had been
planned but was either removed or never in-
stalled. The concrete skirt remained around the
hole, which was an eyesore filled with weeds.
In one version of the tale, Fagan reportedly
caught a leprechaun and was granted three
wishes. He asked to have many children — there
were five kids in the family — to have the lep-
rechaun write his column, though Fagan still
had to type it himself, and to have his own park,
which was a 2-foot-wide hole in the ground.
A slightly more official source, the city of
Portland’s Parks & Recreation Department web-
site, says Fagan established the tiny park on St.
Patrick’s Day 1948. And while that date has been
widely reported, it doesn’t appear to be true.
“Fagan, TV personality and sometimes news-
paper man, stood at the north end of the traffic
island and surveyed the rolling expanse of splen-
did soil that makes up Portland Envoy Park,”
the Oregon Journal reported on March 7, 1954.
“That’s where the green work (for which there
is no commercial spray available) of envy must
have put in its appearance, for Fagan then and
there began claiming it (with all the flowery ges-
turing of Columbus landing on the New World)
in the ‘Name of Mill Ends.’”
This connection to the true founding date of
Mill Ends Park seems to have first been reported
in the 2014 book “PDXccentric,” written by
Scott Cook and Aimee Wade. Wade also dug up
a 1955 letter from the superintendent of parks
who confirmed the entire thing was a “stunt to
publicize ‘Rose Planting Week’” dreamed up by
the Oregon Journal.
Over time, the rose bush was replaced with
other flowers, plants and leprechaun-themed
amenities.
“(Fagan) is still the definite founder of this. He
is in that first photo,” Wade said. “He was just do-
ing it for a different reason than meeting a lepre-
chaun. He was trying to keep the title of the City
of Roses, and that’s so much more important.”
However it started, the tiny park became a
popular Portland point of interest due to Fagan’s
regular column writing.
Dick Fagan became ill with lung cancer and
died at age 58. Just weeks before his death in No-
vember 1969, a special proclamation was made,
signed by Gov. Tom McCall, honoring him “for
his contributions to the livability of the city of
Portland and Oregon, exemplifying fun in good
taste, and particularly for his foresight in estab-
lishing the original Willamette River-Harbor
Parkway, known as Mill Ends Park.”
The park continued to be celebrated after Fa-
gan’s death. In 1976, the spot was officially ad-
opted as a park by the Portland Parks & Recre-
ation department.
And every St. Patrick’s Day, in what is most
likely not a city-sanctioned event, the descen-
dants of Dick Fagan still gather at Mill Ends
Park to raise a toast in his honor.
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