Mill Ends Park

Mill Ends Park is a circle two feet across set in a median on SW Naito Parkway, and Portland has spent three quarters of a century treating it as more than a pothole with flowers. Oregon Journal columnist Dick Fagan watched the city leave an unplugged light pole hole in the median in 1946, planted it himself in 1948, and wrote in his Mill Ends column that a leprechaun named Patrick O'Toole lived there and granted a wish each day, with the catch that wishes went only to the Irish. Guinness World Records certified it the world's smallest park at 452 square inches, and the city keeps it as a park to this day.

The leprechaun story is newspaper whimsy, but the custom around it is real. Portlanders tend the little park, set gnome sized furniture and holiday displays in it, and hold St. Patrick's Day observances there, keeping a piece of Irish fairy lore alive at street level. It is folk practice at the smallest possible scale: a wish site where the offering is attention, and where the joke and the devotion are hard to pull apart.

Visiting

SW Naito Parkway at SW Taylor Street, Portland, Oregon, in a traffic median. View it from the sidewalk; reaching it means crossing live traffic lanes, so do not stand in the roadway. Operator: Portland Parks and Recreation, portland.gov/parks/mill-ends-park.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, [File:Mill Ends Park, Portland, Oregon in 2018.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mill_Ends_Park,_Portland,_Oregon_in_2018.jpg), CC BY 2.0.