St. Paul threw what was then its biggest party ever to mark the opening of Highland Park in August 1925.
The seven-hour celebration, which boasted free barbecue and band concerts between speeches from local officials lauding the potential of the city’s newest park, drew more people than opening day at the Minnesota State Fair a month later.
“They called it a monster picnic,” said Charlie Evans, a St. Paul Public Works designer who has researched Highland Park’s history.
“It was pretty primitive when it first opened,” he said of the park. “Even so, they still had 30,000 people show up.”
Highland Park would eventually become a jewel of St. Paul’s park system, helping to spur the development of the surrounding neighborhood that shares its name. But in 1925, it was just 244 acres of swampy fields more than three miles from the city center.
Many St. Paulites didn’t see the value in this far-flung piece of property, and park backers hoped to win them over with an afternoon of free food and entertainment.
A new park
The early decades of the 20th century were transformative for St. Paul’s parks.
While they had long been oases of natural beauty where residents could escape the noise and pollution of urban life, parks also came to be viewed by St. Paulites and city officials as venues for “active, organized recreation,” local historian Andrew J. Schmidt wrote in 2002.
The peaceful lakes and manicured gardens of Como and Phalen parks soon found themselves sharing the landscape with golf courses, tennis courts and baseball fields. Park-goers flocked to these new amenities.
When the Ford Motor Co. bought up land for a factory on the city’s southwestern edge in 1923, officials instantly recognized that the surrounding farmland would soon be developed into housing for auto workers. And they would need a park of their own.
Highland Park was conceived with active recreation in mind from the start. In addition to golf, tennis and baseball facilities, it would be equipped with a swimming pool, a football stadium and a toboggan slide.
As the price tag for this new park grew, parks commissioner Herman Wenzel asked the city council to fund its purchase and development by taxing surrounding property owners in a sprawling assessment district, which stretched from the Mississippi River in the west to Dale Street in the east and Summit Avenue to the north, Evans said.
Wenzel’s plan faced stiff opposition from taxpayers. One of his co-workers later wrote that the commissioner’s wife “received telephone communications to the effect that she would probably be a widow if the agitation for the park continued.”
The party on Aug. 9 was billed as a chance for skeptical St. Paulites to see what they were paying for.
“Many do not know where the park is,” the St. Paul Daily News editorialized on the eve of the celebration. “Others think it inaccessible. It is to acquaint people with their new park that the monster community picnic has been arranged by the park department and four community organizations for Sunday.”
‘Monster community picnic’
The party began at 2 p.m. with a series of sporting events that pitted picnickers against each other for donated prizes in everything from sack races and tug-of-war to horseshoes and kittenball — an early version of softball.
One of the wildest events was a motorcycle hill climb, in which riders zipped up a 300-foot hill in about seven seconds.
“There was a near panic when one of the motorcycles in the hill climb broke through the thickly massed crowd near the top and started back down,” the Pioneer Press reported. “The broad line of spectators on the south side of the track got away like a football backfield.”
Fortunately, no one was injured.
Dinner was served after a series of speeches from Wenzel and other officials. St. Paulites “consumed floods of pop and acres of ice cream cones,” according to the Pioneer Press.
The festivities were capped off with a fireworks display in the evening.
The picnic seems to have swayed some — but certainly not all — Highland Park skeptics. When the city council met in October to vote on Wenzel’s $452,000 assessment proposal, several hundred taxpayers showed up to testify on both sides of the issue.
“You know what you’ll get for this,” one outraged property owner shouted during the hearing. “You’ll get a kick in the anatomy.”
The council ultimately voted to approve the assessment.
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