ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - The drive takes you past a line of massive industrial lots. Two sets of train tracks. A couple of Mississippi River barge terminals. Nobody comes out here.
The manager at St. Paul’s wood recycling center - whose yard, dominated by looming hills of wood chips and pallets, you have to pass through - isn’t quite sure how to get you where you want to go. There’s not a signpost to be seen.
“I think it’s that way,” he says, pointing at a dirt road on the far side of his lot. “Some people use that road sometimes.”
You go down that road and find a dirt “parking lot” - more of a turnaround, with plenty of mud and ruts - and you’re there at the trail head of St. Paul’s most hard-to-find park.
And ironically Pig’s Eye Regional Park is the city’s largest, with 404 acres of land, around a roughly 500-acre lake. The contiguous Hidden Falls and Crosby Farm, taken together, are bigger.
The trail is, objectively, beautiful: Once you take a bridge over Battle Creek and pass through acres of tall prairie grass, you can see Pig’s Eye Lake, after which the park was named. A heron rookery sits on a far shore, and now the hard metal sounds of the industrial lots seem even farther.
“It’s been mowed twice in its lifetime,” Mary DeLaittre says of the path. She manages the city’s Great River Passage Initiative, which has included the park as something they want to make people more aware of. Correction: Aware of at all.
“Generally speaking, nobody is out there. Them mowing the path is only because we asked them to.” Last week, a bunch of her initiative’s “stakeholders” took a stroll through the fields.
“It’s very difficult to experience it,” admits City Parks Director Mike Hahm.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports that part of the reason is the land is actually landfill. Shanty dwellers abandoned it decades ago, because of all the flooding. You really shouldn’t go there in the spring, unless you like puddles and mud. And all that wild, unfettered flora and fauna - from turkeys to coyotes to deer - means ticks in the summer.
Oh, and 45 years ago it was a dump. Pig’s Eye Dump: The largest Superfund site in the state. And though it was remediated just after the turn of the millennium, no solid structures can be built there.
“It was constantly on fire,” said state Rep. Sheldon Johnson, a St. Paul Democrat whose home overlooks the park. Decades ago, when tire fires were a thing, his neighbors weren’t fans.
“But now it’s good to go,” he adds. He’s one of the few who frequently walk the park.
“It’s safe to use as a park,” said Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman Walker Smith, who noted that several feet of organic soil have been dumped on top of the dump, after its worst contamination was excavated. And the banks of Battle Creek were stabilized with trees, now fully grown.
Another reason for the inherent sense of solitude is the park’s isolation is there are no immediate residential neighbors. Just barge and train yards.
It’s true that a slice of Pig’s Eye Regional Park can be reached from the north, a comparatively tiny triangle of space that includes an archery range. But to reach the prairie and lake, you have to cross a litter of 21 train tracks, or find the unmarked dirt lot, miles to the south. Beyond state natural resource officials, crossing from one side of the park to the other doesn’t happen much.
“People don’t think they’re supposed to be here,” said Angie Tillges, another Initiative staffer. “There’s no signs, lots of edges and barriers.” She’s not just being metaphorical: there are chain fences all the way to the park, enough to make any park-goer feel like a trespasser.
If the push to initiate the Great River Passage gets some steam, Hahm is asked, what would he like to see for Pig’s Eye?
“Access,” he says simply, and then says it again. And maybe, “something with the water.” DeLaittre puts out the possibility of a paddling launch or a bird-watching site.
The goal of the Initiative - under the auspices of the parks department - is to bridge the sporadic public spaces in the area below St. Paul’s East Side bluffs and the river they overlook.
The Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary already sits there, and there’s a push to put a welcome center on the land, with a Dakota focus. There’s a strained history there.
“Our Garden of Eden . became a toxic waste dump,” said astronomer James Rock, a Dakota educator who is also the University of Minnesota Duluth’s planetarium director. “This place was too sacred to live on, near, at.”
Above the sanctuary sits Indian Mounds Park, and next door is the Department of Natural Resource’s headquarters, with its fish ponds. Would it be possible to link everything? A staircase down the bluffs from the upper park, and paths and roads and bike trails - and perhaps even a sign or two, so people at least know there’s something there?
The city hopes to have a plan for that by next year, and DeLaittre says she’s looking to create a nonprofit that would gather private funding for three projects - one of them Pig’s Eye park.
“It’s absolutely imperative that industry stays,” DeLaittre says of the project’s hard-hat-wearing neighbors.
But maybe they’ll smooth out some of those edges.
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Information from: St. Paul Pioneer Press, http://www.twincities.com
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