“The Perozzi Fountain has suffered more than any other part of the park,” he says, adding that it’s probably mostly teenagers and folks who have had a bit too much to drink who destroy park property at night. “Unfortunately vandalism is rampant here,” Todt says when I mention that the fountain, though it was completely restored in the late 1980s, looks like it has seen better days.
#Ipass ashland cracked
This is also the section where the gorgeous but cracked Florentine Butler-Perozzi marble fountain stands, with its winged cherub astride a duck, up a scenic flight of stone stairs. Instead of having a music area located off Winburn Way at the sycamore grove, the original old-style circular two-tiered wooden band shell was located where the current band shell stands, off kilter from the sycamore grove but well loved and well used nonetheless. Chautauqua was a spiritual and educational movement that originated in New York State and enjoyed popularity nationwide in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Todt shows me where there used to be a row of alder trees that were taken out when he first came to work for the Parks Department because alder trees don’t usually live past 80-100 years. We start at the lawns before the playground and Todt points out where the old wooden Chautauqua Tabernacle building once stood, as well as where people would camp on the lawns above the lower duck pond-up to 100 tents at a time-to participate in Chautauqua. As I walk through the park on another morning with 63-year-old Todt (pronounced “toad”), whose weather beaten face, green hat, boots, and white leather garden gloves show that he’s a man who’s spent most of his life outdoors, he has stories to tell about many of the trees and plants that are in the park today, and even about trees that are no longer standing. “People who are bird watchers love Lithia Park,” says Todt, “There are water ouzels along the creek” (a really strange bird that has a wonderful song and feeds on underwater insects by dipping down under the water), “warblers, and pileated woodpeckers that come through in the autumn. He’s even spotted nocturnal flying squirrels and once saw a golden eagle in the park. Donn Todt, the park’s lead horticulturalist who has been taking care of the flora here for 30 years, says he’s seen coyotes early in the morning in the wintertime, foxes, wild turkeys, black bears (he threw a garbage can at a nonchalant black bear who had taken up residency a few years ago), native wild band-tail pigeons that sometimes come into the park in the summertime to eat mulberries from a tree by the Upper Duck Pond, lots of western gray tree squirrels, ducks, black-tail deer, moles, and gophers.
Today animals, like the western pond turtles I’m watching and the painted slider turtles that you’re apt to see in the duck ponds, roam freely in Lithia Park.
0 kommentar(er)
