A possibility: a man, greyed, maybe in a suit, maybe in a cassock, approaches the locked gate. He struggles with the lock, but the key still fits. He enters the park, locking up the gate behind him. The park opens only to the sky. He sits at a bench, puts his head down, and waits. The wind plays with what’s left of his hair. He lifts his head just slightly. In the stirring of the leaves there appears a way forward.
But that’s just a possibility. I’ve never seen anyone in Columbus Park. The park lies just south of Ninth Square, next to the Knights of Columbus council building—that dark and threatening monolith to Christian charity. Until recently, I’ve only passed the park on cold, grey days on the way to Union Station, when my shoulder hurt from the weight of my duffle and the wind rumbled in my ears. But the place is worth more than a passing glance.
Columbus Park is barely a park, or, at least, it’s the word’s most austere interpretation. Chainlink fences rise on three sides and there’s a wall on the fourth. Inside stand 37 trees arranged on a 6×7 grid—that’s five trees missing from what should be a round 42—and 14 benches, each one falling exactly on the gridlines. There are no diagonals here. There is no grass, either: the ground is paved over in red brick. Each bench, except the one which stands in the tree-less zone, is partnered with its own tree and a private patch of shade. Although arranged on the grid, the benches have no further order. Where they stand and where they face appears determined at random, with the exception of one principle: if one were to sit on any of these benches and stare straight ahead, their sightline would not intersect another bench nor tree—it would shoot right through the fence into oncoming traffic, or else, collide with the wall. But no one sits here. Both gates into the park are locked. Only the falling leaves get to touch that red brick. The park is a perfectly arranged space for no one.
Columbus Park is not a park at all, it’s a monument. It’s a monument in the peculiar way artist Robert Smithson used that word: monuments are masterpieces of inaction and eternity, resisting entropy by never properly existing in the first place. The park memorializes nothing, picks out no point in history for us to latch onto. Though the park bears Christopher Columbus’s name, the name sounds like a placeholder. I imagine that some nervous Knight of Columbus appended the name to make the absence next door easier to stomach.
The notion of the park having a creator seems ridiculous. This park was generated by some broken algorithm. The algorithm forgot 5 trees and all the grass. I try to imagine what the place was before — maybe a brownfield where teens chatted and nudged rubble with their shoes and speculated about what this place had been before even their time. The image fails me—it is flat, stale, and misleading. The park wasn’t generated at all. The park has always been here and will always be here, incomplete and forbidding. With no way to sit on a bench or inspect a fallen leaf, I feel the material reality of the park slipping away. This place is only a signifier of a park, just one step removed from a green square on a map. And beneath the green square, nothing.
And if I were to make my way inside, would that impression really change? The fallen leaves would crumble between my fingers. If I sat down, I’d end up watching the activity beyond the fence: passing cars and walkers swaddled in their coats. My mind would inevitably drift. Now accessible, the park would lose its remaining allure. The park would drift into the realm of the forgettable and complete its disappearing act.
Why, then, is Columbus Park here at all? In the movie Wings of Desire, invisible angels slip through the city of Berlin—the trains, the libraries, the late night streets, and, too, the sites of absence behind back walls and between abandoned lots. They serve no god in particular. They only provide a silent comfort to the lost, a sense of peace amidst the dying leaves.
