If you are interested in seeing how natural landscapes may be improved and made into ideal pleasure grounds, let us spend a forenoon or afternoon or evening at Como Park. The distance by trolley is three miles, taking the – Como-Harriet line, or any other car marked “Como” at the corner of Fifth and Wabasha streets, or on Fifth and Robert streets, on the loop. The fare is 5 cents.
The City of St. Paul secured at an early day about 425 acres of land lying south and west of Lake Como, a beautiful sheet of water about one and one-half miles long and one mile wide. In 1872 the property was placed in the care of a park board, and up to the present time, about $600, 000 have been spent for improvements. There are fine picnic grounds, winding walks, children’s play grounds, natural groves of trees, beautiful gardens of flowers, and lily ponds to delight the eye.
To show the extent of the park, the Park Board have an automobile service, starting from the entrance to the park every fifteen minutes, fare 25 cents, which extends entirely around the lake, and past the most interesting features of the park.
In the summer evenings and on Sunday afternoons, free popular concerts draw large crowds to the pavilion, which furnishes comfortable seats to more than a thousand visitors, and a hundred or more row boats offer a delightful variation for listening to the music or for rowing further out into the lake. The park is still new and improvements and additions will follow from year to year.
The German citizens have contributed the first piece of statuary for adornnment, a fine monument and life-size figure of the poet, Schiller. Returning, you can go back in the shortest time by the same line you came out, or, if in daylight, vary the trip by going west towards Minneapolis, fare 5 cents, taking a transfer to Snelling avenue and after giving up your transfer, take another, either for Hamline and Jackson, the Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Selby-Lake, or the Grand Avenue line to the city.
-Picturesque Saint Paul: Unrivaled for Beauty and Situation
by an Old Settler
Ramaley Printing Company, 1907
