mill ends park, 8mm

Here you go: An ultra-wide-angle shot of the (supposedly) world's tiniest city park. For the sheer absurdity value. I'm not actually sure whether wide angle shots are more or less absurd than macro shots of flowers in the park, which is another thing I've considered occasionally.

Macro would involve squatting in the crosswalk right in the median of a very busy street, which I'm not a fan of. Plus on the rare occasions when they do have flowers in the park, it's always something uninteresting like marigolds. In short, I haven't gotten around to that macro business yet, and I may never do it at all.

Semi-obligatory Mill Ends post

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If you read any list of Official Quirky Factoids about Portland, before long you'll come to the obligatory bit about Mill Ends Park, which is supposedly the world's smallest city park, as far as anyone knows -- although the similar claim about Forest Park being the largest was debunked a few years back, so this may or may not be true. Either way, this is the place, in all its glory.

Occasional updates:

• 7/31/2010: Added an aerial photo to hopefully give a better idea of where the park is, and just how small it is. Hint: It's the round green bit in the middle of the intersection of Naito & Taylor, a little above the "Mill Ends Park" Wikipedia link. Yes, Wikipedia's wrong again. Big surprise there, I know.
• 1/29/2011: On the other hand, if you go to the aforementioned Wikipedia article about the place, you'll notice that its top photo of the park looks extremely familiar. Creative Commons FTW.
• Updated 9/5/2022: It seems someone has finally accepted the challenge of making a park even smaller than Mill Ends. In July 2022 the small city of Talent, Oregon unveiled one thatʻs a whole 78 square inches smaller, as a cheap way to cheer people up as the town rebuilds after a devastating forest fire back in 2020. I mean, you canʻt really be mad at them for doing that when you understand why, although the Portland Parks & Rec Bureau scoffed that rival park in Talent has no leprechauns, which is true as far as anyone knows. I would also like to point out that the park in Talent is a hexagon, which places it in an entirely different category than normal, non-hexagonal city parks, so the two arenʻt really direct competitors. And even if they were, if you measure smallness by the ratio of the park area to the total area of the city -- which is entirely reasonable -- Mill Ends is still the smallest by a wide margin. See, there are 4,014,489,600 square inches in a square mile, and Portland is much larger in area than Talent at 145 square miles vs 1.33. So Talentʻs park is 0.000000070047014 of the overall city, while Mill Ends takes up just 0.000000000776498 of Portland. Youʻll probably need to copy those numbers into Notepad or count the decimal places a couple of times to be sure, but by the ratio method Talentʻs new park is a whopping 90.2 times larger. So thereʻs that, at least. Though Portland is by no means the largest city by area in the US -- weʻre way down in 77th, in fact, if you count consolidated city-counties, so the largest one (Sitka, AK, believe it or not) could potentially beat us (ratio-wise) completely by accident with a 10ʻ x 10ʻ plaza, big enough for a park bench or maybe two. So thereʻs a potential downside to that approach too, I guess.
• Updated 8/5/2026:
  1. If you really want to quibble about things, Mill Ends Park is not legally a separate taxlot, just a bit of landscaped median, and if you were going to be super pedantic about it you could argue it doesn't count. In which case the real champion (at least locally) would be the Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial up in the Hollywood District. Which is several times larger but still exceedingly small.
  2. Mill Ends does appear on the city transportation bureau's GIS map for traffic circles and islands, which assigns it an asset ID of 3330-0001317 and says it comes to precisely 2.917 square feet, or 420 square inches, which is actually a bit smaller (by 32 square inches, or about 7 percent) than the official Portland Parks number. I'm not sure what would cause that, unless maybe the Parks Bureau counts the curb around the park and the Transportation Bureau doesn't. Dunno.
  3. If you were wondering what the previous record-holder was before Mill Ends claimed the "World's Smallest" title back in the 1950s, you might be as surprised as I was to learn that (as far as anybody knows) it was the Barlow Monument, a 1920s historical marker up in Government Camp, OR, which might have been a direct inspiration for Mill Ends. It was, and may technically still be, the world's smallest state park, as I couldn't find any record of the state ever officially abolishing it, or giving it to somebody else; as far as I can tell they just sort of lost track of the place and it slipped back behind the sofa cushions, just waiting for the state to be able to afford weirdness again someday.

Since I was primarily looking for good IR shots, I had the camera set on ISO 400, and forgot to switch it to "Auto" for the broad-daylight ones, which is why they look a little weird. I'd go take more, but I have no idea when it's going to be sunny again, if ever, so I figure I might as well just go with these.

The last photo is from about a block away from the park. This marker refers to some sort of "Lewis and Clark Botanical Memorial" that isn't actually there, as far as I'm able to determine. I realize I'm not that skilled at identifying plants, but none of the plants listed on the sign are in evidence nearby. I also don't recall that there was anything special here before the big Naito Parkway remodel, either. So in a sense it takes up zero square inches, vs. Mill Ends' 452, which isn't even a fair fight. Although in another sense it's merely tied with a vast number of other nonexistent places, and you can't very well compile a complete list of those. So I suppose the Botanical Memorial has to be disqualified on a technicality....