Spring has sprung. Daffodils are in bloom. Carpets of tulips at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. Flittering butterflies at Krohn Conservatory. And the Queen City’s crown jewel, the verdant hills of Eden Park.

It’s a bountiful time to visit one of Cincinnati’s many garden spots and beautiful parks.

Long ago, though, there was one more picturesque vista, Lincoln Park. Now lost, the park was an oasis among the dense housing and factories of Cincinnati’s West End.

The park was not large, just a city block at Freeman Avenue and bordered by Kenner, Hopkins and Hoefer streets, but featured a manmade lake with an island, a public green and a ball field. Today, that site is the long promenade leading to Union Terminal.

The original 10-acre site was sold by J.D. and Stella Garrard to Cincinnati Township in 1829 for $2,000. The township (annexed by the city in 1834) then swapped the land with the city for the outlot that became the site of Music Hall.

In 1837, an orphan asylum located on the future park site was converted into a pest house, a sort of hospital for people suffering from infectious diseases. The area was also a potter’s field, a burial ground for the city’s poor and unknown. It was common for graverobbers to steal bodies from the potter’s field to sell to local medical colleges.

As West End became more settled, residents were wary of the potter’s field, so in 1858, the land was converted into a pleasant park, then called West-End Park. It was renamed Lincoln Park shortly after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865.

The park was also home to a Lincoln monument, a marble bust of the late president on a column, flanked by two carved lions, that was built and donated in 1987 by Thomas White of the T. White & Son firm of marble dealers. But after a dispute with the city, in 1872, White removed the statues from Lincoln Park in the middle of the night.

Lincoln Park contained a ball field called the Union Grounds that was used by the Union Cricket Club. From 1867 to 1870, it was the home field for the Cincinnati Red Stockings, when the club became the first professional baseball team. A marker near the Union Terminal fountain marks the site.

In 1873, Spring Grove Cemetery landscape architect Adolph Strauch reworked the park, by then stretched to 18 acres, adding the lake with a small waterfall, an island and a grotto. The lake was used for boating and fishing, and when it froze over in the winter, for ice skating.

D.J. Kenny, in his book “Illustrated Cincinnati: A Pictorial Hand-Book of the Queen City” from 1875, sketched a fine description of Lincoln Park:

“The walks wind in and out of shade-trees, by green grass and beds of geranium and fuchsia and verbenas and other garden flowers bright with blossoms, and by the borders of the lake in the center, well-stocked with swan and rare foreign aquatic birds, with an island in the middle.

“…(W)ith the grotto and the lakes, the flowers and the aquatic fowls, and the birds fluttering upon the branches, with the hundreds of lights reflected in the waters, over which an occasional skiff glides, almost noiselessly, it often presents, in the early evening, a scene like fairy land.”

Overlooking the lake from the south was a statue of Capt. John J. Desmond of the Ohio National Guard, who was killed during the 1884 Hamilton County Courthouse riots. The statue was unveiled on May 6, 1899, and now stands in the lobby of the courthouse.

Lincoln Park was a public playground for West End residents, making it one of the most heavily used among the city parks. But by the 1920s, the densely packed West End was considered a slum. On summer nights, as many as 1,500 people slept in the park to escape the stagnant heat in their tenement homes.

So, when the new train station was planned for the site, that was the end of Lincoln Park. “The site of Lincoln Park, as a park, is doomed,” Irwin Krohn, chairman of the Cincinnati Park Board, said in 1929. “It cannot be a public playground under any circumstances, now that the Terminal is to be erected.”

The lake was drained and filled in, the greenspace razed. Union Terminal was completed in 1933, with the park paved over for a grand esplanade. In early maps of Union Terminal, the landscaped entrance was still called Lincoln Park. As the age of automobiles arrived, most of the greenery was converted into parking space.

While no one would argue that Union Terminal wasn’t a fine addition to the city, one of Cincinnati’s treasured icons, the loss of Lincoln Park was nonetheless regrettable.

Sources: “Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1788-1912” by Charles Frederic Goss, “The Bicentennial Guide to Greater Cincinnati,” “Planning for a Sustainable Future of the Cincinnati Union Terminal,” “Lost Cincinnati,” University of Cincinnati Library’s LiBlog, Cincinnati Magazine, Wikipedia, Enquirer archives.