Highland Park, Pittsburgh

One thing I like about the city is its pervasive, ignorable beauty.  Statues, and stone garlands, and Doric columns in places where no one is looking.   

You rarely hear about Highland Park.  The adjacent neighborhood by the same name is relatively well-known, but the park itself exists in the shadow of the more popular Schenley and Frick parks.  Pittsburgh really has four historic "planned" parks.  Schenley is the crowning glory.  Frick is where wealthy urbanites let their dogs run off the leash.  The smallest and most urban of the four is Allegheny Commons, on the North Side.  There you can still see homeless people sleeping on benches.  Highland Park is often lost in the shuffle, but it too is a large, historic, "planned" urban park with lots of glorious details and flourishes.  Of course, there are many smaller parks throughout the city, especially downtown.  And the most famous park of all--"The Point"--is actually one of the newest...despite its location at the site of the original French and British forts.  

City parks don't typically satisfy my need for wild spaces, but the turn-of-the-century statuary is always a curiosity.  And there is something kind of nice about grassy hillsides beneath large shade trees.  Highland Park is one of those ambitious city parks that proved too big to maintain, so they put the zoo and two reservoirs in it to fill up some of the space.