Back Roads

This week’s Back Roads is the work of The Land Correspondent Tim King. Photos by Jan King. A city park with a pagoda

Noonan Park, in an attractive older residential neighborhood in Alexandria, Minn., is three parks in one. The center of the large park, which was donated to the city by the Noonan family in 1943, is dominated by a lake with a sizable population of Canadian geese, mallards and wood ducks. Admittedly, the water fowl do turn the park into a bit of a feed lot; but you’ll get over it because they are fun to watch.

We set out our table cloth and picnic on a table under a tree near the bright yellow and red Duck Inn. The building is an iconic land mark with a dark history (at least from a ducks point of view).

“I know way back in the ‘30s, the park department used to buy ducks and have the wings clipped so they couldn’t fly, and then they’d have them released at Noonan’s,” Bill Thoennes, Alexandria’s Public Works Coordinator, told the Alexandria Echo Press newspaper in 2016. “They used to corral them into here [the Duck Inn] and collect them, then have them butchered and given to people that needed them.”

Now days, the building is just a colorful curiosity.

Another colorful curiosity of the park is the Chinese pagoda birdhouse. A craftsman of Scandinavian heritage named Alexandria, Minn.

Richard H. Bergstrom, from the nearby community of Miltona, built it in 1932. The Noonans may have commissioned the intricate creation, because it was initially placed in their large formal garden. Later, the Fischer family maintained it and eventually donated it to the city.

The bird house was originally part of the Noonan’s “Little Bit of Heaven” formal garden. The original garden was very large. What remains today, lovingly designed and cared for by the city’s gardeners, is merely large — but very colorful and soothing.

Bill Thoennes, the Public Works Coordinator, told the Echo Press the City of Alexandria budgeted $20,000 for flowers in city parks in 2016. Not all of that went to Noonan’s park; but whatever was spent in 2021 was an excellent use of taxpayer dollars.

A path connects the garden with one that circles past the bird house, around the lake, and back to the picnic area and Duck Inn. Across the street is a basketball court and playground for those interested in activities more vigorous than strolling, picnicking and goose watching. Oh, by the way, the swans are plastic, not real. They were placed in the lake with the hope of discouraging even more geese from taking up residence. v