Riverside Park, Two Days After the Tornado
This is the last of the four. That Monday evening I made a loop of the lakefront parks, my own yard first, then Fresh Air Park and Kimberly Point, and I finished at Riverside. Of all of them, Riverside is the one that stopped me.
Riverside is the old one. The city bought the land, all 19.5 acres of it, from Henry Sherry and his wife back in 1872 for $4,400, which makes it one of the oldest parks Neenah has. It sits right where the Fox River runs out of Lake Winnebago, and a lot of us grew up there. There is the bandshell, where the summer concerts are. There is the old cannon. And there is the rocket, the tall metal playground rocket that half the kids in this town have climbed, the reason a lot of people just call the place Rocket Park. If you are from Neenah, you have a memory in Riverside Park.
And it got hammered. This was not just broken branches. Whole trees, big mature ones, came out of the ground roots and all, the root plates standing straight up in the air taller than a person, with craters where they used to be. Others simply snapped and fell full length across the grass. The whole park was covered. I have never seen it look like that.
I shot all of this the evening it happened. Two days later, the park road is still closed. There is that much to clean up.
I took two videos walking through, so you can get the scale of it. You can even see the playground still standing off in the distance in the first one.
So that is the storm, four parks and one long evening of it. The lighthouse at Kimberly Point came through without a scratch. Riverside lost trees that were older than any of us. In between, a whole town got the wind knocked out of it and, somehow, walked away, nobody killed and no one badly hurt. The parks will get cleaned up. The city will plant new trees, the way somebody planted these ones a hundred years ago for us. And in a few summers there will be shade again, and a band playing, and kids climbing that rocket. That is Neenah. We will be fine.
