Piatt Park, established in 1817 as Cincinnati's oldest park, stretches two blocks in front of you between Elm Street and Vine Street along Garfield Place/8th Street, owned and maintained by the Cincinnati Park Board. You can picture the original gift: in 1817 John H. Piatt, a steamboat builder, and his brother Benjamin M. Piatt, a Federal Circuit Judge and father of Civil War general Abram S. Piatt, gave one acre to the city on the condition it be used "for a market space. That plan never fully took hold because of the nearby Sixth Street Market, and on June 19, 1868 the land along Eighth Street was formally dedicated to park uses.
Bronze statues of U.S. Presidents from Ohio mark either end of the park: the sculpture of James A. Garfield, commissioned in 1883 by Charles Henry Niehaus and unveiled in 1887, faces Vine, while William Henry Harrison’s statue faces west toward the Covenant First Presbyterian Church across Elm. The presence of Garfield’s statue once led the city to call this place Garfield Park, though the Board of Park Commissioners officially designated it Piatt Park in 1940. Bronze presidents guard either end of this green, with the Covenant Church rising just past Elm before your eyes.