Tower Grove Park, 289 acres of Victorian pleasure ground, came in 1872 from Henry Shaw, the English-born merchant who founded the Missouri Botanical Garden. Shaw donated the land to the City of St. Louis with the stipulation that it be maintained as a Victorian pleasure ground: ornamental pavilions, formal plantings, broad promenades, and decorative features that distinguished it from a wild or naturalistic park. The park remains essentially as Shaw designed it: five ornate pavilions built in the 1870s and '80s provide shelter and gathering spaces, a series of lily ponds and statuary dot the landscape, and the wide paths are canopied by enormous trees — elms, oaks, sycamores — many of which were planted in the 1870s and are now remarkable in their size and age.
Tower Grove Park is surrounded by the Tower Grove South and Tower Grove East neighborhoods, both of which are home to large communities of Bosnian refugees and their descendants. Beginning in the 1990s, thousands of Bosnian Muslim refugees fleeing the Balkan Wars were resettled in St. Louis, and St. Louis today has the largest Bosnian diaspora population in the United States. The neighborhood around the park now has Bosnian bakeries, cafes, mosques, and community centers — the newest layer in the city's long history of immigrant communities.