October 24th: The O'Kane House

On October 24th, Alex was feeling a little bit better after having stayed home from the zoo the day before. So we decided to take the dogs to a different park, one that I hadn't ever walked around at.

The park itself was... not great. Fairly typical grassy city park, but it was pretty much just wall-to-wall goose poop. Not ideal, especially since Bella is not to be trusted around such things (ew), and Cy's favorite park activity is rolling (also ew, under the circumstances.)

Buuuuut, there is a cute historic house on the park property, so that was worth seeing at least.

This is the O'Kane Farmhouse, which was originally built in 1888. It's just a little house, but it's cute!

The yellow and green paint are newish; most of the older pictures from a decade or few ago have everything white. The house and its outbuildings have fallen into a fairly sad state of disrepair in the last couple decades, unfortunately largely starting when the city took over ownership in the early 00s after the last resident O'Kane passed away.

Fortunately, 6ish years ago it was granted "local landmark" designation, which offers some protections, and the city agreed there was widespread public support for rehabilitating the structures and finding ways to utilize them. Last I was able to find online, they were submitting grant and funding applications, due late 2022, with hopes to begin work on one of the outbuildings in 2023... which doesn't appear to have started yet. It's listed as a current project, so hopefully it will continue to progress! (Though the lack of work may mean the funding was denied, in which case I hope they find an alternate source.)

( Three more pictures: )