PARKS & OUTDOORS
Cascades Park
Leon County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast
Twenty-four acres of park immediately south of downtown Tallahassee, on ground that was a contaminated industrial site until 2014.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The waterfall here is the reason Tallahassee is the capital. When commissioners went looking in the 1820s for a midpoint between Pensacola and St. Augustine, this spot, with its falls on the St. Augustine Branch, is what decided them. A manufactured gas plant then ran on the site from 1895 into the late 1950s, and a municipal dump followed, leaving coal tar and waste in the ground. Cleaning it took the removal of more than seventy thousand tons of contaminated soil, hauled out to Georgia, at a cost of some seven and three quarter million dollars, and the park opened in 2014 on the cleaned ground. It is also a working stormwater system, holding back water that used to flood the streets below. There is an amphitheater for concerts, an interactive fountain children play in, walking and cycling paths, ponds, a children's play area with an outdoor classroom, and the monument marking Florida's Prime Meridian, the point every land survey in the state is measured from
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