John Ball Park: the 40 acres the city almost shrugged off

John Ball gave Grand Rapids 40 acres and a fair number of his neighbors thought he’d handed the city a dud. Ball was a lawyer, land agent, and restless traveler who landed here in the 1830s, and when he died in 1884 he left the wooded plot off Fulton Street to the city for a park. Some leaders looked at the trees and the slope and figured it wasn’t worth the bother.

They were wrong, and it didn’t take long to show. By the 1890s the spot people called the “Ball 40” was the city’s main park — picnics, flower beds, a bandstand on a Sunday afternoon. The zoo started on the same ground around the same time, and it started humble: a few birds, some raccoons, a couple of deer kept on the property. As the years passed the city bought up land around the original gift and the little menagerie grew into a real collection.

The Great Depression nearly finished it. Like a lot of small zoos, John Ball ran short of money and animals in the 1930s before the city rebuilt it in the decades after. These days a nonprofit runs the zoo while the park around it stays city green space, and the two have long since outgrown the boundary lines Ball drew.

Climb the hill behind the zoo on the west side and you’ll find his statue looking out over the grounds — a quiet thanks to the man whose worthless 40 acres turned out to anchor a city park for going on a century and a half.