I’ve now added a set of winter photos of Tower Grove Park to my image collection. The photo at the head of the page shows the vista down the the long hill on the back side of the park towards the bath house. Here’s a better view

Here are a few other images I particularly like. This first one is the music stand in the center of the park where we’ve heard a good many concerts by the Compton Heights Band.

The music stand is ringed around by granite pedestals, each bearing the figure of one of Henry Shaw’s favorite composers (see below). The present busts are copies of originals that are now displayed in the Piper Palm House and marked by damage from erosion. I think the exchange must have been made in order to prevent further damage to the original heads, though the copies are beginning to show weather damage now.

Here’s one of the park’s many gates, just adjacent to the bandstand.

And here’s a familiar sight. At all hours the park is a popular place for humans and dogs to walk together.

Here’s the Turkish Pavilion, a popular site for warm weather barbecues and picnics, now shrouded in snow. Across the street from it is the dove-cot house with homes for pigeons and other birds under its cupola roof.

This elegant house, just inside the Magnolia Avenue park entrance, serves as the residence of the park’s executive director.

The bronze stag in the foreground is one of a pair that frame the Magnolia entrance and continue a theme articulated at the park’s main entrance on Grand Boulevard, which features lions on stone pedestals. Here’s the other Magnolia Avenue stag.

Here’s the house again from another perspective and after that a corner of the Piper Palm House, which houses administrative offices for the park and serves as a venue for concerts and other programs, including a Sunday brunch during the cold months of the year. It’s also a popular site for weddings. Perhaps I’ll return in warmer weather for more photographs of the central buildings and the woodland groves that make the park many degrees cooler than the outside world in summer.

Tower Grove Park was an 1868 gift to the City from Henry Shaw, who also donated the land for the Missouri Botanical Garden and oversaw the early development of both facilities as well as the residential areas immediately adjacent to them. As I’ve mentioned before, both garden and park show on Compton and Dry’s 1876 map of Saint Louis. You can see other park pictures at my Flickr photostream.