Falls Park: Where the City Keeps Coming Back
Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota
The falls themselves have been the reason for nearly everything. The Dakota people came to them long before any European surveyor. Land companies platted streets around them in eighteen fifty-six. A seven-story flour mill was built to capture their power and failed within two years. The federal government put a prison on the bluff above them. The meatpacking industry settled north of them. Railroads came because they were here. A credit card company came because of what the city became after the railroads came.
Today the falls sit inside a hundred and twenty-eight-acre park that contains more concentrated history than almost any comparable urban green space in the region. The Queen Bee Mill ruins stand at the southern edge. The nineteen oh eight Sioux Falls Light and Power Company building, the utility that first brought electricity to the city, has been converted into the Falls Overlook Cafe. A five-story observation tower, enclosed and elevator-equipped, provides a panoramic view of the falls and the skyline that surrounds them.
The falls themselves have not changed much. The river still drops approximately one hundred feet over the course of a quarter mile, over the same pink quartzite it has been crossing for ten thousand years. The sound of them is constant: water moving over stone at the rate of seven thousand four hundred gallons per second, audible from most of the park, present even when you cannot see the falls directly.
The park draws somewhere around a million visitors a year to a city of fewer than two hundred thousand people. They come in part because the falls are genuinely dramatic, more than photographs suggest. They come in part because the surrounding ruins and historic buildings give the water context: this is not just a natural feature preserved for recreation, but the site where a succession of human ambitions played out, most of them at least partially defeated by the same river they were trying to use.
The falls won every round. The quartzite is still winning.
