In the Gilded Age of the 1890s city parks often hewed to the same starchy formality as was expected of a polite society. Lafayette Park was a strolling park, with pedestrians expected to keep to the graveled pathways. Those who chose to stray onto lawns and flower beds could find themselves confined to the police substation (today’s park house) for an hour, to ponder their errant ways.
This stuffy policy informs a poem which appeared in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat 130 years ago, in February of 1894. Reprinted for your enjoyment here:
A Heinous Crime
He appeared to be a villain of the
Very deepest dye;
There was treachery in his features
There was trickery in his eye:
And as six big coppers bore him
Struggling through the crowd,
Of the capture of the scoundrel
Each man of them felt proud.
They beat him with their billies and
They dragged him through the mire;
They yanked him to the Courthouse
And up before the Squire,
Who fined him twenty dollars and
Sassed him full of sass,
And all because the man had
Failed to
