Schiller Park is the centrepiece of German Village, a 23-acre park surrounded by Victorian brick cottages. A statue of the German poet Friedrich Schiller stands at its centre — a gift from the German-American community in 1891 — and a small pond reflects the surrounding trees in good weather.
The park comes into its own in summer, when the open-air Schiller Theatre hosts Shakespeare in the Park performances on warm evenings. The seating is picnic-blanket-on-the-grass, and people bring their own food and wine. Even without a performance, the park is a pleasant place to read on the grass on a weekend afternoon, in the company of dogs, cyclists, and German Village locals who seem pleasantly unaware that they live in one of the nicer parts of the city.