Venue: Riverside Park
Town: La Crosse, US

Riverside Park is a public park located on the riverfront of downtown La Crosse, Wisconsin. It hosts events such as Riverfest, Fourth of July fireworks, Oktoberfest, Moon Tunes, and the Rotary Lights. The steamboats American Queen, La Crosse Queen, and Julia Belle Swain make stops along the river in the park. The park has walking/running trails. The region's weather service has maintained a gauge for reading the water of the Mississippi river at Riverside Park for over 145 years. Its first iteration was installed near a flour mill on the former Mount Vernon Street. The U.S. Army Signal Corps recorded their first reading at this location on June 17, 1873. At the time, it was necessary for workers from the US Weather Bureau to visit and read the staff gauge daily. A permanent shelter for this equipment was built in the 1930s along with a styrofoam float device for more easily measuring the water level. In 1942, a transmitter was added to the shelter which meant that observers no longer had to visit the gauge in person to record readings. This shelter remains at the same location on the southern end of the park to this day and is used by both the National Weather Service and the United States Army Corps of Engineers to obtain readings of the water level of the Mississippi in La Crosse. When it was first created in the late 19th century, the park was named Spence Park after Thomas H. Spence, who had given the land to the city. The waterfront west of Spence Park had been used by a ferry, but when it closed in 1891, that area became part of the park as well after it was expanded and filled using sediment collected from dredging the main channel. In 1908 Mayor Wendell Anderson invited landscape architect John Nolen to design the city's emerging parks system. Nolen's resulting 1911 plan was extensive, though it only drew up an explicit design for what he called “Levee Park.” Construction of the park was carried out according to his plan in 1912. Since then, the park has evo