The Vancouver Central Park is a collection of parks just east of downtown Vancouver, Washington. The park is very large, consisting of over a hundred square blocks of land.

Although the park is very large, only a small part of it is actually conventional parks: Waterworks Park, which gets its name from the fact it has a working well that supplies the city of Vancouver, and General Geoge C Marshall Park, which contains a swimming pool and comminity center. Together, these two city parks make up perhaps 1/5th of the complex. The rest of the area is taken up by the campus of Clark College, the grounds of Hudson's Bay High School, the Fort Vancouver Regional Library headquarters and the memoriable Fort Vancouver, which is actually a National Historic Site. Next to the Fort grounds is Officer's Row, a collection of Victorian Homes, of historic interesting, including the George C Marshall House, which was the home of George C Marshall when he was resident of the area. Next to the fort is Pearson Airfield, a historical airfield, and its attendant museum.

While this may all seem very confusing and historical, in practice it isn't. Despite the presence of so many cultural and historic buildings, it is quite easy to just take the entire network of public lands as a nice place to take a stroll, as the landscape is a nice rolling open meadow. The park reaches gently upwards from the Columbia River to the crest of the low hill that runs the length of Vancouver, before dipping back down the same hill in the lightly wooded Waterworks park.

If the park has any faults, it is that is is not much of a community park, although at one point it might have been. The park is totally bound along its western edge by I-5, by the north by the commercial district of Fourth Plain Boulevard, and to the south by the Columbia River. Only to its eastern edge is there that much of a residential district. However, since in the past twenty years, Vancouver has sprawled out mostly on its far eastern edge, the park is not really located in walking distance of any but a small amount of Vancouver's population.

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