In or about 1822, pioneer real estate developers Josiah Barber and Richard Lord laid out a village west of the Cuyahoga River. Its public square was located on what is today the northwest corner of West 25th Street and Lorain Avenue, just across the street from the West Side Market. While the village, which was known as "Brooklyn," was short-lived, the public space that was created for its village square was not. Two hundred years later, it still exists and is home today to Cleveland's Market Square Park.

Market Square Park sits across West 25th Street from the West Side Market. While the Market is one of the best-known, even beloved, places on the West Side of Cleveland, Market Square Park is not. Likely for many, it appears to be merely a small and uninteresting park that you might walk through or walk past on your way from the West Side Market to Great Lakes Brewing Company's BrewPub on Market Avenue. It might surprise you then to learn that, while the West Side Market has indeed stood on the northeast corner of West 25th and Lorain for a long time, more than a century now, the land upon which Market Square Park stands has been a public space for even longer than that, a full two centuries.