This eighty-acre rectangular park was the first significant addition of green space to the city since the designation of Forsyth Park (10.1) extension as a parade ground. It was named in honor of P. D. Daffin, the city’s first park and tree commissioner. In 1906, the Park and Tree Commission hired Nolen to design the park, among the first in his illustrious career as a leading twentieth-century landscape architect and urban designer. His City Beautiful design, accepted by the City in 1907, is symmetrical in form and dominated by a central green mall, 210 feet wide and 1,440 feet long, planted with four rows of live oaks, and flanked by paved drives that terminated at each end in a circular drive from which diagonal drives led to the corners of the park. These drives were lined with live oaks from Ossabaw Island, a feature that still strongly defines the park. To the north and south of the mall the plan included a variety of athletic facilities, including tennis courts and playing fields, in keeping with the goal of it being an “Athletic Park.” In keeping with the social ideals and prejudices of the Progressive Era, activities in the park were strictly programmed at first and open only to whites, except on certain occasions. The vast green field on the park’s south side preserves Nolen’s design, while evolving social needs led to various changes on the north side, most notably the 1920s addition of a public swimming pond in the shape of the continental United States. The lake was relandscaped and two sixty-foot-jet fountains installed in 1991–1998 as a legacy project of the 1996 Summer Olympics yachting events in Savannah. The most significant departure from Nolen’s design (though not from the park’s purpose) was the construction of a wooden municipal baseball stadium (14.8.1) in 1927 and to its east the 1938 planting of the Herty Memorial Pines (honoring Savannah native and leading American chemist Charles Herty), which dramatically altered the park’s east end. Daffin Park welcomed the first airmail delivery in Georgia in 1911, served as a temporary airfield for mail service and private aviators from 1919 through the 1920s, and was the site of the annual arrival of Santa Claus (by plane) in the 1930s.