Patton Park is a 93acre park located on the southwest side of Detroit, Michigan. The park, named for the World War II US military leader General George S. Patton, was dedicated in the early 1950s. Local landowner Jacques Baby bequeathed the 93acre tract of land to the City of Detroit for a park. The park retains a restrictive covenant that prohibits the City from tampering with the park, lest the park return to Baby's descendants. (Restrictive covenants in City of Detroit parks have also been placed into the deeds at Eliza Howell Park and Rackham Golf Course.)Location and Patton PondSitting within Patton Park is a Detroit Recreation Department recreation center, also bearing Patton’s name. The Patton Park Recreation Center once boasted America’s first indoor-outdoor swimming pool, due to its one time hangar-like doors that completely opened two exterior walls, allowing swimmers to use a raised outdoor patio that overlooked three sets of tennis courts, a racquetball court and a swimming/fishing pond.Patton Park is also home to a sizable pond-marsh area, located directly southwest of the recreation center. The pond was a favorite swimming hole and fishing spot until the mid-1970s. The Patton Recreation Center once had a basement-level (step-down stairway) entrance to locker rooms to accommodate park-goers who utilized the pond area. The recreation center also had a rowing boat that once serviced the pond.The Patton Pond was a natural outgrowth of the nearby springs, emanating from the area of Lonyo and Dix Streets. (The surrounding area was once named Springwells Township, after the preponderance of natural springs in the area.) Up until the early 1960s, the water flowed unabated as Baby (or Baubee) Creek through Patton Park, beneath Vernor, and along Woodmere Cemetery (Riverside Drive) in Dearborn. Baby Creek, was named after its first landowner, Jacques Baby. Baby Creek flowed into the Woodmere Cemetery pond, before flowing out near the intersection of Riverside and Dearborn Avenues, out into the Rouge River, on Miller Road (north of Fort Street). Baby Creek was impounded beneath Patton Park through a set of parallel tunnels in the early 1960s, as well as through Woodmere Cemetery.
