The “Public Square” shown in Anson Mills’s 1859 survey, which originally held the corrals of Juan Maria Ponce de León’s ranch, was not acquired from William Smith until 1881. The square lies near the center of Mills’s town plan of fifty-one blocks, which follows two different grid orientations due to prior land ownership. Unlike the civil or commercial focus of Spanish-Mexican city planning, this square has always been a public park. In 1883 J. Fisher Satterwaite, parks and streets commissioner, developed it with a fence, a gazebo, and a walled pond where he installed three alligators brought from New Orleans in a cigar box. (The reptiles and their descendants were the prime downtown attraction until removed in 1965.) The pond was filled in 1975. In 1995, the alligators were memorialized with Los Lagartos, a swirling, snapping pile of fiberglass creatures by El Paso sculptor Luis Jiménez (1940–2006). The plaza was rehabilitated in 2016 with allées of shade trees, game tables, a splash pad, and a shade structure to protect Jiménez’s restored alligators.