WINONA, Minn. — City maintenance crews asked police to help find vandals who damaged porta-potties at Gabryck Park on the Far East Side and on the Gavin Heights overlook on the on the bluffs. Police said they are handicapped by the lack of surveillance cameras at the sites. It wasn’t clear whether incidents, a couple miles apart, were related. Clear was that the vandals have no civic decency nor respect for legendary figures with significant Winona legacies
Gabryck Park
At 950 East Wabasha Street. With baseball diamond and playgrounds. Named for Gene Gabrych, who played baseball for Winona’s Polish National Alliance team and helped the club draw huge crowds and an 18-3 record in 1938. He was expected to be drafted by the New York Yankees. He went to war instead. He was killed, age 29, after in the Foret de Mont Castre after the Normandy invasion. His unit encountered massive. His body was returned to a grieving Winona in 1948 for burial.
Garvin Heights
Overlooking Winona from 540 feet. It’s the namesake of Herbert Garvin, born 1862, who donated land for the bluff-top park. Garvin co-founded Bay State Milling in Winona, still. Major employer. Later president of Winona National Bank. An early promoter of Winona as nucleus of a growing railroad network. He also donated 43 acres of open land and woods that became Farmers Community Park between Stockton and Lewiston. Also bearing his name is Garvin Brook, which is a Winona County tributary to the Mississippi River. Garvin died in 1938.