Le Bourget Park and Its Namesake Near Paris

The park in Little Falls

Le Bourget Park sits on Paul Larson Memorial Drive, on the Mississippi, and it earns its keep as a working recreation park rather than a showpiece. It has a boat ramp and good fishing access, a walking trail along the water, and a nine-hole disc golf course added in 2020 — lightly wooded, with two basket positions per hole, so it plays differently the second time around. On an ordinary afternoon it is exactly what a river-town park should be: uncrowded, useful, and green.

The name that crossed an ocean

The park's name is not local. It comes from Le Bourget, a town on the northern edge of Paris, and specifically from Le Bourget Aerodrome. On the night of May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh brought the Spirit of St. Louis down onto that field, roughly thirty-three and a half hours after leaving Roosevelt Field on Long Island, and a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands surged across the grass to reach him. It was the moment that turned a Little Falls farm boy into the most famous man in the world.

Little Falls has never let the connection go. The town where Lindbergh spent his boyhood is a sister city of Le Bourget, France, and naming a park for the French airfield is the quiet, permanent way a small Minnesota town keeps one foot in Paris. For the boyhood side of the story, see Charles Lindbergh and Little Falls.

Le Bourget, France — the place the park honors

Most people who use the Little Falls park have never seen its namesake, so here it is. Le Bourget is a commune in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, just north of central Paris. Its airport, Paris–Le Bourget, opened in 1919 as the city's first civil airport and was for decades its main one, until commercial traffic moved to Orly and then to Charles de Gaulle. Today Le Bourget handles business aviation and, every other year, the Paris Air Show — and it is home to the Musée de l'air et de l'espace, one of the oldest aviation museums in the world. Lindbergh's landing is still part of the field's identity a century later.

Seeing both sides of the name

You can stand in the Little Falls park in an afternoon; the French Le Bourget is a day trip for a different kind of traveler. Together they make one of the more unusual small-town connections in Minnesota — a disc-golf course and a boat ramp named, in earnest, for a piece of aviation history an ocean away. Pair a visit with the Lindbergh boyhood home, the adjoining state park, and the town's other parks.