About this tag

“MALLARD” is one of those tiny neighborhood mysteries that survives because somebody put it in concrete. The name was carved beside the steps of a Smoketown residence, but there doesn’t seem to be a documented story explaining it. Old concrete often preserves contractor names, dates, and other marks long after their original context disappears. That’s especially interesting in Smoketown, where much of the surviving residential fabric grew out of the neighborhood’s dense development in the decades after the Civil War.