American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is the namesake of
nearby J.H.S. 74, so Parks named this playground after one of his best
known books. Hawthorne published The House of the Seven Gables in 1851,
just one year after The Scarlet Letter. The author notes in a short
preface to the novel that it is “a romance.” Hawthorne wishes his
readers to dispense with the constraints of realism so that he might
employ the fantastic and the improbable to address abstract truths about
human existence. The relationship between the past and the present is a
central concern in Seven Gables as Hawthorne relates the unusual
history of one house and its inhabitants.
