English: A panoramic view of Steuben Park in Utica, New York, as seen in August 2021. One of the earliest plots of land in Utica to be set aside for use as a park, Steuben Park shows up in historical records as early as 1827, at which point the surrounding neighborhood was an off-the-beaten-path backwater in the outskirts of town. However, that would begin to change in 1830, when prominent attorney and soon-to-be U.S. Congressman Rutger B. Miller built a spacious mansion in this vicinity designed by eminent architect Philip Hooker. Derided initially as "Miller's Folly", the construction was actually a prescient harbinger, as the basis of the local economy was on the cusp of a transition from westward shipping of people and goods along the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal to manufacturing, especially of textiles and knit goods. The newly wealthy industrialists who were spearheading this new economy sought desirable places to live away from the increasingly congested city center, and the area around Steuben Park was one of the places where they clustered, and to this day, most of the housing in the district dates to the middle 19th century.