When I was a kid we called this area 'The Sandy Place'. The previous generation of neighborhood kids had played baseball and other games there regularly and killed all the grass there so most of the area was bare sandy dirt with some scrubby plants here and there. It was a great place to play in the dirt, building roads for our matchbox cars and building houses and farms so the cars would have some place to go. Because of it was a somewhat unique environment you also saw some unusual plant there which where common elsewhere in the area. When I was in high school the aluminum company, Alcoa, which owns the land planted a stand of pine trees there to 'beautify' it. This stand is what can be seen now.
