The NYC park where Marjorie Taylor Greene is hosting the rally for Trump used to be an open sewer the city tried to fill in with land but it sunk (and stunk)

• The NYC park where Marjorie Taylor Greene is hosting a Trump rally used to be an open sewer. 
• Collect Pond Park was then a blossoming new neighborhood, and later the center of a gang-filled slum. 
• The land was finally granted park status in 1960, its name changed to call out the area's rich history. 

Hours before former President Donald Trump plans to surrender to the Manhattan District Attorney Tuesday, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene will join a rally in New York City's Collect Pond Park to protest the former president's indictment. 

But the park — just steps outside of the DA's office in downtown Manhattan — wasn't always the patch of greenery inside New York's concrete jungle. The small area was once a pond filled with drinking water that later became a disgusting, stinky open sewer and the center of a gang-filled slum where mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone got their start.

Here's the winding history of the unusual NYC park:

Collect Pond used to supply NYC with drinking water

In the 18th century, the land on Leonard Street between Centre and Lafayette Streets used to be a "sixty-foot deep pool fed by an underground spring," according to New York City's Department of Parks & Recreation. 

The water at the time was clean and pure enough that it supplied drinking water to the area through the end of the 1700s. 

At the time, the locals used the area a common space for activities like picnics or ice skating when the pond froze over in the winter. 

In 1796, John Fitch tested one of the first-ever experimental steamboats on the pond, New York's parks department said. 

The pond got its name from Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century who dubbed it "kolch," or "small body of water." Over time, the name was changed to "collect" as native English speakers took control the land, according to the parks department website. 

By the 19th century, the clean pond became a sewer — then a neighborhood

At the turn of the century, the once-pure pond had been transformed into a communal open sewer by nearby businesses. Slaughterhouses, tanneries, and breweries dumped refuse into the pond during the start of the industrial revolution, according to the Tenement Museum.

By 1805, out of disgust for the trash-filled water (and accompanying smells), city officials devised a plan to drain the sewer water and fill the hole with land from a nearby hill. 

In 1805, the city ordered the pond to be drained. But the drainage caused the surrounding land to become marshy, so 1807, the city built a canal that would bring the water all the way to the Hudson River, according to the Tenement Museum. 

It was all drained by 1811, but the smells wafting from the canal were still pretty foul. To fix the problem, city workers started construction to cover the canal; that's now NYC's Canal Street. 

It took six years for the city to fill the hole that was once Collect Pond, according to the parks department. In 1811, construction began on a new neighborhood — Paradise Square — that was poised to sit atop the new land and boasted new apartment buildings. 

But because of the land's roots, and the area's high water table, the neighborhood began to sink — and stink —in the 1820s, prompting many of the affluent businessmen who had just moved there to flock to other areas of the city, according to the Tenement Museum. 

The failed neighborhood became known for the "Five Points" in the 1830s

Once Paradise Square failed as a new city neighborhood, the area became known as "Five Points," or the convergence of five streets: Mulberry Street, Anthony Street, Cross Street, Orange Street, and Little Water Street, according to the parks department. 

The neighborhood quickly shifted to be poor and dangerous in the 1830s, most well-known for its "crime and filth," according to the parks department, the new apartment buildings suddenly opened for poorer city residents and newly arriving immigrants who could live there for cheap, according to the Tenement Museum. 

According to the Tenement Museum, "Five Points" became one of the most well-known immigrant slums in the city at the time. 

The streets were rife with criminals and gangs in the 1830s, and, according to the parks department, some early 20th-century criminals — such as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone — got their start in "Five Points" gangs. 

City officials condemned the area in the early twentieth century 

In addition to high crime rates and poor living conditions, the neighborhood was densely populated and sat on top of an underground swamp, causing massive disease outbreaks by the beginning of the 1900s. 

According to New York City's parks department, nearly all of the city's 20-century cholera outbreaks can be traced to this area. 

"Five Points" finally started turning around after journalist Jacob Riis published "How The Other Half Lives" in 1890. The book revealed the squalid conditions of many living throughout NYC, specifically on the Lower East Side, and sparked concern with city officials. 

Four years after its publication, NYC officials condemned nearly all of the tenement buildings in the area, "ridding the community of crime and filth," according to the parks department. 

The area was built up and is now known as Civic Center. 

The area finally became a park in 1960 

It wasn't until 1960 that NYC's Board of Estimate gave the area Parks jurisdiction.

Until then, the property was known as Civil Court Park until a City Commissioner changed the name to Collect Pond Park, paying homage to the pond that once sat on the same land. 

The park now boasts open, green areas, and plenty of benches and trees. Soon, the park will add "site of a pro-Trump rally" to its long and winding history.