The Park was laid out above the Dnieper near the European Square in the mid-18th century as part of the City Garden by order of the Empress Elizabeth. Its past names are: Tsar, Merchant, Proletarskyi, Pionerskyi. In 1882, the building of the Merchants’ Assembly (now the building of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine) was opened there, and the Park was for long named after it.
In the 1970s, the first two towers of Kyiv Waterworks were built, where the Water Information Centre (also known as the Water Museum) is currently located. In 2005, a building in the form of a fairy-tale castle that houses the oldest puppet theatre of Ukraine decorated with a number of sculptural images of fairy-tale characters was built in the Park. The park has a gazebo, sculptures Luigi and Mokryna in Love, The Wish Tree, as well as a monument to a coin-eating frog hiding an unexpected surprise for visitors.