Abstract
If the great Olmsted and Vaux-designed parks represent a form of visionary design, masterworks aimed to inject soothing pastoral landscapes into the big, bad 19th-century American city, Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park represents something else. Olmsted’s plans (executed with and later without Vaux) for New York’s Central and Prospect parks, as well as those in Boston, Buffalo, San Francisco, and elsewhere, were delivered complete and constructed largely according to plan on discrete plots of land. Not merely lacking the Olmsted imprimatur, Fairmount Park lacks a unitary design. It took shape and grew incrementally across parts of many and often noncontiguous square miles of the city. Yet this cobbled-together park—fragmented by rivers, topography, and private property, compromised by railroads and highways, overburdened by the many facilities placed within its footprint, and for decades suffering from skimpy maintenance budgets and outright neglect—is a vital and well-used leisure, culture, and conservation grounds beloved by generations of Philadelphians and well suited for meeting the needs of a resurgent 21st-century city.
This is the central argument of James McClelland and Lynn Miller’s City in a Park: A History of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System. The volume, a largely celebratory account accompanied by many sizable color photographs, aimed for a broad audience, will provide a useful reference for those studying or professionally engaged with Philadelphia or urban parks. The book is organized by topic rather than era, which will surely facilitate its reference value. Yet the authors’ zeal to cover everything has consequences. The volume contains considerable repetition and sprawls well beyond its primary subject. Topics such as Penn and Holme’s 1682 five-square plan for Philadelphia, which is given its proper due in the book’s introduction and mentioned throughout, receives its own and perhaps unnecessary chapter. Similarly, “Public Art in Philadelphia,” one of two public art chapters, with its city-wide focus, seems disconnected from the larger discourse of park development, and topics such as the city’s Percent for Art and Mural Arts programs are tangential to the book’s central narrative.
Part of the book’s tendency to drift perhaps lies in the park’s confusing jurisdictional structure and nomenclature. Fairmount Park is generally understood to be composed of three distinct areas totaling over 4000 acres: East Park (on the east bank of Schuylkill River), West Park (on the river’s opposite bank), and, sometimes, the Wissahickon Valley. But for over a century, the Fairmount Park Commission oversaw these sprawling areas and the “system” grew to include other large Philadelphia parks as well as a few small but prominent public spaces in the city’s center, while most recreation-oriented, neighborhood-scaled parks were governed by the city’s Department of Recreation. This opaque, two-tiered governing structure was finally reorganized in 2008, when Philadelphia voters approved a charter amendment bringing all the city’s park sites under the newly created Parks and Recreation Department.
City in a Park is strongest in chronicling the park’s early development. Unlike New York’s large parks, Fairmount Park was not born out of the mid-19th-century pastoral ideal and the reformist desire to create democratic leisure grounds, but to address the growing city’s need for clean water a generation earlier. At the beginning of the century, Philadelphia was already a technological leader in water systems, with Benjamin Latrobe’s elegantly designed, steam-powered pump house in Centre Square (site of present-day City Hall) and its connection to the Schuylkill River, three-quarters of a mile away. Yet within a decade, unrelenting growth threatened to overwhelm the system. In 1812, the city constructed a new waterworks, likely the largest and most modern pumping system of its time, at a strategic point on the riverbank northwest of the city where water could be pumped up to a three million gallon reservoir constructed atop the adjacent Faire Mount (site of the present-day Philadelphia Art Museum) and then distributed to the city below via a network of first wood and then iron pipes. Much like the earlier pump house, the five-acre waterworks, with its balustraded esplanade and flanking temple-like structures, proved to be a local attraction. When an adjacent 340-foot covered bridge spanning the river was completed a year later, the longest span of its kind in the world at the time, the infrastructural ensemble drew many admirers and those seeking attractive leisure grounds. And thus, the evolution of Schuylkill River Valley into a park had begun, even as the formal creation of Fairmount Park was over 40 years away.
As further urbanization threatened the city’s water supply, Philadelphia made substantial land purchases along both banks of the river. Some purchases included already-urbanized tracts, requiring significant demolition, including an early 19th-century commercial district known as the Flat Iron—though some country estates that pre-date the park were retained and incorporated into the park grounds. These incremental purchases accelerated after Philadelphia’s 1854 Act of Consolidation, which greatly expanded the city’s footprint and required it to acquire open spaces for the “health and enjoyment” of its people, as well as the Pennsylvania Legislature’s establishment of the Fairmont Park Commission in 1867.
A year after its creation, the Commission purchased a 1400-acre tract along seven miles of the Wissahickon Creek, a Schuylkill tributary, to protect the city’s water supply from the discharge of early industrial development. While the densely forested Wissahickon Valley has long been Philadelphia’s scenic wilderness, in the 18th and early 19th centuries it was dotted by industrial works that took advantage of the stream’s swift currents. It included British North America’s first paper mill, constructed by Philadelphia’s prominent Rittenhouse family in 1690, and its surrounding village. While a few of the buildings of Rittenhouse Town, as it was known, have been conserved and are part of the park today, many more were demolished, as were a series of inns located along the adjacent valley road. The inns generally catered to working class clientele and had a reputation for ill-mannered and occasionally violent behavior. The 19th-century parks movement, here and elsewhere, had a strong moralist component. Shortly after this acquisition, the Fairmount Park Commission banned alcohol in the park, forcing most of the inns to close, all but two of which have since been demolished. Land purchases elsewhere also involved compromises, but in most cases the authors do not unpack conflicts among competing classes or constituencies to define and control the use of the city’s parkland.
In many respects, the incremental and opportunistic land purchases that comprise the park, driven by forward-thinking urban leaders and enlightened public policy, are the most salient aspect of the planning of Fairmount Park. Many key tracts were purchased in advance of urban growth, and as the authors observe, the city grew toward the park as the park grew back toward the city. It would have been helpful for the authors to provide maps of park annexations and improvements. In fact, the book’s greatest flaw is its lack of any park map or plan, historic or contemporary, whatsoever.
In addition to the narratives of water protection and incremental expansion, another strain of the park’s history involves the placement of cultural facilities, amusements, and infrastructure within the park. This includes fairgrounds of the Centennial Exposition of 1876, but also the privately owned structures of Boathouse Row, the Philadelphia Zoo, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an ill-fated aquarium, multiple concert venues, and railroad and automobile infrastructure. While some of these facilities evolved into beloved features of the park, others were likely better suited to other locations or have had damaging impacts. The most egregious is the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76), which runs the length of West Park. The excesses of mid-century federal highway building have been documented many times over and highways have all but destroyed wide corridors in urban parks across the country, including Forest Park in St. Louis, Delaware Park in Buffalo, Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Yet few park highways can compare to the traffic-choked Schuylkill, which when taken together with Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive (aka West Drive) separates the river from much of the park and the neighborhoods beyond it, by often 10 or more lanes of fast-moving traffic.
The expressway can be viewed as part of a continuum of the compromises of incremental design. In a crucial era of the park’s development, the late 1860s and early 1870s, the Olmsted firm was contracted twice to develop preliminary plans for parts of the park. Yet none of its plans were adopted. Similarly, few features of an Olmsted-like plan by the firm Sidney and Evans were implemented, even though the plan was approved by Philadelphia City Council in 1859 (Schuyler, 1993). The authors speculate that the in-house park personnel that ultimately designed significant expanses of the grounds had absorbed the lessons of the Olmsted paradigm. Yet the park falls short of the Olmsted ideal of a park being a “unified work of art, and a corrective to the conditions of life in the city” (Schuyler, 1993, 108).
Today, the lack of unity or connection persists at many critical areas of the park. East Park’s northwest terminus abruptly devolves into a phalanx of ramps that connect highways and park drives on both sides of the Schuylkill and up the Wissahickon Valley, forcing hikers and bikers destined for the Wissahickon to exit park grounds only to reenter later after navigating several unremarkable and auto-oriented city blocks. This is indicative of the park’s generous accommodation of automobiles, which takes the form of park drives, the expressway, and several crossing or intruding at-grade streets. Given the park’s sheer size and not fully contiguous geography, its incremental development, and multiple purposes, the authors rightly argue that the park’s design is more of a “patchwork” with many diverse contributors over 200 years. Yet one wonders whether there are not remaining chapters in Fairmount Park’s development, which might tame, limit, or ban automobiles, as has been recently done in New York’s Prospect and Central parks. City in a Park’s ultimate chapter includes an inventory of park and public space improvements made in Philadelphia over the past 20 years and those currently being planned. Indeed, Philadelphia has made tremendous improvements in livability, and has for some time been an attractive, lower-cost-of-living alternative to the larger metropolis to the north. But perhaps this conclusion misses the point that there is still work to do in Fairmount Park.