Fairmount Park

• 1. Introduction

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  Fairmount Park is the largest municipal park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a sprawl of 2052 acres split by the Schuylkill River. The name also works as a historic label, once attached to a loose family of parks scattered across the city rather than one single ground. A city department formed in 2010 changed what still counts as Fairmount Park and what does not. How did a single riverside estate grow into a space this size? What buildings from long before the park's founding are still standing inside it? And who filled this ground with the sculpture that still draws visitors today?

• 2. One Name, Many Parks

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  Wissahickon Valley Park in Northwest Philadelphia once counted as part of the Fairmount Park system. So did Pennypack Park to the northeast and Cobbs Creek Park to the west. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park in South Philadelphia belonged to that same list. So did 58 more parks, parkways, plazas, squares, and public golf courses across the city.

  Philadelphia Parks & Recreation formed in 2010 by merging the Fairmount Park Commission with the Department of Recreation. This single department now runs the whole citywide system. After that merger, the department stopped using the phrase Fairmount Park system altogether. Wissahickon Valley Park and the other formerly grouped areas are now treated as entirely separate entities from Fairmount Park itself.

  What remains under the Fairmount Park name today is just two sections, East Park and West Park, split by the Schuylkill River. Each has its own origin story.

• 3. Three Original Domains

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  Fairmount Park's original footprint held three separate areas. South Park sat just below the Fairmount Water Works and ran to the Callowhill Street Bridge. Old Park covered the former estates of Lemon Hill and Sedgeley. West Park made up the third area, land that would later hold the Philadelphia Zoo and the Centennial Exposition grounds. The South Garden section predated the Park Commission's founding in 1867. Lemon Hill and Sedgeley joined the park in 1855-56.

  Henry Pratt's Lemon Hill estate anchored this growth, and his land had originally belonged to Robert Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The city bought the estate in 1844 and dedicated it to the public by ordinance on the 15th of September 1855. State and local legislative acts over the following three years kept expanding the city's holdings around it. In 1858 the city ran a design competition to re-landscape Lemon Hill and Sedgeley, framing it as the best way to protect the water supply. The ground under the Sedgeley mansion had also once belonged to Robert Morris. After his bankruptcy it was sold to a different owner before it reached Henry Pratt.

  After the American Civil War, the city turned its attention to acquiring the rest of the land that would become West Park.

• 4. Expanding West

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  In the 1870s, the Fairmount Park Commission expropriated properties along the Wissahickon Creek to stretch the park further into the city's northwest. The Belmont Plateau Cross Country Course sits inside the park, and it hosted the USA Cross Country Championships in 1923 and again in 1976. The Schuylkill River Trail, a modern paved multi-use trail, now runs past Kelly Drive through East Park.

  Philadelphia Zoo, the first zoo built in the United States, opened inside the park. The park earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and Wissahickon Valley Park was included in that same registration.

  Long before any of this expansion, houses had already stood scattered across the land, waiting to be folded into the growing park.

• 5. Houses Older Than The Park

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  Mount Pleasant went up in 1762-65 for John Macpherson, a Scottish ship captain, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art administers it today. The Art Museum also oversees Cedar Grove Mansion, built in 1748-50 in what later became the Frankford neighborhood. The house was moved into the park in 1926-1928.

  Boelson Cottage, dated to 1678-84, ranks among the oldest structures on the grounds. The Lilacs went up around 1711, followed by the Letitia Street House around 1713 and Ridgeland Mansion in 1719. Belmont Mansion followed in 1745, and The Cliffs went up in 1753, though only ruins remain after a fire in 1986. Woodford Mansion dates to 1756, Hatfield House to 1760, and Randolph House to around 1767, a building renamed Laurel Hill Mansion in 1976. Strawberry Mansion rose around 1783-89, while The Solitude, built in 1784-85, now sits inside the zoo grounds. Sweetbriar Mansion followed in 1797, Ormiston Mansion in 1798, and the Lemon Hill Mansion in 1800, on the estate that gave the park its start. Chamounix Mansion came in 1802 and Rockland Mansion around 1810. The Ohio House was built for the Centennial Exposition of 1876, the world's fair that filled these grounds with visitors that year.

  Sedgeley Mansion itself was built in 1799 on Lemon Hill, then abandoned and later demolished after the city acquired it through eminent domain in 1857. A stone servant's cottage on the Sedgeley property still stands, designed by the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe and known today as the Sedgeley Porter's House.

  Latrobe's small stone cottage was not the only structure the park would come to display and protect.

• 6. Sculpture Across The Grounds

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  The Association for Public Art started out as the Fairmount Park Art Association, founded in 1872 to embellish the park with outdoor sculpture. The Medici lions, known locally as the Florentine Lions, were installed under the association's watch in 1887.

  In 2007 the Art Association installed Iroquois, a work by Mark di Suvero, near the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It still commissions and cares for sculpture across the park today, working alongside the park and the city.

  Sculpture was just one layer added onto a park that kept collecting buildings, trails, and institutions of its own well into the twentieth century.

• 7. Everyday Fairmount Park

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  Park properties include the Centennial Arboretum, a Horticulture Center, and the Fairmount Water Works. Memorial Hall houses the Please Touch Museum, and the Shofuso Japanese House and Garden offers a very different stop nearby. Boathouse Row lines the river, and Smith Memorial Arch stands near the Smith Memorial Playground and Playhouse. Recreation centers and reservoirs round out the grounds, alongside the park's own recreation programming.

  The outdoor scenes of A Chronicle of Corpses, a 2000 period art-horror film, were shot in Carpenter's Woods. That spot sits inside Wissahickon Valley Park, within Fairmount Park.

  Carpenter's Woods, and the film crews it once hosted, are a reminder that Fairmount Park's map keeps expanding into stories no single visit can cover.