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The First Design for Fairmount Park
| Fairmount Park in Philadelphia is one of the great urban parks of America, its importance in landscape history exceeded only by New York's Central Park. Its name derives from the "Faire Mount" shown on William Penn's plan of 1682, where the Philadelphia Museum of Art now perches, and where the gridded Quaker city suddenly gives way to an undulating scenery of river and park. Measuring over 3,900 acres, it is one of the world's largest municipal parks. Nonetheless, for all its national importance, the origin of the park, its philosophical foundations, and its authorship have been misunderstood in the literature.1 |
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About the principal dates there is no dispute: in 1812–15 a municipal waterworks was built on the banks of the Schuylkill, the site of which soon became a popular resort location and a subject of picturesque paintings; in 1843 the city began to acquire tracts of land along the river to safeguard the water supply; in 1859 the city held a competition for the design of a picturesque park; finally, in 1867, the Fairmount Park Commission was established to oversee a much larger park, whose layout was eventually entrusted to the German landscape architect Hermann J. Schwarzmann. This is the version rehearsed in all modern accounts of the park. |
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All texts agree that 1867 marks the origin of the park, in conception and execution. They depict the pre-Civil War events as abortive and inconclusive; in particular, they dismiss the 1859 competition. According to George B. Tatum, writing in 1961, a series of "plans were prepared," although many of the specific proposals "were never carried out."2 For Richard Webster, writing in 1976, the competition resulted in the victory of Andrew Palles, whose design was "not executed, presumably because of the Civil War."3 Theo B. White's monograph, Fairmount: Philadelphia's Park, does not even mention the competition, taking for granted that the history of the park only began with the act of the state legislature in 1867.4 Of recent scholars, David Schuyler was the first to call attention to the 1859 plan although he too pointed out that "few of the improvements ... were implemented."5 |
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Here historical judgment has been colored by negative evidence. Writers from Tatum to White have concentrated their research on the ample files of the Fairmount Park Commission and, finding nothing there about the pre-Civil War history of the park, have assumed there was none. This article proposes that the pre-1867 history of the park was crucial to its form, and that the designer of the park was an architect of sophistication and historical importance; in so doing, it corrects the chronology that has persisted in all modern histories of the park.
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In some sense Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century already had a ready-made park landscape, for along the banks of the Schuylkill were situated some of the city's most stately aristocratic country seats. Just as English aristocrats commuted to their seats upriver along the Thames, so did Philadelphia's colonial elite take to their riverside estates each summer (and probably a little more hastily, since they were also fleeing outbreaks of yellow fever). Much of the story of Fairmount Park is the tale of the democratization of these picturesque aristocratic seats—unlike the story of Central Park, which is that of a great civic building enterprise. |
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