East Fairmount Park

East Fairmount Park — the older half of the park America built to protect its drinking water

The east bank of the Schuylkill, from the museum hill north to the city line, holds the original and more historically loaded half of Fairmount Park. Together the two banks total 2,052 acres; the east side is the smaller, steeper, older one, and it is where the whole idea began. Philadelphia did not buy this ground for recreation. It bought it in 1844 to keep tanneries, mills and sewage off the slopes above its water intake, which makes Fairmount Park one of the earliest municipal watershed parks anywhere. It is city land, run by Philadelphia Parks and Recreation with the Fairmount Park Conservancy as its nonprofit partner — not National Park Service territory, even though two of its features carry National Historic Landmark status.

Highlights

• Boathouse Row — fifteen rowing clubhouses in Victorian Gothic and Late Victorian dress, several attributed to the firm of Frank Furness, strung along the east bank and outlined at night in a lighting scheme designed by Ray Grenald in 1979 and rebuilt with computerized LEDs in 2005.
• The Fairmount Water Works — Frederick Graff’s engineering monument, with the engine house of 1812 to 1815 and the dam and waterwheel system built between 1819 and 1822; its adjoining garden opened to the public in 1825 and effectively invented the park.
• The Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial — three river terraces laid out by Paul Philippe Cret, carrying seventeen sculptures commissioned between 1933 and 1961, the sculptors chosen through three international exhibitions held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1933, 1940 and 1949.
• Mount Pleasant — a Georgian country house of 1762 to 1765 built for the privateer captain John Macpherson, which John Adams called the most elegant seat in Pennsylvania and which Benedict Arnold bought in 1779 for his bride Peggy Shippen and never lived in.
• Lemon Hill — the neoclassical villa of 1799 to 1801 built for the merchant Henry Pratt on ground that had been Robert Morris’s estate; the city’s 1844 purchase of it is the founding act of Fairmount Park.
• Smith Memorial Playground and Playhouse — open since 1899 under the wills of Richard and Sarah Smith in memory of their son Stanfield, with a wooden slide wide enough for six children abreast and no ticket required.

What’s inside

East Park is a narrow, wooded shelf climbing from the river to the ridge, and it holds the densest concentration of surviving eighteenth-century American country houses anywhere in the United States alongside a working recreational riverfront.

• Four house museums open to the public — Lemon Hill, Mount Pleasant, Woodford of 1756 and Strawberry Mansion, whose central block of about 1789 was built for Judge William Lewis and whose two flanking wings date from the 1820s, making it the largest of the park houses.
• More houses standing but less often open — Laurel Hill of about 1767, Ormiston of 1798 and Rockland of about 1810, all summer villas of Philadelphia merchants who wanted river air.
• The Sedgeley Porter’s House — the surviving lodge of the estate Benjamin Henry Latrobe designed between 1799 and 1802, generally called the first Gothic Revival house in the United States; the mansion itself came down in 1857.
• The riverside trail — a paved multi-use path squeezed between the east-bank drive and the water, part of the Schuylkill River Trail and the busiest running route in the city.
• Lloyd Hall — boathouse number one and the only publicly accessible building on the row, with restrooms, a snack counter and bike rental.
• Gardens and oddities — the Azalea Garden behind the art museum, the Glendinning Rock Garden on the slope above the river, and a disc golf course threaded through the Sedgeley woods.

What to do and who it’s for

• Runners and cyclists — the riverside loop is the default training route of Philadelphia, flat, continuous and lined with sculpture, and it connects onward to trail mileage well beyond the city.
• Rowing spectators — the Schuylkill Navy, founded in 1858 and the oldest amateur athletic governing body in the United States, still runs the course here; the Stotesbury Cup, first held in 1927, remains the largest high school regatta in the world.
• Architecture and decorative arts visitors — four open house museums in one park, furnished with period collections, is a program you could not assemble in a week anywhere else in America.
• Families — the 1899 playground and playhouse is purpose-built for children under ten and asks nothing at the door.
• Photographers — the boathouse lights against the water after dark are the single most reproduced image of Philadelphia after the Liberty Bell.
• Sculpture walkers — the Samuel Memorial terraces plus the works scattered along the drive make the riverbank an open-air museum of American figurative sculpture from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Getting there and practicalities

East Park runs from the Fairmount neighborhood and the art museum hill northward past Brewerytown and Strawberry Mansion to the northern edge of the city. Girard Station on the Broad Street Line, signed as SEPTA Metro B, is the closest subway access to the middle of the park; the museum end is an easy walk or a short bus ride from Suburban Station, and 30th Street Station sits just across the river. There are no gates and no admission to the park itself, though the individual house museums keep their own visiting hours and are typically open on limited days, so check before making a special trip. Daylight hours are the rule; the riverside path is lit but the wooded upper slopes are not. Allow ninety minutes for the boathouses and the water works, half a day if you add a house museum, and a full day if you intend to walk the sculpture terraces and reach the northern mansions.

When to visit

Spring turns the museum slope pink and white as the Azalea Garden opens, and it is also regatta season, when the river fills with eight-oared shells and the banks with school crews. Summer is heavy, green and humid, best taken early in the morning on the riverside path before the asphalt heats, and it is the season when the mansions’ shaded porches explain why merchants built here in the first place. Autumn gives the park its best light: the ridge above the river goes copper and gold, the sculpture terraces come into their own with long shadows across Cret’s stonework, and the running path is at its busiest. Winter is when the park reads as engineering — the water works’ Greek Revival pavilions stand bare against the dam, the boathouse lights burn for longer each evening, and the eighteenth-century houses sit exposed on their slopes exactly as their builders saw them in a Pennsylvania January.

Worth knowing

The chain of events is unusually clear here. Frederick Graff designed a municipal waterworks at the foot of a rocky hill, with the engine house going up between 1812 and 1815 and the dam and waterwheel plant between 1819 and 1822; by 1825 its gardens were a public promenade and a tourist attraction that drew Charles Dickens among others. But upstream industry threatened the intake, so in 1844 the city bought the Lemon Hill estate — Henry Pratt’s neoclassical villa of 1799 to 1801, built on the ground where Robert Morris, financier of the Revolution, had kept his country seat before bankruptcy took it. The city dedicated Lemon Hill to public use by ordinance on 15 September 1855, the formal birth of Fairmount Park. A design competition followed in 1858 to landscape Lemon Hill and the neighboring Sedgeley estate, and in 1867 an Act of Assembly created the Fairmount Park Commission with power to keep acquiring both banks. Art followed money: the Fairmount Park Art Association was founded in 1872 as the first private nonprofit in the country dedicated to integrating public art into city planning, and it is the body, now called the Association for Public Art, that gave the riverbank its sculpture. The philanthropist Ellen Phillips Samuel left a bequest for a sculptural history of America; Cret laid out three terraces and seventeen works arrived between 1933 and 1961, including Jacques Lipchitz’s Prometheus Strangling the Vulture. Rowing arrived even earlier: the Schuylkill Navy organized in 1858, the city authorized permanent boathouses from 1860 after condemning the earlier wooden sheds, and the row was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987. The riverside drive on this bank was renamed in the mid-1980s for the Olympic sculler John B. Kelly Jr., brother of Grace Kelly, after his death in 1985. In 2010 the Fairmount Park Commission was merged into a new Department of Parks and Recreation, and the name Fairmount Park was narrowed to mean exactly this: the east and west parks along the Schuylkill.

Visitor tips

• Check house museum opening days before you go. Several of the mansions open only a few days a week or seasonally, and arriving on the wrong afternoon means looking at a locked Georgian door.
• For the classic boathouse photograph, come at blue hour rather than full dark — the LED outlines and the last light in the sky balance for about twenty minutes.
• The riverside path is shared by runners, cyclists and rowers carrying shells across it. Keep right, and expect a boat to have priority at the boathouse crossings.

Questions and answers

Is East Fairmount Park a national park? No. It is city parkland under Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, with the Fairmount Park Conservancy as its nonprofit partner. Boathouse Row and the Fairmount Water Works hold National Historic Landmark status, which is a federal designation of significance, not federal ownership or management.

How large is it? East and West Fairmount Park together cover 2,052 acres, divided by the Schuylkill River. The east side is the smaller and older of the two.

Why does the park exist at all? To protect the drinking water. The city bought the east bank from 1844 onward to keep polluting industry off the slopes above the Fairmount intake, and dedicated the land to public use by ordinance in 1855.

Which historic houses can I actually go inside? Lemon Hill, Mount Pleasant, Woodford and Strawberry Mansion are the four regularly open to visitors, and all four are on the east bank. Laurel Hill, Ormiston and Rockland stand nearby with more limited access.

Can I go inside the boathouses? Only Lloyd Hall, boathouse number one, which is a public recreation center. The other fourteen are private clubs, though many open for regatta days.

What is the sculpture along the river? Chiefly the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial, three terraces designed by Paul Philippe Cret holding seventeen sculptures commissioned between 1933 and 1961 to depict the history of the United States, plus individual works installed by the Association for Public Art since 1872.

Is the running path continuous? Yes along the east bank, and it links into the wider Schuylkill River Trail, which continues far upriver beyond the city boundary.

Is it worth visiting in winter? Yes, and arguably it is the honest season: without leaves you can read the Greek Revival waterworks, the dam, the mansion slopes and the whole engineered logic of the place at once.