Rittenhouse Square

Rittenhouse Square — Philadelphia’s outdoor living room, and formally a square

Six acres of plane trees, balustrades and diagonal walks that function as the front garden of Center City. It is worth being precise about what this place is: Rittenhouse Square is not a park in the administrative sense but one of the five public squares laid out in William Penn’s 1682 plan for Philadelphia and drawn by his surveyor Thomas Holme. It is city land, managed by Philadelphia Parks and Recreation with the nonprofit Friends of Rittenhouse Square, and it is not National Park Service property — unlike Washington Square, the only one of Penn’s five squares that sits inside Independence National Historical Park and answers to federal rangers.

Highlights

• Paul Philippe Cret’s 1913 plan — the French-born architect, hired by the Rittenhouse Square Improvement Association, gave the square its diagonal walks from all four corners, its oval central plaza, its stone balustrades and its urns on low pedestals, importing the logic of a French public garden into a Quaker city grid.
• Lion Crushing a Serpent — Antoine-Louis Barye modeled this Romantic bronze in the 1830s as an allegory of order overcoming chaos; the cast that dominates the central plaza was installed here in the late nineteenth century and is the square’s most photographed object.
• Duck Girl — Paul Manship modeled the bronze in 1911, early in the career that would produce the Prometheus at Rockefeller Center; she was moved into the square beside the reflecting pool in 1964.
• Billy — Albert Laessle’s small bronze billy goat of 1914, worn to a bright polish across the back and horns by more than a century of children climbing it; Laessle also made animal sculpture for the Philadelphia Zoo.
• The Evelyn Taylor Price Memorial Sundial — placed in 1947 for the woman who ran both the Improvement Association and the Flower Market Association for over twenty years, carrying the inscription that friendship abides as the hour passes.
• Giant Frog — Cornelia Van Auken Chapin’s 1941 carving, made by a sculptor who insisted on cutting directly into stone rather than modeling first in clay.

What’s inside

The square is compact enough to cross in four minutes and dense enough to occupy an afternoon. Cret’s geometry organizes everything: four corner entrances, four diagonals, one oval plaza in the middle, and a rectangular reflecting pool set symmetrically opposite a large planting bed.

• The central plaza — an oval of paving ringed by a circular walk, where the Barye lion, the benches and the buskers concentrate.
• The reflecting pool — a shallow rectangular basin, the setting for Manship’s bronze and the informal wading spot that no sign quite permits.
• The lawns — four grass panels between the diagonals, the only true lawns for many blocks in every direction and treated accordingly on the first warm Saturday of the year.
• The canopy — mature shade trees, kept deliberately high-limbed so that sightlines run clear across the square, a security principle written into the design a century before anyone called it that.
• The corner gateways — Cret’s stone entrances and railings, which give the square its curious quality of feeling enclosed without ever being fenced off.
• The surrounding frame — the Curtis Institute of Music in an 1893 mansion, the Church of the Holy Trinity of 1859, the Philadelphia Art Alliance in a former private house, and apartment towers of the 1920s that face the green like theater boxes.

What to do and who it’s for

• Office workers and students — the benches under the diagonals are the default lunch hour of Center City, and the square absorbs a startling number of people without ever feeling crowded.
• Families with small children — the goat is a climbing frame, the pool is a magnet, and the flat paving suits scooters and strollers.
• Music lovers — the Curtis Institute stands on the square, so the buskers here are frequently conservatory students, and the standard of street playing is unusually high.
• Art and design visitors — four significant public sculptures and an intact Beaux-Arts landscape plan sit within a hundred paces of each other.
• Dog owners — leashed dogs are part of the square’s daily social life; the planting beds are not, and the stewards are firm about it.
• Event seekers — the Flower Market in spring and the outdoor Fine Art Show fill the walks with stalls and canvases on a schedule that has barely changed in a century.

Getting there and practicalities

The square anchors the Rittenhouse neighborhood on the western side of Center City, a few minutes’ walk from the retail spine known as Rittenhouse Row. SEPTA puts you at the door: 19th Street Station serves both the Market-Frankford Line, now signed as Metro L, and the subway-surface trolley tunnel; Walnut-Locust Station on the Broad Street Line, signed as Metro B, is a short walk east. Suburban Station and 30th Street Station handle Regional Rail and Amtrak arrivals. There is no gate, no ticket and no closing ritual — the square is open and busy from early morning joggers until late in the evening, and city park rules apply. Twenty minutes is enough to see the sculpture; an hour on a bench is the point. Public restrooms are not provided inside the square, so plan around the surrounding cafés.

When to visit

Spring is the square’s moment of maximum theater: the canopy leafs out, the Flower Market takes over the walks with stalls for children’s charities as it has since May 1914, and the first genuinely warm Saturday brings out what feels like the entire neighborhood at once. Summer is dense and shaded, with the reflecting pool acting as a thermostat for small children and the buskers playing until dusk. Autumn is the connoisseur’s season, when low light rakes across Cret’s balustrades, the plane leaves come down in sheets, and the outdoor art show hangs canvases along the diagonals in the tradition artists began here in 1928. Winter empties the lawns and reveals the architecture — the square’s stonework, the bare high-limbed trees and the lit windows of the 1920s apartment houses turn it into the most legible urban room in Philadelphia.

Worth knowing

Penn and Holme drew five squares onto the 1682 plan: a center square where City Hall now stands, and one in each quadrant. Four of them were pressed into use as burial grounds; the southwest square was not. Instead it was pasture and brickyard, ringed by clay pits well into the eighteenth century, and it stayed a working edge of town long after the others had been dignified. Neighboring residents paid for an iron fence in 1816 to keep livestock out, the beginning of the private stewardship that still defines the place. In 1825 the city renamed it for David Rittenhouse, the astronomer, clockmaker and instrument builder who observed the 1769 transit of Venus, served as the first director of the United States Mint from 1792, and was born at his family’s papermaking settlement on the Wissahickon — the same RittenhouseTown that survives in the gorge northwest of here. After the Civil War the square became the address of Philadelphia’s industrial wealth, and by 1913 that wealth funded Cret’s redesign. The Rittenhouse Square Improvement Association hired him, and he delivered a plan that has survived essentially intact for over a century. All five of Penn’s squares were entered on the National Register of Historic Places together on 14 September 1981. The Friends of Rittenhouse Square was created in 1976 to close the gap between city maintenance budgets and what a square of this visibility actually needs, and still funds much of its horticulture. Nearby, the Church of the Holy Trinity of 1859 by John Notman gave the world a Christmas carol: its rector Phillips Brooks wrote the words of O Little Town of Bethlehem in 1868. The Curtis Institute of Music, founded on the square in 1924 by Mary Louise Curtis Bok and famously tuition-free, has been supplying the square’s soundtrack ever since.

Visitor tips

• Come before nine on a weekday if you want the sculpture and the geometry to yourself; by noon the benches are fully claimed.
• Sit on the diagonals rather than the plaza if you want to watch the square work — the corner-to-corner walks carry the real traffic.
• Check what is scheduled before a spring or autumn visit: the Flower Market and the art show transform the walks completely, which is either exactly what you came for or exactly what you wanted to avoid.

Questions and answers

Is Rittenhouse Square a park or a square? Formally a square. It is one of the five public squares in William Penn’s 1682 plan, laid out by surveyor Thomas Holme, and it has always been administered as a square rather than as a park in the Fairmount sense.

Is it run by the National Park Service? No. It is city land under Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, with the Friends of Rittenhouse Square as its nonprofit steward. Among Penn’s five squares, only Washington Square lies inside Independence National Historical Park and is managed federally.

How big is it? About six acres, roughly two short blocks on each side, small enough to cross diagonally in a few minutes.

Who designed what you see today? Paul Philippe Cret, around 1913, working for the Rittenhouse Square Improvement Association. The diagonal walks, oval plaza, reflecting pool, balustrades and urns are all his.

Why is it called Rittenhouse? The city renamed the old Southwest Square in 1825 for David Rittenhouse, astronomer, clockmaker and first director of the United States Mint, whose family founded the first paper mill in British North America on the Wissahickon in 1690.

What are the sculptures? Barye’s Lion Crushing a Serpent in the central plaza, Manship’s Duck Girl of 1911 at the pool, Laessle’s goat Billy of 1914, Chapin’s Giant Frog of 1941, and the Evelyn Taylor Price Memorial Sundial of 1947.

Are there restrooms and food inside? No public restrooms and no permanent food kiosk inside the square itself. The surrounding blocks are among the densest café districts in the city, which is how the square has always operated.

Is it safe in the evening? It is one of the most continuously occupied public spaces in Philadelphia, overlooked on all four sides by residential buildings, and the high-limbed tree canopy keeps sightlines open by design. Ordinary city sense applies.