 |
About Fairmount Park |
|
Recreation/Activities |
|
Environment/Education |
|
History/Art/Culture |
|
Services/Permits |
| Support Your Park | ||
 | ||
 |
FAQs | |
|
Related Links | |
|
Downloadable Forms | |
|
Site Map | |
| >HOME >PLACES TO GO >SQUARES | |
  Photo #1: Tony Webb/City of Philadelphia LOGAN SQUARE The original Northwest Square provided burial plots, pasturage, and a place for public executions (a gallows stood here until 1823). In 1825, the square was renamed for James Logan, who served as secretary to William Penn and chief justice to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. As the neighborhood developed, the city began to improve the square, planting trees and installing walks and fences. In 1864, during the Civil War, a large fair was held in Logan Square to raise funds for the US Sanitary Commission, the agency that aided the Union wounded. For a short time afterward, the temporary buildings erected for the fair housed some 3,000 convalescent soldiers. Logan Square entered the 20th century as a pleasant but modest area of trees, flowers, and walkways. But its size and appearance changed dramatically with the adoption of Jacques Gréber's Parkway plan of 1919. Gréber, a French architect, created the final design for the city's great diagonal boulevard, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and like a jewel at its center he placed a remodeled Logan Square. Basing his concepts on the Place de la Concorde, Gréber designed a large traffic circle in the square with space for a monument and formal gardens in the middle. The square's western boundary, originally closed to 19th Street, was extended to 20th. As the square linked Center City and the green belt of the upper Parkway, the surrounding area changed predominantly from a residential neighborhood to a locale for major cultural institutions such as the Franklin Institute and the Free Library of Philadelphia. Gréber had sketched a tall monument, however, the Philadelphia Fountain Society had been planning a memorial fountain in honor of its founder and late president, Dr. Wilson Cary Swann. After agreeing that the fountain would become city property, the city was granted the choice site in the center of Logan Square. The Swann Memorial Fountain, also known as The Fountain of the Three Rivers, was created by Wilson Eyre, Jr., and sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder. Eyre designed the basin and the interlacing water jets, including the central geyser that gushed more than 50 feet high. Calder created three bronze Native Americans symbolizing Philadelphia's principal waterways. The young girl leaning on her side against an agitated, water-spouting swan represents Wissahickon Creek; the mature woman holding the swan's neck stands for the Schuylkill River; and the male figure, reaching above his head to grasp his bow as a large pike sprays water over him, symbolizes the Delaware River. The use of swans is an obvious pun on Dr. Swann's name. Calder's playfulness is evident in the bronze turtles and frogs that shoot water from the basin. In 1924, the fountain opened with a celebration which drew ten thousand who people danced and congregated in the streets. In 1979, Pope John Paul II brought 150,000 people together when he celebrated mass from an enormous platform over the fountain. The fountain forms a midpoint in the long Parkway vista that includes sculptures by two other generations of Calders. At one end of the Parkway is City Hall, for which Stirling Calder's father, Alexander Milne Calder, designed hundreds of sculptures, including the giant statue of William Penn on the tower. At the Parkway's opposite end, in the grand stair hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, hangs the mobile Ghosts by Alexander Stirling Calder's famous son, Alexander "Sandy" Calder. The landscaping accentuates the central position of the Swann Fountain. Ever since Logan Circle opened in the 1920s, its princess trees (Paulownia tomentosa) have been local favorites. Their clusters of purplish flowers appear in early spring, creating a mist of delicate colors. The surrounding beds of flowers and shrubs were originally designed in a formal French pattern, but have since been changed to a looser, more Romantic English style. Masses of tulips, dahlias, grape hyacinths, and azaleas bloom in season. On the square's northern lawn, in front of the Free Library, stands Stirling Calder's Shakespeare Memorial, a marvelous sculpture portrait of a morose Hamlet and Touchstone the fool, together representing Tragedy and Comedy. To the northeast is the General Galusha Pennypacker Memorial, created by Charles Grafly. Pennypacker, a Chester County native was the youngest general in the Civil War. At the square's eastern end are statues of two figures of the Revolutionary period: Diego de Gardoqui, the king of Spain's envoy to the fledgling democracy; and Thomas Fitzsimons, an Irish-born Philadelphian who served in the Continental Congress and signed the Constitution. The Sister Cities Plaza, commemorating Philadelphia's special relationship with Tel-Aviv and Florence, occupies the southeast corner of the square. In 1948 Paul Manship, one of the era's leading sculptors, created the Aero Memorial for the square's western border. This celestial sphere, inscribed with the Latin names of constellations and planets, is dedicated to the aviators who died in WWI. |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||
| PLACES TO GO | |||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
