Growth
The park grew out of the Lemon Hill estate of Henry Pratt, whose land was originally owned by Robert Morris, signer of the Declaration of Independence. It was dedicated to the public by city council's ordinance on September 15, 1855. A series of state and local legislative acts over the next three years increased the holdings of the city, incorporating mansions, waterworks, gardens, and even territory previously set aside for the Zoological Society of Philadelphia. In 1858, the city called for a comprehensive plan and the new Fairmount Park Commission held a design competition to determine the best way to “protect and improve the purity of the Schuylkill water supply” while also creating a naturally landscaped public park.
As the site of the 1876 Centennial Exposition and the first zoo in the United States, the Philadelphia Zoo, Fairmount Park was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 7, 1972.
Read more about this topic: Fairmount Park
Famous quotes containing the word growth:
“The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth ... the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders of the best of us.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The Past—the dark unfathom’d retrospect!
The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows!
The past! the infinite greatness of the past!
For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)