The Heart of the Parkway

Swann Fountain sits halfway between City Hall and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and serves as a focal point of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Built to honor Dr. Wilson Cary Swann, a 19th-century doctor who founded the Philadelphia Fountain Society because he believed the city should have more public drinking fountains for people and troughs for animals, the fountain was completed in 1924. Alexander Stirling Calder created its sculptures, and the three central figures represent Philadelphia’s major waterways: the Delaware River, the Schuylkill River, and Wissahickon Creek. Also known as the Fountain of the Three Rivers, it reflects the importance of these nearby rivers as natural resources in the city’s early days, when people used their water for drinking, bathing, and fighting fires. William Penn chose this spot for Philadelphia because of its location between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. Along the Parkway, the work of three generations of the Calder family appears: Alexander Stirling Calder created the Swann Fountain sculptures, his father Alexander Milne Calder sculpted William Penn and the other figures at City Hall, and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art hangs the mobile Ghost, created by Stirling’s son, Alexander Sandy Calder.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · United States