Logan Square, Logan Circle / The Heart of the Parkway

Logan Square, at the center of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, was a pasture and burial ground in 1821, although William Penn had envisioned “Northwest Square” as green space to keep city dwellers healthy. Locals used it for public hangings, and a gallows stood there as late as 1823. In 1825, the square was renamed for Penn’s secretary, James Logan, who had arrived in 1699 at age 25, rose to become secretary of the province of Pennsylvania, mayor of Philadelphia, and Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and used wealth from fur trading to build a mansion and assemble a library of more than 2,000 books that he later left to the city. As the city improved the neighborhood, it moved graves and planted trees. Revised plans for the Parkway unveiled in 1919 transformed Logan Square into the midpoint of a grand boulevard, with a traffic circle and formal flower beds. At its heart, Swann Fountain was completed in 1924 with bronze sculptures by Alexander Stirling Calder. Built to honor Dr. Wilson Cary Swann, a 19th-century doctor who founded the Philadelphia Fountain Society to promote public drinking fountains for people and troughs for animals, the fountain stands halfway between City Hall and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and serves as a focal point of the Parkway. Its three central figures represent the Delaware River, the Schuylkill River, and Wissahickon Creek, and the fountain is also known as “The Fountain of the Three Rivers.” These waterways were important natural resources in the city’s early days, when people used them for drinking, bathing, and fighting fires, and William Penn chose this spot for Philadelphia because of its location between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. The Parkway also displays the work of three generations of the Calder family: Alexander Stirling Calder created the Swann Fountain sculptures, his father Alexander Milne Calder sculpted William Penn and other figures at City Hall, and his son Alexander “Sandy” Calder created the mobile “Ghost” in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · United States