The Wissahickon Creek can’t see a map. It rises in Montgomery County and threads through the gorge to join the Schuylkill River without much regard for Philadelphia city limits. The 19th-century preservationists who fought to protect it understood this, and created Wissahickon Valley Park as a green boundary to keep its water clean.
Just as the watershed doesn’t end at the city line, neither does the community that cares about it. You might live in it, or you might just visit. Either way, you love the beauty of this shared green paradise, and its essential role in our ecology.
The …
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The Wissahickon Creek can’t see a map. It rises in Montgomery County and threads through the gorge to join the Schuylkill River without much regard for Philadelphia city limits. The 19th-century preservationists who fought to protect it understood this, and created Wissahickon Valley Park as a green boundary to keep its water clean.
Just as the watershed doesn’t end at the city line, neither does the community that cares about it. You might live in it, or you might just visit. Either way, you love the beauty of this shared green paradise, and its essential role in our ecology.
The people in this issue know that feeling well.
At Wyck, volunteer rosarians found extinct rose varieties growing wild in a garden planted in the 1820s, untangled them, and used Jane Bowne Haines’s original sketches to put it all back. Landscape architect Carol Franklin and historian George McNeely show us how the architects who designed Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy let the land itself take the lead, creating neighborhoods that are unlike anywhere else. Tom Judd introduces us to Nicholas James Harris, who has been painting the valley for decades – the bridges, the schist, the transmission tower at night – not because anyone asked him to, but because he thinks the record ought to exist.
As Philadelphia marks its 250th year, the Phambassadors are out in force, making sure visitors see what we see. David Young reminds us that while we celebrate Philadelphia’s founding, the Revolution was also fought beyond the city line, on ground we drive through every day without thinking about it. And Amy Lambert recovered the largely untold story of Elizabeth Hirsh Fleischer, the first woman licensed as an architect in Philadelphia.
This watershed was here long before we gave name to the park, or drew boundaries around it. This watershed was here long before we gave a name to the park, or drew boundaries around it. The last 250 years have left their mark, and the people in these pages are adding to it — one garden, one painting, one building at a time.
Carla Robinson
