The Historical Context: Hunting Park
As an English teacher with a social conscience, and as a citizen who has lived in Philadelphia for forty-five years, I’ve come to believe that the parks are a fundamental asset to our individual and community well being. Now there seems to be an effort to validate and quantify that assumption. While Philadelphia has the largest inner-city park system in the world, and I have always enjoyed it for running, walking my various dogs over the years, and escaping the congestion of my neighborhood, I see a need to enhance the value others might place in the parks as well, in order to sustain their public space for generations to come. I’m getting older, and the more I teach, the more I see truth in the proverb “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”. Perhaps the recent appreciation I’ve made of life’s temporal nature through a near-death bicycle accident in one of the parks has allowed me to embrace the notion that appearances are temporary, and Hunting Park has taken on many different topographical appearances over time. In a public history project, students must learn an appreciation for the history of the city’s effort to maintain these parks, as well as examine why they should invest their time and interest into critical analysis of the city’s park development and maintenance over the course of their own lifetimes. What we inherit, be it an object, a tradition, a name, a language or a place, is to be questioned and evaluated, but also cherished and respected, even if it is let go.
Up until my research here, I had crossed “Hunting Park” on its avenue by the same name as though it were mainly a scenic thoroughfare, and in fact it is one: Hunting Park Avenue has been frequently trafficked territory for many citizens coming from Northeast Philadelphia all the way West to where it ends at the Schuylkill River (its “Terminus”) or begins, if you are heading away from the river and its “Impetus” where it flows towards the center city of Philadelphia. While it has a direct line to the Schuylkill one way, in the other direction Hunting Park Avenue heads East all the way towards Philadelphia’s other liquid thruway: the wider and more commercially trafficked Delaware River. The corridor from one river to the other has never developed into the commercial region to which it aspired when Tastykake’s grand factory at Fox Street and Hunting Park Avenue opened in 19143 and ran six days a week, 24 hours a day and employed nearly 500 working class folks in filling the nation’s dentists offices with patients and the immediate neighborhood with a delicious vapor that told me which nights they were baking their famous artificially-flavored and preserved pastries. Due to the presence of an increasing number of residents all the way from river to river, the park has been a constant source of discussion with the people who surround it: Is it safe, or unsafe? What’s in there? How can I use it? What is its future? Students can discover a lot of information to appreciate forced and voluntary cohabitation between various cultural groups by studying a park that parallels larger trends in American history.
The Public Past
The land which became Hunting Park was a small parcel within the Stenton Estate, a 500 acre agricultural holding belonging to the Logan family, after which the Logan neighborhood on the opposite side of Roosevelt Boulevard is named. George Logan, a doctor who lived from 1758-1821, was grandson to James Logan (1674-1751), the secretary to Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn.4 “Pennsylvania” means quite literally “Penn’s Woods” and while part of what became the city of Philadelphia had been an earlier Dutch settlement, much was unchanged woods by European standards. The natural landscape had been altered in some spaces by Native people’s agricultural planning, and George Logan set about actively farming Stenton, though bought and sold off various pieces as parcels when he needed a favor or fresh influx of capital. George Logan hired laborers and local craftsmen to build the “Logan House” in the 1790s, which sits near Old York Road and Hunting Park Avenue today. With its origin as a nobleman’s estate, the land it sits upon marked a long tradition of giving land when money was in short supply, or even because the currency varied from region to region. While the built environment of the park has evolved since then, the house seems to have been a more or less permanent fixture in the area. Logan the grandson sold the remaining plot, located within what is still called the “Northern Liberties” district, and the remaining plot became the Hunting Park Horse Racing course in 1808. The racecourse remained active until betting on horse racing was outlawed in Philadelphia in 1854.5
Slaves were in all likelihood housed on the Stenton Estate, since “manumission”, or granting freedom to all slaves came only gradually in the late 18th to early 19th century. Slavery took root in Pennsylvania much as it had in New York and Virginia, but the record of black slave labor has been left out of the narrative about Hunting Park, and the Stenton Estate earlier; in fact “Laws governing unfree labor structured social hierarchy in colonial Pennsylvania, and as a consequence slaves and indentured servants occupied the lowest rungs.”6 I imagine the neighborhood people surrounding Hunting Park, composed largely of black and Latino citizens, would be intrigued to learn of this broader story to the historical record. At Independence National Historic Park, across from the liberty bell in the center of Philadelphia’s booming historical tourist industry, the discovery of President George Washington’s slave quarters became an important way that marginalized groups were drawn to historical study at that attraction, and presented a much more nuanced narrative around American leadership of the time.
The primary focus at Hunting Park over the course of its lifetime has been recreational activity, not historical study, but it is a complex story of land use, both private and public. In 1854 the Pennsylvania General Assembly consolidated all the remaining townships, districts, and boroughs within the Philadelphia County, including the Northern Liberties district adjacent to what can simply be called Northeast Philadelphia. The Walnut, Fisher, Lovering, and Cope families purchased the property in a real estate venture for nearby land and presented it to the City of Philadelphia as an official public park;7 Philadelphia City Council accepted the proposal in 1855, according to city records, and William Saunders, a historically significant horticulturist and garden planner for other reasons, who lived from 1822-1900, laid out Hunting Park as it stands today in his 1858 design.8 In 1871, by another act of the Pennsylvania Assembly, the increasingly expansive “Fairmount Park Commission” acquired vast swaths of the area surrounding the city’s public watershed; the Commission assumed responsibility for Hunting Park, among other open green spaces. The several landowning families who collectively donated Hunting Park unloaded a burdensome source of tax responsibility for themselves upon a larger, government entity and began the process of making parks public to all social classes in the city. What had once been a private estate became a public park, and along with the park came an accompanying responsibility for the people to manage it.
But which people did the park serve? It seems that the horse raceway allowed for some sordid acts of gambling by the men of the time, and the public record seems to show dramatic criticism that might suggest it was closed down because it invited the wrong sorts of people, in addition to the wrong sorts of behavior, to congregate in the midst of what had been a Quaker paradise. Instead the land had become a source of scrutiny and stimulated laws around gambling, leading to “blue laws” of semi-Puritanical and mostly Methodist origin. These “blue laws”, which lasted until the end of the Prohibition period during the 1930s Great Depression, prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sunday’s Christian Sabbath, which was exactly when everyone clamored to watch the horse races in what became Hunting Park.9 Once the laws against gambling passed, the park became largely abandoned.
One unanswered question students should be asked to investigate is whether or not continued private ownership could have diminished the poverty that fell on the park in much later years. If we compare, as students in public history, the evolution of Central Park in New York’s Manhattan, we can see how three urban planning themes arise out of Hunting Park’s absorption into city government possession to complicate free expansion of shared public space: one, class warfare escalated over park use, expressed occasionally through rioting and public property destruction; two, the modern significance of litigious battles, expressed through legislation around public behavior such as commerce in the park, vagrancy, sexual conduct, dress, traffic, entertainment and ownership of personal property; finally, environmental concerns, such as those with water, sanitation and plantings, which arose as a third theme in what have become staples in public debate around park use in the United States.10
In Philadelphia’s case, the 1871 Act included the provision to establish Hunting Park Avenue along Juniata Street and west of Broad Street along the alignment of Nicetown Lane, eventually connecting citizens in the Northeast sections with East Fairmount Park and the Victorian graveyard “Laurel Hill Cemetery” that to this day looks over the Schuylkill River. In Victorian times the public graveyard served as a space for upper class promenades and picnics, and the graves that could have been planted nearer to Hunting Park went there, instead. The ambitious scale of the “allée” as a physical link from Fairmount to Hunting Park was a significant statement to what was then the city’s suburban population of upper-middle-class, White Anglo Saxon Protestants, and became the next substantial work the Fairmount Park Commission executed after the creation of East and West Parks on either side of the river. The roadway was designed in the grand Parisian style (100 feet wide) as an organic extension of both the “Fair Mount Park” and “Hunting Park”, and was intended as a leafy boulevard for park visitors. At the Hunting Park terminus, designer William Saunders’ central “cartway”, for while this predated the automobile was certainly traversed by various horse-drawn buggies and “carts”, and created a grand entrance into Hunting Park and its central pond. It is unclear to what extent the city implemented his full design between Fairmount Park and Hunting Park, but pedestrians from Juniata Park and Hunting Park neighborhoods can still see the remains of his original intent in the South side of the park’s great stand of trees near 13th Street.11
Even in what were then the suburbs to Philadelphia, the city’s street plan allowed for a grid of numbered streets one direction and named streets the other way; these simply increased in number and variety as time passed and the city expanded. City planners added two open-air pavilion structures sited within Saunders’ plan in what are typically referred to as “enhancements” and another collection of shrubs and trees. Many of these trees represent a distinctly European taste and do not nearly replicate the species native to the region, and some of these were destroyed by a blight upon Chestnut trees at the time. 12 Could further invasive species plantings have changed the landscape forever from what it once was? Clearly it was never in its agricultural state a grassy golf-course like knoll; nor was it as flat as it seems to have been then as now, however one aspect that could be explored is what were native to the region, and what plants and botanical experiments arrived later? Has the soil been so transformed by development as to be depleted of what is a safe habitat for anything but recreational sports? There is a uniformity throughout the parks in Philadelphia, perhaps due to a need to keep it simple and affordable, but doing so also suggests a cultural point: rather than make each neighborhood’s park unique, city planners stressed a desire for equality and hence uniformity; today, we could change the emphasis to promote diversity. A diverse flora and fauna, drawing on the Wingohocking Creek that has been forced underground into massive storm drains, could lend a variety that would celebrate the social and cultural diversity Philadelphia has to offer. Even along 5th Street nearby, the largely Puerto Rican community solicited donations from local businesses in order to afford constructing some fifty metal palm trees, placed every 25 feet or so along the sidewalk, in order to remind residents of their island roots. Hunting Park could be decorated similarly with local artwork and sculptures, in order to reflect the local talent and ethnic heritage.
From 1904-1949, the Hunting Park Avenue corridor through Nicetown and Juniata Park nearly doubled in size, as city planners sought to increase textile production with factories as a substitute for the decrease in papermaking production. Clean drinking water had evolved as a necessary commodity with Philadelphia’s growth outward from Center City, since water had become increasingly polluted by factories beginning with David Rittenhouse’s papermaking complex aside the Wissahickon Creek in Germantown (the first of its kind in the “New World”). Industry had rapidly consumed the area along the Schuylkill River until the Fairmount Park Commission came along and transformed the built environment and mill architecture into vast green space. As more and more people set up residence in these outer regions of the city limits, the Commission sought also to preserve sources of drinking water for the city, and bought so much land as part of a new city plan it became the largest inner-city park system in the world. Water flowed from “Fair Mount” (later site of the Philadelphia Museum of Art) after being pumped up to the top of the hill by the Water Works (opened in 1815, it was decommissioned in 1909). Philadelphia’s physical infrastructure underwent significant development during the early 20th century, and the question of how to ensure safe drinking water for a ballooning population required a dramatic response. Ever since the beginning of the First World War in 1914 the European immigrant population bolstered the labor force in factories and immigration records, filling neighborhoods around the city with a plethora of new residents, motivated to make “a better life” for themselves, perhaps, but also in need of city services.
Photographs of the time document the transformation of an agricultural to an industrial base. Concerns with squalid conditions from unplanned growth stimulated construction projects all around the city, and all around the nation as part of the “City Beautiful” movement, included a large lake and bridge inside Hunting Park in 1914 inspired by European waterways. Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Boulevard (also known today by its “Route 1” moniker) was constructed from 1909-1910 and the parcel of land north of The Boulevard, all the way to Wingohocking Street, became an adjacent and apparently contiguous park. Then as now, urban planners sought to capitalize on the plentiful water supply; could there be more of a display using today’s technology or could there be other beneficial uses of water – not just display – today?13
Nonetheless, by the 1920s several structures were added to the landscape in Hunting Park, including a bandstand pavilion overlooking the lake (or “pond” depending upon who is writing), a tennis pavilion, and a carousel. The City of Philadelphia Park Commission built “comfort stations” and other “amenities” as the city would call them, a word that connotes a benevolent gift to the area, and may indeed be accepted as such, at least then; whether or not the amenities, which made the park pleasant to look at, represent the right choices for the use of the park, will later be decided by my own students, and by the enduring criticism of later times. In any case, the 1915 Fairmount Park Commission Annual Report provides some context for understanding this growth: “The park is greatly appreciated by the rapidly increasing population of the neighborhood and is attested by the presence of large numbers of church, school and family picnic parties and the almost constant use of all the baseball diamonds and tennis courts to their utmost.”14 The residents of the time, primarily Jewish residents in Olney and everything from Italian and other European immigrants in Hunting Park, Nicetown, and the contiguous neighborhoods the park served to connect, tell us a lot about the change within American cities in general. The 1915 Commission report was concerned about them posing a social problem -- not because they were seen as spillover from a European society that had become war-weary and battered -- but instead over their occupation of an area of the city slated for the expansion of the central city.15 The expansion of a population of very recent immigrants only increased exponentially at the end of the Second World war, and the spaces in maps of open space during the time rapidly changed into dense urban streets. Some historians and current park planning agency leaders speculate that this intensive use continued after the 1920s as the Boulevard continued to spur growth in the neighborhood, and the 1920s period can be considered an important heyday for parks all around the nation. The most significant documentation of parks in the 1920s surrounds New York’s Central Park, but Hunting Park also flourished, primarily because an improved Boulevard meant more effective traffic through the Northeast areas, both by train and by an increase in automobiles.16
By the 1930s, the park became, along with many areas in Philadelphia, the site of Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects and the lake was chlorinated for bathing. Automobiles became the primary mode of transportation and added to the increasing expansion of the city’s urban environment, so that by the end of World War the Northeast section of the city required a new two compounded by a need to accommodate the underground flow of the Wingohocking waterway, but primarily inspired by a philosophy of inclusion with community as central to further development and grand city planning around the need to plan for recent immigrants and veterans returning from Europe and the second world war, both of whom were eager to begin families and take on a job. Alternatively, the effort to develop the Northeast was a concerted attempt to isolate the less desirable immigrants following WWII with parks as natural barriers; the exodus of earlier immigrants corresponded with this “Baby Boom” generation whose need for larger houses to accommodate the appeal of a suburban household, and a slice of the American pie, promoted in Levittown and other suburban communities around the nation. 17
The last major facility enhancements for Hunting Park occurred during the 1950s-1960s, including construction of a recreation center, concession building, and modifications to the bathing lake, including the addition of a swimming pool that is still a popular attraction in the summer months of 2015. In the 1970s the Fair Mount Park Commission contracted David A. Crane, an influential architect and city planner, though much less powerful and funded than Edmund Bacon, to redesign the Hunting Park grounds. There had already been some work done throughout the 1950s to erect exercise stations in the center, and near the pond, but this action left the perimeter somewhat neglected; Crane had the pond removed to encourage use of the park’s outer regions of the park, and reverted some of the hills to earlier levels. One further yet seemingly mystifying change was that Crane and his team removed the carousel and its shelter, as well as a few other structures dating to earlier periods of development. His emphasis was upon recreation, and that focus remains to this day.
1976 was planned as a huge year in the life of the city, as Philadelphia coordinated a huge bicentennial festival, but according to many critics, all the focus was on Independence Hall in center city, and not enough on outlying inner city neighborhoods like those around Hunting Park. Mayor Frank Rizzo had been the police chief before his eight-year tenure in politics ended in 1980, followed by another run until his unexpected death in 1991, and his priorities were to reinforce the rule of law upon poor and in particular minority neighborhoods in the city. As the neighborhood around Hunting Park became one of an increasing number of neglected regions in the city, the park suffered too. By 1987 Crack had taken the city by storm and North Philadelphia suffered as much if not more than anywhere. Three short years later, following a major investigation into drug trafficking in Hunting Park, U.S Attorney Robert K. Reed described the situation as having been “total, total lawlessness”. Within the neighborhood, however, law-abiding residents supported police and federal intervention, and the Latino community has been strong and involved for a long time; according to one resident, my schoolmate Eduardo Collazo’s father, people throughout Hunting Park were “frustrated, afraid, just giving up”, but by the time the community organizations began to hold nightly and weekly vigils, they were able to tell the city government representatives “You don’t have to be afraid to invest in Hunting Park”.18
The Grand Experiment
Urban planners are today attempting another grand evolution in the form of an extension to Interstate 95 at the entrance to Philadelphia from New Jersey, so that there might be (at least as it is touted to become) a seamless transition for cars passing from Northeast regions of the country like New York City points south of the river, in the direction of Delaware, and Washington DC. Today Washington DC is the nation’s capitol, but until 1865 the capital was situated right on Independence Mall in Center City Philadelphia). Such development of the roadway beside Hunting Park, as well as the fact that Route 1 possesses the top two most dangerous intersections in the state according to reports available through the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation may never mean a safe passage into Philadelphia, but you might be able to get through the upper Northeast without polluting the wealthy suburban regions of Bucks County with too much traffic congestion for their taste. To its detriment, there are intersections every 200 meters or so along much of The Boulevard, and yet pedestrian traffic seems to cross at any spontaneous moment, whether there is an intersection, or not, and even if there is oncoming traffic. That alone seems to be a type of social experience and seems worthy of study. For our purposes it means that Hunting Park becomes even more of an oasis for pedestrians than ever before in the history of the Park, as automobiles have gotten increasingly prolific, and increasingly lethal. Perhaps the newest park developments will lead to a closer look at how the entire neighborhood can be improved, without completely erasing all evidence of the past in the process.
Such “erasure” as Public Historians would refer to elimination and replacement of facilities and structures, provides no explanation of how three years ago the renovation that brings us all into the present moment, and perhaps thrusts us beyond, chooses to memorialize all the history and transformations within the original plan created by William Saunders. Where will this park go if funding evaporates again, or as renovations again become neglected once the grant ends? Can an overbearing and financially strapped government structure or even a privately funded entity that now manages the parks and the periodic donations from diminishing concerned patrons, be sustained? I believe this unit of study can help to be the check and balance to government decision-making, even if now such decisions are made by a benevolent organization that seeks to manage all the parks for the public good. Hunting Park, by the very fact that it is run by a community organization, seeks to be different. Can it? Should it? I think so.
Some persistent questions remain: What ought to be done to address the lingering petty and more serious crime that happens at night? In the 1990s the community found the answer in taking back the streets through grassroots campaigns and vigils, so at least the park is not at all hazardous during the day. In 2015 these community groups have become even stronger, and significantly more connected to the mainstream political engines of city government, and have become well funded through both local campaigns to renovate and revitalize the area, and Federal initiatives to combat blight everywhere. North Philadelphia and Hunting Park specifically, seems to represent “everywhere”, so was selected for its potential to show how investment could make a difference. The community-minded organizations and citizens are ready for that change.
Another new and fortunate issue has also arisen: Now that the park is much more desirable, how do we share it during both the day and the evening, and who becomes responsible to maintain it? The park’s recent development began with big money from both celebrity grants and government sources, the famous two being the grants afforded by the Ryan Howard family to build the baseball field and Billie Jean King Foundation to remodel the tennis courts; the park is and will be dramatically more polished in its modern incarnation. Nonetheless, how can its current benefits and beauty be sustained? It is not easy to find green space in the built environment of North Philadelphia, especially in less prosperous neighborhoods like the areas surrounding Hunting Park. Despite the benefits it can provide by increasing quality of life and lifting property values the social and public benefits have proven to benefit the health and wellbeing of residents.19 In a recent TV news report, Hunting Park’s nearby neighborhoods were identified as having the highest rates of Asthma in the city; in other parks around the country, academic research is being done to measure the health benefits of such a transformation, and part of the Hunting Park Revitalization Plan includes a plan to improve physical health in the target area. Can we take advantage of these benefits without suffering from the potential problems of gentrification or higher property taxes homeowners cannot bear to afford? Instead of becoming a casualty to the attention the park and ultimately, its local community’ has received in the windfall of refurbishment, the park could become a win-win situation for everyone, including students from my school if we can get as involved as the managing community group “Hunting Park United”.
Hunting Park, which is today genuinely worth the brief trip from center city Philadelphia, or from any of the more closely associated areas, is a generally wide-open green area comprising about 87 acres in North Philadelphia, and while it has certainly changed through the years, it has always been filled with plants and playing fields. There is a swimming pool, too, at the lake’s historic center, and on a warm summer day those fields will be filled with people playing soccer and baseball, and watching others do the same, and just enjoying being out of doors; the fear that violence is imminent seems irrational today, and yet it was only a decade ago in 2004 that the news media warned against a “Hunting Park Rapist”. The desire to leave cities like Philadelphia when Crack hit the streets in the 1980s, and Philadelphians Bruce Toll and his brother began to remodel farm country in Bucks County into colloquially named “McMansions” so that whites could avoid the next wave of immigration and African Americans. During the 1950s Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North, in addition to the Hispanic immigration from Puerto Rico in the 1960s there was a huge population shift out of the city; today there is another change in human demographics in how people from the suburbs (or at least their children) have sought to return to the city and buy in. Potential gentrification could be a future area of study within Edison High School’s student body as time progresses. There is a terrific line from a poem by Tato Laviera that gives me hope:
the congas clean the gasses
in the air. The congas burn out
everything not natural to our people.20
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