Benjamin Franklin Parkway

The Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ranks among the most notable of early-20th-century City Beautiful projects. The parkway cuts a wide diagonal across the city's street grid, creating a vast open space for public events. Construction began in 1909 and the roadway opened in 1918.

Although several proposals to link the downtown to Fairmount Park surfaced in the late 19th century, it was the combination of national interest in city planning and local pressure to build an art museum that led, in 1907, to a detailed parkway plan aligning with an art museum on the hilltop site of the reservoir. It would be a grand urban parkway, with major cultural institutions clustered at its base and other buildings lining the route. The proposed roadway would be four lanes between City Hall and Logan Square, and then widen to the museum.

In 1916, taking advantage of a new state law giving cities the authority to control land development adjacent to parkland, the city gave control of the entire parkway to the Fairmount Park Commission, which established both height and land use regulations along the route. In 1917, the commission hired Jacques Gréber, a French landscape architect and planner, to reexamine the design. Gréber altered the earlier plans in a fundamental way. Instead of an urban boulevard, the parkway became an extension of Fairmount Park itself. The line of buildings along the route disappeared. Gréber proposed only a few public buildings in their place. Logan Square shrank to a Circle, stranded in a swirl of traffic.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art opened in 1928, but most of the proposed civic structures never materialized. West of Logan Circle only the Rodin Museum (1928) and the city's juvenile detention center (1952) were built. The cluster of civic buildings occurred on the blocks surrounding Logan Circle where the Free Library (1927), the Franklin Institute (1934), and the Municipal Court (1941) joined the Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul (1864) and the Academy of Natural Science (1873). Commercial buildings and a hotel lined the blocks east of Logan Circle. In the 1960s, the block closest to City Hall was closed off and rebuilt as a plaza, popularly known as LOVE Park, after the sculpture there by Robert Indiana. In 2004, the city proposed construction of a new museum for the Barnes Collection on the site of the juvenile detention center.

In its early decades, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway served mostly as an attractive automobile route from the park drives to Center City. With 10 lanes of traffic and few buildings, it has never attracted many pedestrians. Only much later in the 20th century did it become the city's principal venue for ethnic festivals, July fourth celebrations, and parades.