Eakins Oval | |
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Location | |
Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. | |
Coordinates | 39°57′49″N75°10′43″W / 39.96361°N 75.17861°W |
Roads at junction | Benjamin Franklin Parkway Spring Garden Street Kelly Drive Martin Luther King Jr. Drive 24th Street |
Construction | |
Lanes | 3-5 |
Maintained by | City of Philadelphia |
Eakins Oval is a traffic circle in Philadelphia. It forms the northwest end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway just in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a central array of fountains and monuments, and a network of pedestrian walkways.
This loop of road usually carries a large volume of traffic, as it connects the core of the city with Fairmount Park, Kelly Drive (formerly East River Drive), and Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive (formerly West River Drive). During parades and other major municipal events such as the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and large concerts such as Live 8 Philadelphia and the Budweiser Made in America Festival, the roadways are shut down to automobile traffic and the oval becomes center stage for the gathering. Eakins Oval was the site of the stage for the 2017 NFL draft.
The oval was part of urban planner Jacques Gréber's design for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which he proposed in 1917. [1]
The oval is named for Thomas Eakins, a Philadelphian, world-famous realist painter, and fine arts educator.
The southeastern part of the oval serves as a parking lot; it was originally part of the Parkway until traffic modifications isolated it in the 1960s.
Washington Monument | |
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Location | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
Coordinates | 39°57′49″N75°10′43″W / 39.96361°N 75.17861°W |
Official name | Washington Fountain |
Just inside the northwest edge of Eakins Oval, in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art stairs, stands the Washington Monument fountain. It was commissioned and designed by sculptor Rudolf Siemering. The sculpture was dedicated in 1897 at the Green Street entrance to Fairmount Park.
It was moved in 1928 to its present location after construction of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway was completed. [2] In 1997, work to restore the statue began under the direction of Margo Berg of the Philadelphia Art Commission. Over the years, the sculpture had come loose from its base, and the fountain had ceased to function properly. The restoration was completed in June of the same year, 100 years after it was dedicated.
The bronze and granite sculpture features a uniformed George Washington mounted on a horse. Washington and his horse are poised on top of the fountain, facing southeast down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway towards Philadelphia City Hall. The face of the sculpture was made from an impression of the former president made while he was still alive. The lowest level of the monument features Native Americans and animals that are native to the United States. [3]
The Washington Monument fountain is flanked by two smaller fountains, honoring Eli Kirk Price and John Ericsson. [4]
Beneath Eakins Oval and the surrounding area run two tunnels, originally for rail traffic, and constructed in the 1920s at the same time as the Oval, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and the Philadelphia Art Museum. The lower tunnel, built for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, is owned by successor CSX and carries freight trains on a single track. The upper tunnel carried streetcars on the Spring Garden Street line (Route 43) of Philadelphia Rapid Transit (PRT) and successor Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) until 1956. This double-track tunnel was then completely rebuilt in 1960 to carry two lanes of one-way (westbound only) traffic on Spring Garden from Pennsylvania Avenue to the Spring Garden Street Bridge over the Schuylkill River; currently only one lane is in use. This tunnel crosses above the CSX tunnel in the middle. Today's Route 43 buses, operated by SEPTA, circle the Oval and do not use the tunnel.
LOVE Park, officially known as John F. Kennedy Plaza, is a public park located in Center City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The park is across from the Philadelphia City Hall and serves as a visual terminus for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The park is nicknamed LOVE Park for its reproduction of Robert Indiana's 1970 LOVE sculpture which overlooks the plaza, one of three located in Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at Eakins Oval. The museum administers collections containing over 240,000 objects including major holdings of European, American and Asian origin. The various classes of artwork include sculpture, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, armor, and decorative arts.
Fairmount Park is the largest municipal park in Philadelphia and the historic name for a group of parks located throughout the city. Fairmount Park consists of two park sections named East Park and West Park, divided by the Schuylkill River, with the two sections together totalling 2,052 acres (830 ha). Management of Fairmount Park and the entire citywide park system is overseen by Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, a city department created in 2010 from the merger of the Fairmount Park Commission and the Department of Recreation.
William Rush was a U.S. neoclassical sculptor from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is considered the first major American sculptor.
Fairmount is a neighborhood within Lower North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Its boundaries are north of Fairmount Avenue, west of Corinthian Avenue, south of Girard Avenue and east of The Schuylkill River. While this may be the most accurate demarcation, the area's boundaries fluctuate depending how the neighborhood is defined. Several other neighborhoods near Fairmount are sometimes also collectively called Fairmount, including: Spring Garden, Franklintown and Francisville. Fairmount and neighboring Spring Garden are commonly referred to as the "Art Museum Area," for their proximity to and association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Fairmount is also the location of the Eastern State Penitentiary.
The Schuylkill Expressway, locally known as "the Schuylkill", is a freeway through southern Montgomery County and Philadelphia. It is the easternmost segment of Interstate 76 (I-76) in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It extends from the Valley Forge interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in King of Prussia, paralleling its namesake Schuylkill River for most of the route, southeast to the Walt Whitman Bridge over the Delaware River in South Philadelphia. It serves as the primary corridor into Philadelphia from points west. Maintenance and planning for most of the highway are administered through Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) District 6, with the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) maintaining the approach to the Walt Whitman Bridge.
Logan Circle, also known as Logan Square, is an open-space park in Center City Philadelphia's northwest quadrant and one of the five original planned squares laid out on the city grid. The centerpiece of the park is the Logan Circle, a circular area centered on a large water feature, bounded by a traffic circle carrying 19th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway with connections to 18th and 20th streets to the east and west and Race and Vine Streets to the south and north.
Benjamin Franklin Parkway, commonly abbreviated to Ben Franklin Parkway and colloquially called the Parkway, is a boulevard that runs through the cultural heart of Philadelphia, the nation's sixth-largest city as of 2020.
The Swann Memorial Fountain is an art deco fountain sculpture located in the center of Logan Circle in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Franklin Square is one of the five original open-space parks planned by William Penn when he laid out the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1682. It is located in the Center City area, between North 6th and 7th streets, and between Race Street and the Vine Street Expressway (I-676).
Bike Philly was a bicycle tour of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on a closed route cleared of motorized vehicular traffic. The tour is sponsored by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, and it occurs on the second Sunday of September. The inaugural event for Bike Philly was held on September 9, 2007, and consisted of two 10 mile loops, a Center City route, and a Fairmount Park route. The ride attracted 2,500 riders
SEPTA Route 38 is a bus and former subway–surface streetcar route operated by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Spring Garden Street Bridge is a highway bridge in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It crosses the Schuylkill River below Fairmount Dam and connects West Philadelphia to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It is the fourth bridge at this location.
Samuel Aloysius Murray was an American sculptor, educator, and protégé of the painter Thomas Eakins.
Eli Kirk Price II was a prominent American Philadelphia lawyer, called "the foremost civic and cultural leader in early twentieth-century Philadelphia". He was the commissioner of Fairmount Park during the planning and development of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, of which he was one of the principal planners. Later, he was instrumental in obtaining funding for the new Philadelphia Museum of Art building and was President of the museum from 1926 to 1933.
Chief Justice John Marshall is a bronze sculpture of John Marshall, by American sculptor William Wetmore Story. It is located at the Supreme Court, 1 First Street, Washington, D.C., N.E.
Iroquois is a sculpture by American artist Mark di Suvero, owned by the Association for Public Art. The artwork is located at the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, at Eakins Oval and 24th Street, Philadelphia, United States. Iroquois is one of the many sculptures included in the Association's for Public Art's Museum Without Walls: AUDIO™ interpretive audio program for Philadelphia's outdoor sculpture.
All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors is a war memorial in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that honors the state's African American servicemen who fought in American conflicts from the American Revolutionary War to World War I. Commissioned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1927, it was created by sculptor J. Otto Schweizer and dedicated July 7, 1934. In 1994 it was relocated from a remote site in West Fairmount Park to its present prominent site in Logan Square, along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.