Loans. Fairmount Park Commission., 1988-1989

The Benjamin Franklin Parkway, stretching northwest from Philadelphia's city center to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is one of the most remarkable products of the nineteenth-century "City Beautiful" movement. With plans beginning in 1858 and developing through the early decades of the 1900s, building the city beautiful was a long and arduous process. This exhibition, organized by David B. Brownlee, guest curator, and coordinated by Ann Percy, Associate Curator of Drawings, chronicles the relationship between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the evolution of the parkway through architectural drawings, photographs, and other documentary evidence from the Museum's permanent collection and archives throughout the city of Philadelphia. The majority of records for this exhibition pertain to loans from local institutions situated along the parkway, photographs, and photocopies of research materials.