Understanding the Legacy of Philadelphia’s “Greene Country Towne”

Urban growth in Philadelphia ignited new attitudes about the value of green space. In the early decades of the city, elites sought to privatize access to nature. Ironically, however, the private villa estates of the wealthy eventually became the starting point for a city-wide park system available to all. Public access to green space became enshrined as a right of citizenship.

The upper class claimed access to both city lives and country lives, a demand echoed in later years by middle- and lower-class Philadelphians. The rich often established both a townhome in center city and a country-seat just a few miles away in the hinterlands. The city life routine of business and social rounds, they insisted, required them to take time away to refocus on personal improvement and recreation of the mind and body through reading, writing, pursuing expression in the fine arts, and outdoor pursuits such as hunting and fishing. They needed to escape from the summer disease outbreaks, bad smells, noise, and crowding. Over time, some of the benefits afforded to the elites at their country-seats would become available to the remainder of Philadelphia’s population through the development of a public park system.

Middle-class Philadelphians found their private green space through suburbanization as their lots became locales for landscaping and gardening. Like the elite, the middle class found connections to nature through their property, but instead of maintaining a city and country property the middle class became suburbanites, combining closeness to the center city with green space by living outside the city core. The popularity of flower gardens during the early twentieth-century Progressive Era marks a high point in middle-class manipulation of the residential landscape.

Today the park system of Philadelphia makes green space available to a diverse urban population. Philadelphia’s park system offers the formerly elite privilege of city life combined with wildness, pastoral beauty, scenic views, and historic properties. A symphony of recreational opportunities awaits the twenty-first-century Philadelphian with dog parks, bike trails, neighborhood parks, rails-to-trails projects, swimming pools, and athletic facilities.

These books link William Penn’s vision of Philadelphia as a “greene country towne” in the seventeenth century to the assortment and variety of green-space choices and options available today. These authors each contribute to a rich evolutionary story that explains how colonial-era rural estates and green space in and around Philadelphia created areas of recreation and parks, spurred flower gardening by the middle class, and preserved rural landscapes for the public benefit. The sensitivity toward country living in the vicinity of Philadelphia yielded places infused with pastoral and rural values worthy of preservation and, in many cases, public access. Over time, Philadelphians achieved Penn’s shared “greene country towne” aesthetic as a right of residency. This achievement has a history and it is worth the attention it has received in these books.

In Mark Reinberger and Elizabeth McLean’s work The Philadelphia Country House: Architecture and Landscape in Colonial America the country-seat emerged as a distinct, elite, rural housing...