Logan Square Series #2 | 08:17AM Aug 08, 2008
Logan Square, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is one of the five original public squares designed by Philadelphia founder Willliam Penn in 1682. His reasoning was to keep a green country town feel to city living. In modern times the "square" was turned into a circle for traffic flow. This fountain is in the middle of that "circle". Originally called "Northwest Square," the park had a somewhat gruesome history as a site of public executions and burial plots until the early Nineteenth Century. In 1825, it was renamed Logan Square after Philadelphia statesman James Logan.
Although the bounds of the square—18th Street to the east, 20th Street to the west, Race Street to the south and Vine Street to the north—are still intact, the park today is distinguished by its circle, constructed in the 1930s as a segment of Benjamin Franklin Parkway and centered around picturesque Swann Fountain. Among the sites in its immediate vicinity are the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Franklin Institute and the Roman Catholic Cathedral-Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul.
