Spring Garden District

Spring Garden is a residential district on the edge of Fairmount Park and central Philadelphia, built largely between about 1850 and 1900. Its core is three-story brick rowhouses with pressed-brick facades, marble trim, flat bracketed cornices and distinctive cast ironwork, many put up by speculative builders in groups as large as a full block. Approximately 300 were built by one firm, Randolph and Parry, local lumber merchants. Later, wealthier residents commissioned individually designed brownstone houses and churches, including work by Willis G. Hale, James H. Windrim, Samuel Sloan, and Wilson Eyre, Jr. Interiors retain high ceilings, painted pine woodwork and gas lighting. The district is regarded as the best surviving example in Philadelphia of the neighborhoods that the expanding urban middle class created in the mid to late 19th century. It is also among the city's earliest large-scale residential developments, and it shows how rowhouse design could be varied for different households.