CONTESTED GROUND: At FDR Park & Gateway Plaza, the promise of democratic space is a work in progress

By Allison Schapker

June 14, 2025: “No Kings” protests fill streets, squares and parks across the country. In Philadelphia, 80,000 protesters march from Love Park up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to rally at the Art Museum steps. Three miles to the south, politicians, city officials and neighbors gather to cut the ribbon on the Gateway Plaza at FDR Park.

The new Gateway Plaza is the welcome mat, the threshold connecting the park to Broad Street, public transit and the city. It replaces a crumbling asphalt path with a wide promenade that reaches out to the subway and embraces the bike path. It’s a place designed for human bodies, offering shade, cooling mist in summer and horticultural beauty across three seasons.

It is one of the first projects realized from the FDR Park Plan. The plan converts 40 acres of a soggy and insolvent golf course into athletic fields and basketball courts, and the remainder into high-functioning natural areas. Some trees will be razed, and many more new trees will be planted. It’s a lot of change for a place that hadn’t seen much attention since I-95 cut through it in 1965.

Just as speeches ended in FDR Park, a group marched into the plaza with homemade signs and an enormous bald eagle puppet carried aloft. They opposed the plan’s conversion of the golf course into basketball courts and athletic fields. These amenities would draw new users to a park that had, until now, largely belonged to those who already knew it. They walked to the opening of a public plaza their taxes helped build. This is what belonging looks like when it feels threatened — the legitimate grief of people who love a place and fear losing their claim to it. Love is the thing a park is supposed to produce.

Two Parks, Two Expositions, One Unfinished Promise

Philadelphia has hosted two World’s Fairs celebrating American democracy. In 1876 and 1926, the city did so imperfectly, and what remained after each spectacle was a park.

The 1876 Centennial Exposition, held a short decade after the Civil War tore the country apart, was intended to rally the nation around a commercial and technological future. Between May and November, 10 million visitors made a pilgrimage to Fairmount Park, arriving from across the continent. They witnessed the Corliss steam engine, the telephone and the stirrings of an industrial city. By measures of scale and attendance, it was a triumph.

This tapestry of patriotism shows snags from the rougher edges of Reconstruction. Women and Black Americans were largely excluded from the planning and denied exhibit space. Frederick Douglass, the nation’s pre-eminent orator, was invited to sit on the dais, but his voice was left out of the Opening Day remarks. The Exposition closed most Sundays, the only day the working class had off.

This was followed by the Sesquicentennial Exposition of 1926, on the grounds of League Island Park. The marshy South Philadelphia site was chosen not for its civic grandeur but because it fell within the district of Republican machine boss William S. Vare. The money ran out. It rained all summer. The Ku Klux Klan applied for a permit to rally on the grounds. The American Eugenics Society hosted an exhibit. Philadelphia’s Black community was denied participation in official events until A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was invited to speak at the opening ceremony after Black residents demanded inclusion.

Both times, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was fêted in the city where it was written while excluding those to whom its promises most urgently applied. Both expositions gave the same answer to the same question: The public being celebrated in this democracy is not quite all of the public.

What remains on the Centennial fairgrounds are open lawns and wide boulevards designed for parades, now used for hastening commutes. A handful of monumental buildings and heroic classical sculptures dot the vast landscape. The Welsh Fountain, built in 1887, honors John Welsh, president of the Centennial Exposition Finance Board. The landscape is divided from the neighborhood by two busy roads that often appear on the evening news for the hazard they present. The fountain itself went dry in 1918 and had a brief revival in the 1950s. What endures: young families burning energy after visiting the Please Touch Museum, cricket matches, teens lazily dodging adulthood on swings and old-timers barbecuing on weekends.

What remained in South Philadelphia after the 1926 Sesquicentennial was League Island Park, renamed FDR Park. Designed in 1914 by the Olmsted Brothers as a landscape of lakes, lawns and playing fields, the Park began to change almost as soon as it was opened. It surrendered the acreage east of Broad Street for a Municipal Stadium. After WWII, it doubled in size to accommodate a golf course. The boathouse, the lakeside overlook, the museum and the marshy, ecologically rich ground all endured. And the communities that grew up around the park — South Philadelphia’s immigrant and working-class neighborhoods — all kept coming to a space that served them variably, partially and sometimes not at all.

Public parks are not spectacles. They do not have an opening day and a closing day and a final accounting of attendance. They are slow, permanent and accretive. They build something the expositions never could — the ordinary, unremarkable civic trust that comes from people sharing ground over time. Not in grand gestures of democracy, but in the daily, seasonal, generational repetition of presence. Different bodies on common ground. A birthday party on the lawn. Kids at the playground. An elder who remembers when the fountain ran. The family who takes the bus to the lakes instead of a vacation to the shore.

Frederick Law Olmsted understood this, which is why the Olmsted Brothers’ design for League Island Park was not organized around a grand building or a ceremonial axis. It was organized around lakes, lawns and paths — and around a theory of democratic social life that Olmsted had been working out since 1870: one that feels, if anything, more urgent now in our age of algorithmic sorting than it did then.

In a lecture that year, Olmsted argued that the American city without parks produced “a peculiarly hard sort of selfishness” — the condition of people who see thousands of their fellow citizens every day and share nothing with them. His remedy was designed for two distinct modes of civic gathering.

The first he called “gregarious”: the city coming together as a crowd, seeing and being seen, a promenade or plaza where class and origin and circumstance dissolved temporarily into shared presence. It’s a civic argument about what happens when you make a beautiful expansive place and ensure that different kinds of people can all get there. The second he called “neighborly”: the intimate gathering of family and community on their own terms, the grove where a culture could celebrate itself without being asked to perform belonging for anyone else.

Both are necessary. A park that offers only the gregarious encounter is a spectacle or a protest. A park that offers only the neighborly gathering is a private club with grass. The democratic park holds both in productive tension.

But Olmsted’s framework doesn’t fully explain what happens when people feel that their belonging is being threatened. For that — for the eagle puppet, and for everything it represents — you need Robert Putnam.

Putnam, a political scientist and author of Bowling Alone, spent his career uncovering what holds democratic communities together. His answer aligns neatly with what Olmsted understood a century ago: “Bonding capital” accumulates within communities. It is the deep trust of people who share an identity, a neighborhood, a language, a history. The Southeast Asian community gathering in FDR Park for weekend markets is bonding capital at work. So is the Parkside neighbors’ attachment to a park they have known for decades. The problem is when that love hardens into a claim — when a public park begins to feel, to those who know it best, like theirs alone.

“Bridging capital” is Putnam’s democratic corrective. It accumulates through weak ties across communities — the thinner, more effortful trust that develops when unlike people encounter each other repeatedly, over time, in low-stakes settings. A pickup basketball game between strangers. It is speculative. You cannot manufacture it or schedule it. You can only build the conditions in which it might occur — a plaza, a fountain, a basketball court — and make a bet on the future.

Growing Closer

The Welsh Fountain Garden represents 10 years of work to reconnect the Parkside neighborhood to its namesake Fairmount Park. On its face, the project is a straightforward restoration of a 140-year-old fountain: granite cleaned and reset, the pool waterproofed, the waterworks repaired, lighting added. But the reason the project exists at all is that neighborhood elders remember when things were different. They remember the shade. They remember when the fountain ran. For nearly 70 years, they waited across a dangerous road. When planners finally crossed the street and asked what was needed, neighbors had answers: Fix the road and turn the water back on.

The effort began with pedestrian crossings and safer signals, and continues with new sidewalks, raised crossings and medians. The design ensures that the park feels like what it should always have been: a place that welcomes the people who live there more than the cars just passing through.

The Welsh Fountain itself, once restored and running, will be a gregarious space — a destination drawing people from different directions into a common center. Its four circular garden rooms are neighborly spaces. The rooms near the Please Touch Museum invite families and children into play and discovery. The rooms closer to Parkside Avenue are quieter and more contemplative, given over to local artists and to neighbors gathering on their own terms. Gregarious at the center, neighborly at the edges — the fountain as the shared ground where both meet.

On Higher Ground

At FDR Park, the Great Lawn and the Gateway Plaza are gregarious infrastructure, designed for the city to come together as a crowd, for festivals and spontaneous embodied encounters between people who didn’t arrive together. The basketball courts and multipurpose fields replacing part of the former golf course are gregarious, too: a direct invitation to communities that have not previously been invited to share this ground, designed to produce exactly the encounter with difference that democratic life requires.

The golf course was a fee-based amenity serving a narrow constituency. The Meadows, the interim landscape that emerged when the course was abandoned, became the domain of those who valued its inaccessibility and the insider knowledge its use required or, in Olmsted’s terms, a neighborly space that calcified into something more exclusive: a retreat for those in the know within the park. The basketball courts are its democratic correction. They are an example of bridging infrastructure — an invitation for communities that have not previously shared this ground to begin the slow, uncertain, necessary work of sharing it.

That is uncomfortable for the people who have had parts of the park to themselves. Olmsted understood that the gregarious encounter was not always pleasant. It was, he knew, the thing that many people would prefer to avoid. He built it anyway because he believed that a city that did not create the conditions for encounter across difference was building something other than democracy. The discomfort is not a side effect. That is the entire point.

Back to June 14, 2025, and FDR Park

Just as protesters christen the brand-new Gateway Plaza with their signs and a bald eagle puppet, another group joins the scene. WeWalkers, a group of strangers who gather weekly for the simple pleasure of moving through the park, enter the Plaza. Bouncing with a DJ’s beats, they form a line dance, spontaneous and joyful, bodies moving together on the new ground.

The DJ makes a game-time decision. He cues the Philadelphia Eagles fight song, and the crowd instinctively raises its voice together: “Fly, Eagles Fly.”

This plaza holds it all: dissent and dance, grievance and celebration, a handmade puppet and an impromptu line dance. Not in sequence, but at once. Not resolved, but shared.

This is where the promise of democracy lives. Not in the expositions that celebrated it, but in the parks that inherited their ground. On June 14, the same city that marched three miles up the Parkway also gathered here, at the threshold of FDR Park, to argue, to celebrate, to resist and to belong.

Olmsted understood that cities require places where people can practice being citizens in the friction and fullness of public life. The Welsh Fountain Gardens and FDR Park are that ground, renewed for a century that is more diverse, more contested and more in need of common space than ever before.

Democracy is not only the right to raise your voice; it is the obligation to hear another. We learn both the same way: by returning, again and again, to the same ground.

The fountain will run again. Kids will play ball next summer.

This took 100 years. That is not a long time in the history of American democracy. It is also not a short time if you live across the street.

ALLISON SCHAPKER joined the Fairmount Park Conservancy team in 2018 to lead the organization’s transformation of the 350-acre FDR Park in South Philadelphia. As chief operations and projects officer, she works with partners to co-author a public-realm strategy that engages communities, inspires investment and maximizes impact.