Fairmount Park Historic Resource Archive Rehousing Project

FAIN: PG-51329-11

City of Philadelphia Fairmount Park Commission (Philadelphia, PA 19102-1225)
Christopher Raymond Dougherty (Project Director: May 2010 to October 2012)

The purchase of a five-drawer flat file to rehouse a collection of historic maps and architectural drawings, including 400 pen and ink drawings of buildings from the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, 200 construction drawings of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and topographical maps dating to the 1870s. These resources are used frequently by city officials, consultants, scholars, and the general public to learn more about the history of Philadelphia's built environment.

The City of Philadelphia's Fairmount Park Historic Resource Archive (FPHRA) seeks to replace 5 of its archivally unsound flat files to better house key portions of our architectural drawings and map collections. With these new flat files, Fairmount Park hopes to rehouse maps and plans relating to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, a full set of forty hand-drawn topographical map panels executed for the WPA in 1938 and other maps, plans and drawings spanning from the mid-19th century to the early 20th. This rehousing effort is a fitting capstone to a successful project funded by Fairmount Park and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission to conserve, rehouse and digitize nearly 100+ architectural plans, maps, and renderings.