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The Fairmount Park Transit Company built artful stone bridges that spanned creeks and ravines in the pathway of the trolley line. The bridge shown in this photo is below Wynnefield Heights in West Fairmount Park. The Fairmount Park Conservancy and Terra Firma Trails are now constructing a “Trolley Trail,” designed to be “a continuous trail that follows the pathway of the scenic trolley that ran through the woods of West Fairmount Park in the early 20th century.” 

Fully restored and operational, Woodside Park’s Dentzel Carousel is housed today in Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum, in Fairmount Park’s Memorial Hall. This photo shows the hand-crafted beauty of the carousel’s lead horse figure.

Typical condition of the 52 animals at the time of the dismantling of the Dentzel Carousel in 1966.

Purchased in 1908 from the Dentzel Carousel Company of North Philadelphia, with 52 elegantly hand-carved animals and 1,296 lights, the carousel remained a beloved attraction at the park for the next 47 years. This photo shows the carousel in Lambertville, PA, in its pre-restoration condition in the years after the demolition of Woodside Park. The Smithsonian Institution meticulously restored the carousel, which happily found a permanent home in Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.  

Photo from Woodside Park’s early years. 

The Fairmount Park Trolley Line serviced this station at Woodside Park.

Giovanni E. Conterno, Woodside Park March (sheet music), performed in the season of 1897

Construction began on the Penn Medicine Pavilion in May 2017. According to a Penn Medicine website, “The Pavilion will house 500 private patient rooms and 47 operating rooms in a 1.5 million square foot, 17-story facility across from the Hospital of University of Pennsylvania and adjacent to the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine. This gigantic structure will offer patients the tremendous benefits of state-of-the-art hospital-room designs, laboratories and treatment facilities, and advanced technologies. Priced at $1.5 billion, the Pavilion is scheduled to open in 2021. 

Penn Tower, a grim modernist edifice that opened in 1975 on Convention Avenue as a Hilton Hotel morphed into an office building for HUP. This photo from 2013 shows Penn Tower between the University Museum and the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, with Convention Avenue separating the erstwhile hotel from the Perelman Center. The University demolished Penn Tower in 2015–16 to clear the site for construction of Penn Medicine’s Pavilion.    

This photo shows part of the Penn Medicine healthcare and health sciences research complex on the north side of Civic Center Boulevard, opposite CHOP’s main hospital. The blue-tone building (left center) is the Ronald G. Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, which is the primary site for HUP’s state-of-the-art clinical services and laboratories. The Smilow Center for Translational Research rises above it (right center).