Explore the landscapes of Chestnut Hill and Mt Airy with nationally recognized landscape architect and life-time Chestnut Hill-Mt Airy resident, Carol Franklin, drawing from her book Metropolitan Paradise:  The Struggle for Nature in the City. The book is a history of the Wissahickon Valley, co-authored with David Contosta, professor of Social History at Chestnut Hill College and author of a number of books on Chestnut Hill. This virtual slideshow will illustrate the critical interconnection between the structure and architecture of the communities in Northwest Philadelphia with the adjacent Wissahickon Park—exploring these ideas in the context of their development from the end of the era of the Lenni-Lenape to the present day.  It will explore in detail the distinct patterns that emerge and create the genuinely “greene country” villages that make our communities so special.  She calls these patterns the “Wissahickon Style” because they grow out of an imaginative and very positive response to the great natural woods that is our local branch of Fairmount Park.

Carol, FASLA, RLA, is a nationally recognized landscape architect, one of the founders of the local firm Andropogon Associates—a pioneer in the field of ecological and sustainable design. Now retired, she was also a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 30 years, chairman of the Chestnut Hill Tree and Landscape Committee, and winner of the Chestnut Hill Award in 1980.