January 15, 2016
Philadelphia is lucky to have an outdoor recreational space as sprawling and strategically developed as Fairmount Park, whose 6.4 square miles and 4,100 acres includes museums, trails, The Mann Center, playgrounds, and an unlimited supply of natural beauty.
While Philadelphia as a whole comes in at number 70 in the United States in terms of cities ranked by area at 134.1 square miles, Fairmount Park represents a fairly unique expanse. To illustrate just how gargantuan it is relative to other cities, parks and iconic locations around the country and the world, the SpareFoot blog put together a series of maps with the park territory overlaid for comparison.
"Fairmount Park is Philadelphia's emerald, and I wanted to show how incredibly fortunate Philadelphians are to have such a massive expanse of green space within their urban area," said SpareFoot's Brian Shreckengast. "I think size is best understood by means of visual comparison, so that's what I tried to do here. As you can see, Fairmount Park would swallow huge sections of other cities. And finally, just for fun, I compared Fairmount Park to some of nature's most impressive geographical features to put into scale how small the human world really is."
As Curbed Philly notes, the entire Fairmount Park system comprises 63 parks encompassing 9,200 acres in total from one corner of the city to the other. Just for good measure, the park opened up another 50 acres of land in December that had been kept behind gates for 45 years.
For its comparison purposes, SpareFoot used the original, contiguous Fairmount Park known to most Philadelphians, meaning the maps provide a conservative look at the recreational lands that Philadelphia has in its backyard.
Fairmount Park vs. Central Park in New York City
Fairmount Park vs. Baltimore
Fairmount Park vs. Amazon River
Fairmount Park vs. Grand Canyon
Head over to the SpareFoot blog to see the rest of the comparisons, and if you're interested in generating your own, you can use the outline to see how Fairmount Park sizes up against locations all over the world.
