Willow Grove Park: Philadelphia’s classic trolley park idyll
At the end of an hour-long trolley ride from Philadelphia, where the tracks finally stopped, Willow Grove Park opened in 1896 as a reward for patience.
The Peoples Traction Company, one of the city’s traction firms, had built the place for the most prosaic of reasons – to fill weekend seats on its streetcars.
From this transactional impulse grew a carefully tended idyll of lakes and lawns, picnic groves and walking paths, pavilions for dancing and band concerts…