Most people experience Logan Square looking up.
Dominated by the grand neoclassical sweep of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway — Philadelphia’s answer to the Champs-Élysées — at first glance the area registers as a monumental backdrop rather than a place where people actually live. The Free Library; The Barnes Foundation; The Franklin Institute; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, all crowning the hill at the top like a civic exclamation point.
Tourists arrive by the busload, crane their necks, snap their photos, and move on.
But step just two blocks off the parkway in almost any direction, and the scale of the city completely changes. The wide, windswept boulevard gives way to narrow, tree-canopied streets. Rowhomes reappear. Dogs get walked. Grocery runs occur…