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Every day, Philadelphians and tourists alike run up and down the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Some thrust their arms towards the sky, recreating the scene from “Rocky.” Many who make that climb walk past or stop by the carved marble fountains just across the street.
Etched into the gray stone of the Eli Kirk Price Fountain reads, “To the memory of Eli Kirk Price 1860-1933 whose wisdom and dedication were responsible for the developement of the parkway and art museum.”
See anything wrong with the text there?
Since the fountain was installed in 1969, the answer has seemingly been no. At least until writer and director Jeff Greenstein noticed the extra “e” in development during a visit with his stepson.
“Price fountain in Philadelphia has a typo,” reads Greenstein’s plainly written Threads post that pointed out the typo.
Greenstein said writing for shows like “Friends” and “Desperate Housewives” helped him spot the error. A self-proclaimed “word guy,” he’s not new to spotting public typos.
“My son is a journalist, and something we’ve always enjoyed doing since he was very young is finding amusing street signs and infelicitous inscriptions,” said Greenstein.
Not so quick to notice the typo was Iam Jones, a Philly native giving his friend a tour of the city on a September morning. A quick lap around the fountain with special attention to grammar made the typo apparent to Jones, but he said he’d be surprised if anything was done about it.
“No one cares,” said Jones. “I didn’t notice until it was pointed out to me; people don’t notice.”
Jones’ hypothesis was true for a trio of tourists from the United Kingdom. None said they’d noticed the typo at first glance.
“I doubt they’d fix it as that’d cost a fortune,” said Daphne Harvey, one of the tourists. “I think telling people it’s spelled wrong is a tourist attraction.”
As for the city, officials seem aware of the typo. In response to a Billy Penn inquiry, officials from the Association for Public Art, a Philadelphia-founded nonprofit dedicated to integrating public art, sent a photo from the 1969 unveiling of the fountain that shows men pointing to the fountain’s typo.
Then known as the Fairmount Park Art Association, the group had commissioned the Price Fountain and minutes from a 1967 board meeting show the approved transcription spelled “development” correctly.
“People are correct that the spelling carved on the fountain is incorrect according to modern English,” wrote Julia Perciasepe, marketing and communications manager for the Association for Public Art, in an email to Billy Penn. “As far as we know, the city has no plans to correct the spelling or redo the fountain.”
Two Philly-area monument companies couldn’t provide exact estimates of how much a fix would be, but said it would be “costly.”
Representatives contacted said the most likely fix would be to replace the entire stone rather than sand down and re-inscribe “development.”
“It’s a wrap,” said a representative of a North Philly monument company near Fern Rock. “Definitely don’t replace that; it’s there to stay.”
For monument scholar Paul Farber, director and co-founder of Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art, history and design studio in Philadelphia, the expensive additional “e” fits neatly into what he calls the life cycle of a monument. Public memorials may look permanent, he said, but they’re always shifting, through weather, maintenance, political debates or just the stories people tell about them.
“A monument is not forever,” Farber said. “It has the illusion of permanence, but they’re constantly changing. Sometimes that change is adding names to a war memorial. Sometimes it’s fixing a quote. And sometimes it’s just the way people notice and talk about a typo.”
Farber says the Eli Kirk Price typo is part of a much longer story of monuments being revised, corrected, or reinterpreted over time. Names have been added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Boston’s 54th Massachusetts Regiment monument as researchers uncovered more accurate casualty lists. In Washington, D.C., the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial had to be altered after a paraphrased quote that’d been trimmed down with ellipses drew sharp criticism from writer Maya Angelou for making King sound arrogant.
“My litmus test is if it’s actively causing harm to a vulnerable group of people or it triggers a kind of wound in a city,” said Farber. “I feel like that would open it up to a fix. But there is something honest and raw and, dare I say, very Philly about living with imperfections and taking deep pride in it.”
What’s more interesting to Farber than a potential spelling change to correct the typo is the possibility that the typo changes how Philadelphians interact with the fountain and the history it represents.
Eli Kirk Price II, to whom the fountain was dedicated, was a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and civic leader who helped shape the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and played a major role in developing the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He served as president of the museum from 1926 until his death in 1933.
“Maybe there’s some lore about Eli Kirk and his legacy in the city that gets a new look,” said Farber. “I think that this has the potential to open up conversations either about this typo, about this site or about monuments more broadly.”
The future of the fountain — whether it’s fixed, becomes a quirky tourist attraction or continues to go unnoticed — is unknown. Farber’s future is more certain.
“I’m coming back into town from a visit out of town, and this weekend I gotta go look,” said Farber. “I gotta reread this fountain.”
