Lemon Hill’s caretakers call for sustainable parks funding as World Cup legacy project begins

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Over the summer, East Fairmount Park’s Lemon Hill was one of the centers of the world’s biggest sporting celebration, hosting the only U.S. FIFA Fan Fest site that ran throughout the 39 days of the FIFA World Cup.  

By and large, it was a success, drawing half a million people and helping make Philadelphia one of the tournament’s best host cities.

On Monday, the city hosted a thank you celebration for the neighbors around the park, planting the first of more than 100 new trees and unveiling some of the upgrades that are already underway as part of the legacy project intended to leave Lemon Hill in better condition than it was before Fan Fest. 

“The World Cup came to Philadelphia, the world came to Lemon Hill and we are here making sure that something lasting remains for the community that helped us welcome the world,” said Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker.

The park’s neighboring community had to bear some pain and sacrifice for all of that, giving up a public park space for much of the summer and dealing with the parking restrictions, crowds and noise that replaced it. 

“When we were ‘volun-told’ that Fan Fest was going to be here, we were excited but knew it would present some challenges and some opportunities,” said Nissa Eisenberg, co-lead of Lemon Hill Neighbors Association. “And it was a fun party. I’ll tell you that. It was great.”

Two days before the ceremony, Eisenberg, her co-lead Shaun Cerborino and other members of the volunteer group were also working on the park, as they had been in the weeks after Fan Fest, and the years before the soccer festivities were even imagined.

While they are mostly happy with how Fan Fest turned out, and glad to see improvements coming to Lemon Hill, the process still feels bittersweet that this was what it took for the improvements to finally arrive.

So Eisenberg’s thank you speech also came with a request.

“Just like we want this tree here to still stand in 50, 150, 250 years, it’s going to need tending and with new amenities come new maintenance requirements and volunteers. It’s kind of all hands on deck,” she said. “In the same vein we also want to advocate for [Philadelphia Parks and Recreation] to be sustainably funded in the long term.”

‘Legacy in and of itself’ 

The nearly $7 million upgrade includes a 43,500-square-foot play space for different age groups and renovations to the basketball courts and baseball field. 

Two new picnic pavilions are also set to be added, along with more than 50 new light poles and more than 100 new trees around the park. The upgraded playspace is expected to open this spring and the space will be closed off until then.

Four million dollars of the funds in the park is being provided by the William Penn Foundation and Philadelphia Soccer 2026, the group that organized the city’s World Cup host city bid and implementation. 

The city had already allocated $11.8 million to prepare Lemon Hill for Fan Fest, which went toward revamping the electrical service for the park, restoring a historic gazebo and tearing down another on the hill, roadway improvements, renovating sidewalks, walkways, curb ramps and park signage. 

The playspaces and other renovations were in the city’s plans years before Lemon Hill was chosen for Fan Fest in June 2024, Parks and Rec and the city’s Capital Program Office didn’t get the city budget funding for it.

Fan Fest changed that. After winning its bid to be one of the 16 host cities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico for the World Cup, Philadelphia Soccer 2026 had to find a site for the free fan festival each city promised to set up in its bid. 

One of the host committee’s challenges was finding somewhere that wouldn’t conflict with all of the other semiquincentennial celebrations already happening across the city. Meg Kane, the host city executive for Philadelphia Soccer 2026, joked Monday that the group spent three years not showing FIFA the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

When Lemon Hill was first pitched to Kane, she admitted that she had to break out Google Earth to see exactly where it was. 

Kane said that organizers went into Fan Fest knowing and acknowledging that many residents would be disappointed and concerned about losing access to their park for its usual recreational activities for the summer.

“We are using Lemon Hill for this once this generational event, a once-in-a-lifetime sporting event coming to Philadelphia,” she said back in June, while the park was being prepared for Fan Fest. “And for this moment, leaving the park in an upgraded fashion, in a better place than it may have been before, was something that we felt was a way that we could ensure the care of it and ensure that we returned it to the neighbors in a way that they would be able to enjoy it, in an even greater way once it reopened.”

Lemon Hill is in City Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr.’s 4th District, while Councilmember Jeffery Young Jr.’s. 5th District includes the nearby neighborhoods that frequent the park, including Fairmount, Brewerytown, Francisville, Strawberry Mansion and Spring Garden.

After the project kicked off in April 2024, Parks and Rec and Philadelphia Soccer 2026 held community sessions with registered community organizations (RCOs) for those neighborhoods, city representatives and groups that will be affected by Fan Fest like Lemon Hill Neighbors. 

The sessions took feedback on the park’s proposed improvements, including what specific amenities were needed, respecting preserving the natural elements, and acknowledging the already existing challenges to staffing and funding.

“Philadelphia has a tremendous opportunity to showcase itself on the world stage,” Young wrote in an email in May. “My priority is to make sure we do so in a way that is thoughtful, well-managed, and respectful of the communities who call these neighborhoods home.”

The closing of the park space and roads around it for Philadelphia Soccer 2026 to set up Fan Fest was May 26, the day after Memorial Day. Fan Fest’s executive producer Michael DelBene said it was left as late as possible to keep the park open to the public before the World Cup. On June 11, it opened for the first game of the tournament and — save for a couple weather closures — remained open every day after until the final on July 19.

The load out process removing the Fan Fest infrastructure after July 19 happened as swiftly as the load in, to have the space usable in time for the return of the Philadelphia Cycling Classic at the end of August. DelBene set the clear-out target for Aug. 1, and it was done by July 25. 

Kane said she hadn’t been back to Lemon Hill since Fan Fest closed and it was strange not to see the site filled with stages, screens and thousands of people in soccer jerseys. Philly was the only venue that kept its bid promise to keep a fan fest running throughout the tournament. With 575,000 attendees over the 39 days, 55,000 on its busiest day, it was one of the most popular in the country. 

Coupled with all the joy and celebrations around the rest of the city for the six games at Lincoln FInancial Field and the rest of the tournament, Kane said the World Cup brought a lot of civic pride to the city and showed the opportunities to bring visitors to new parts of the city that weren’t previously activated for them.   

“For Fan Fest to utilize a public park in such an incredible way, I think is a legacy in and of itself,” Kane said. “But I think what will come here when we are able to ribbon cut this in the spring, will just be an extraordinary moment for the city, but I think more importantly for the neighbors.”

Cleaning up Lemon Hill

Lemon Hill Neighbors is a volunteer-run park friends organization, one of the many that help organize park maintenance and events around the city. It’s been co-led by Cerborino and Eisenberg for over the past 10 years and has been fiscally sponsored by Park to Broad Arts & Business District for the past two years.

On Saturday morning, Cerborino, Eisenberg and three other volunteers worked on a hill along Sedgley Drive next to the defunct Lemon Hill pond. After rooting out and removing invasive plant species, they planned to install 450 plugs of native plants along the small patch of hillside.

Around the steps of the pond, the group’s pollinator garden project was still blooming, drawing bees and other insects on the pleasant fall day.

During the Fan Fest, the pond had a giant replica of the World Cup’s “Trionda” soccer ball that people could take photos in front of while they waited to get through the security entrance. Now, it’s filled with stagnant water after unsuccessful attempts to drain it. The city currently has no plans to restore it into a working fountain. 

The fountain is part of the list of upgrades and amenities that will likely not be addressed by the upgrades, due to the city’s level of funding to its Parks and Recreation department. Restoring public restrooms is another — mainly because the park isn’t currently a fully staffed site — leaving anyone hosting a large gathering at Lemon Hill needing to rent portable ones.

Lemon Hill Neighbors conducted its own survey asking what the legacy investments from Fan Fest should go towards. The results from the almost 450 respondents, mainly from Fairmount and Brewerytown, ranked improving pedestrian safety, bathroom restoration and long-term maintenance funding as their highest priorities.

While Cerborino was glad that the park was going to get some of its long-needed fixes and upgrades, he was frustrated how a “bare minimum” could finally be addressed for the trade-off of not having the park for most of the summer.

“If this event wasn’t at Lemon Hill, Lemon Hill wouldn’t be invested in,” he said. “This investment came because of this event. It’s not because we were asking for things.”

Cerborino said in a September open meeting that the group is still asking the city to restore water and bathroom access back to the park.

“Why have we come to expect so little of what our local government — or government in general — can and should be doing for us and for our public spaces, which are a very vital asset,” he asked.

Before Fan Fest, Eisenberg said she hoped that one result of the summer would be increased attention on Lemon Hill Neighbors after the World Cup, and that happened, to some extent.

The group was able to raise $4,000 over the summer, partially from selling t-shirts depicting a soccer ball crashing into the historic Lemon Hill mansion. That funding went towards completing a set of stairs beside the mansion, with the help of nonprofit Power Corps PHL.

Attendance at the weekly volunteer day events hasn’t changed too much, beyond the regulars, but Eisenberg said that the hot, buggy days of summer when folks would likely head down the shore aren’t a good gauge of that . An open meeting in mid-September drew close to 20 local residents, gathered at picnic tables under an old oak tree, near where the new pavilions will be. 

Joggers, dog-walkers and strollers passed by while the group worked on Saturday. A couple stopped to briefly chat with the group, including Mary Michalski. A Fairmount resident for over the past decades, she said she had noticed the flowers on her walks over the past few days. 

“I just stopped and wanted to thank them for their hard work and find out a little bit more about it,” she said. “I’m kind of new to learning about the neighborhood association that takes care of this.”

Fan Fest aftermath

Some remnants of Fan Fest have taken longer to leave the park, including a small gazebo next to Poplar Drive and temporary sidewalk ramps that may block drainage and encourage pedestrians to jaywalk across Sedgley Drive. 

Residents also reported there being some metal debris left over from the Fan Fest infrastructure. Cerborino and Eisenberg said that residents cleaned up what they came across, so the park was safe for people and pets, and the city later said Parks and Rec was using a magnetic sweeper to remove the debris.

Parker’s administration has managed to double parks and recreation’s spending per resident over its first two years, the Inquirer reported last month. Research by the Trust for Public Land shows that that’s well below the national average. 

“Parks and Rec does not get enough money to cover all of the acreage, some of the largest parkland in the Northeast quarter, and rec centers, and little memorials … and the first budget to get raided when something bad happens is Parks and Rec,” Councilmember Jones said after Monday’s ceremony. “So we’ve got to figure out how to increase our commitment from City Council, increase our commitment from the state.”

Jones highlighted that events on the scale of FIFA Fan Fest are an outlier. For every event of that scale, Parks and Rec Commissioner Susan Slawson and her team have to manage thousands of smaller ones in the community spaces across Philly’s neighborhoods.

For Lemon Hill, which has held four other events along with Fan Fest this year, two dates are still left circled on the calendar. It will host Jazz in Fairmount on Nov. 1 and then finish out the season as part of the Love Your Park Fall Weekend from Nov. 13 to 15, a time when Philadelphians can volunteer with their park friends group.

Eisenberg closed out Monday’s ceremony by encouraging people to participate in Love Your Park and, in solidarity with Parks United, called on the city’s elected officials to leave a “true lasting legacy” with long-term sustainable levels of funding for park staffing.

“It would not be without the tremendous amount of work that Parks and Rec does, and needs to succeed, to take care of our public green spaces, our athletic community centers and help to improve and maintain our environmental health, climate resilience, physical, mental, and social well-being of all Philadelphians.”

Editor’s Note: The William Penn Foundation is a WHYY supporter. WHYY News produces independent, fact-based news content for audiences in Greater Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey.