Oct 6, 2026 · 9 min · 5 segments
Upper Roxborough is the last rural corner of Philadelphia, a place where forests and fields reign. Squeezed by development, how much longer can it last?
[birds chirping] John Carson's little spread at the Manatana Farm Community Garden sits off a gravel road along the Philadelphia Montgomery County line.
It's a place that looks frozen in time.
On a day this summer, the sixty-eight-year-old reclines in an Adirondack chair.
Bees and butterflies flit between black-eyed Susans he planted nearby.
On the other side of a fence, a hayfield is rejuvenating between harvests.
Between the hayfield, there's an old farmhouse and barn, then another hayfield, then the Schuylkill River, and rising beyond that, a thickly wooded hillside in Montgomery County.
Bending his tan, slender figure to fidget with a rock, Carson marvels that the city of Philadelphia still contains such a view.
Then he wonders how much time is left.
This little traveled patch of Philadelphia is so separated from city life that it doesn't even really have a name.
Whatever one calls it, the land is a swath of roughly seven hundred rural acres boxed in by a Roxborough roadway where the city's manifest destiny seems to have curled up and died.
In the late eighteen hundreds, it was intended to be the next Chestnut Hill, but the landscape littered with steep ravines proved too tricky for train lines.
In nineteen sixty-five, the hundreds of wooded acres were converted into what is now the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education.
It's one of the nation's first urban preserves of its kind and the largest privately held open space in Philadelphia.
Consult historical maps and the area looks little changed from centuries ago.
In a nineteen eighty-three Enquirer article detailing city plans to purchase and protect open space, a city planner noted that Upper Roxborough was one of the few sections of the city that had experienced population growth over the prior decade.
More than eighty acres had been lost to residential development.
"The pressures to develop Upper Roxborough have been mounting and can only get more intense," the planner said.
More recently in twenty ten came the Glen Shawmont Station, an apartment complex that added two hundred and two units on eighteen acres.
A few years later, a developer built townhomes for the first time on the western slopes of Green Tree Run, a stream running toward the Schuylkill River.
Neighbors decried the crossing of their Rubicon.
Sheila De Ambrosio, the founding president of the Residents of Shawmont Valley Association, told a reporter in twenty twelve that eventually constructions like this will destroy the whole valley.
Since then, another developer has divided up a wooded ten-acre parcel into six luxury homes.
Ask current residents whether they feel the area is at risk of development and you do get a mixed bag.
[birds chirping] John Carson's little spread at the Manatana Farm Community Garden sits off a gravel road along the Philadelphia Montgomery County line.
It's a place that looks frozen in time.
On a day this summer, the sixty-eight-year-old reclines in an Adirondack chair.
Bees and butterflies flit between black-eyed Susans he planted nearby.
On the other side of a fence, a hayfield is rejuvenating between harvests.
Between the hayfield, there's an old farmhouse and barn, then another hayfield, then the Schuylkill River, and rising beyond that, a thickly wooded hillside in Montgomery County.
Bending his tan, slender figure to fidget with a rock, Carson marvels that the city of Philadelphia still contains such a view.
Then he wonders how much time is left.
This little traveled patch of Philadelphia is so separated from city life that it doesn't even really have a name.
Whatever one calls it, the land is a swath of roughly seven hundred rural acres boxed in by a Roxborough roadway where the city's manifest destiny seems to have curled up and died.
In the late eighteen hundreds, it was intended to be the next Chestnut Hill, but the landscape littered with steep ravines proved too tricky for train lines.
In nineteen sixty-five, the hundreds of wooded acres were converted into what is now the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education.
It's one of the nation's first urban preserves of its kind and the largest privately held open space in Philadelphia.
Consult historical maps and the area looks little changed from centuries ago.
In a nineteen eighty-three Enquirer article detailing city plans to purchase and protect open space, a city planner noted that Upper Roxborough was one of the few sections of the city that had experienced population growth over the prior decade.
More than eighty acres had been lost to residential development.
"The pressures to develop Upper Roxborough have been mounting and can only get more intense," the planner said.
More recently in twenty ten came the Glen Shawmont Station, an apartment complex that added two hundred and two units on eighteen acres.
A few years later, a developer built townhomes for the first time on the western slopes of Green Tree Run, a stream running toward the Schuylkill River.
Neighbors decried the crossing of their Rubicon.
Sheila De Ambrosio, the founding president of the Residents of Shawmont Valley Association, told a reporter in twenty twelve that eventually constructions like this will destroy the whole valley.
Since then, another developer has divided up a wooded ten-acre parcel into six luxury homes.
Ask current residents whether they feel the area is at risk of development and you do get a mixed bag.
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