Philadelphia helped put Earth Day on the map on this week in Philly history
On April 22, 1970, Philadelphia hosted a six-hour festival in Fairmount Park that drew 25,000 to 30,000 clean-air lovers.
The bow-tied W. Thacher Longstreth agreed to meet a few young people who wanted to celebrate Mother Earth.
In the spring of 1970, they called it Earth Day.
“I thought at first it was just a confrontation,” Longstreth, a longtime City Council member and president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, told the Daily News in 1990. “They assured me they had constructive ideas and wanted no confrontations.”
The planners of the first Earth Day quickly got the cooperation of The Establishment in Philadelphia, where it evolved into a weeklong celebration that the planners called Earth Week.
And the city made the most of it, capping off the festivities on April 22, 1970, with a six-hour festival in Fairmount Park. The finale of the weeklong event drew somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 clean-air lovers.
It was this gathering in the city its inhabitants called “Filthydelphia” that helped kick off a push for a brighter, and cleaner, future.
“It was the biggest event in the country that day, remarkable considering that there were Earth Day events in countless cities and towns and at an estimated 2,000 colleges and 10,000 high schools,” wrote a Daily News reporter.
The idea for the first official celebration of our third planet from the sun sprang from U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson.
The Wisconsin Democrat proposed his idea for a national event focused on the environment in the fall of 1969.
He had envisioned classes and teach-ins held nationwide, and mostly across college campuses, to educate the public on the power and fragility of nature.
The term Earth Day was coined later.
But in Philadelphia, those four young students at the University of Pennsylvania embraced Nelson’s idea and ran with it.
One of the largest events occurred the evening before Earth Day, when a Chestnut Street parade preceded a rally on Independence Mall, which drew 7,000 people.
And on the actual Earth Day, on a bright and clear day with temperatures hovering in the 50s, thousands in tie-dyed clothing rallied around the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
And then they paraded to Belmont Plateau for the six-hour event.
“The throngs listened to the gospel of environmental rights, they cheered, they sang some more,” according to the Daily News.
Earth Day, said poet Allen Ginsberg, was an “educational picnic.”
The best part?
The thousands of revelers picked up their trash.