The terraced rain gardens of Cliveden Park in fall (top) and spring. The structures provide beautiful landscaping while managing stormwater from nearby streets and protecting local streams. Philadelphia Water
Join Philadelphia Water next Saturday, May 14, at Cliveden Park, located at Chew Ave. and E. Johnson Street in Mt. Airy, from 9 a.m. to noon for a special Love Your Park Week event with the Friends of Cliveden and Fairmount Water Works educators.
We will be cleaning up this gorgeous public space and showing off Cliveden’s amazing green stormwater infrastructure(Sorry, this content is no longer available) with a tour exploring how water flows through the park’s unique terraced rain gardens, nourishing the native plants and soaking naturally into the ground instead of overwhelming Mt. Airy’s sewers.
The event is part of our ongoing 5 Down celebrations highlighting the thousands of new green stormwater tools added to Philadelphia neighborhoods through public and private investment during the first five years of the 25-year Green City, Clean Waters program. Working together, the green infrastructure tools now found at hundreds of sites across the city help to keep over 600 million gallons of polluted water out of our rivers and streams each year.
How big is 600 million gallons? Try to imagine every single one of Philadelphia’s 1.5 million people, all carrying 400 one-gallon buckets—that’s how much pollution Green City, Clean Waters investments will keep out of our waterways this year! You can get a look at all the green infrastructure created in Philadelphia since Green City, Clean Waters launched in 2011 by visiting our Big Green Map.
This 5 Down event is a way of thanking partners (like the Friends of Cliveden Park!) who made it possible for us to surpass our 2016 pollution-reduction targets (Sorry, this content is no longer available). Those goals were defined in an agreement between the City and the Environmental Protection Agency to eliminate 85 percent of our stormwater pollution volume by 2036.
In addition to the rain garden tour and cleanup, we will have fun rain drop cards that let you tell your piece of the Green City, Clean Waters story.
For more information about the event, contact Tiffany Ledesma at Tiffany.Ledesma@phila.gov
We hope you’ll join us to celebrate five years of cleaner water through greener neighborhoods and to learn more about what we have planned for the next 20 years of Green City, Clean Waters!
