Fairmount, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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These three institutions were built when Fairmount was still a rural suburban district of Philadelphia. Beginning in the 1830s, the city itself began to grow beyond its original boundaries, and a mixture of homes and factories sprang up on the district's southern fringes. The Baldwin Locomotive Works, the nation's largest maker of locomotive engines, was located on the southeastern edge of the future Fairmount neighborhood and was a major factor in development of the neighborhood south of Fairmount Avenue in the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. This part of the neighborhood, now also known as Spring Garden, was developed as housing for the middle managers of the Baldwin factory complex. The row houses were relatively large and comfortable in the conservative Philadelphia row house style of the time, although the homes at the western end of Green Street were particularly large and owned by wealthier city professionals.

North of Fairmount Avenue, homes were generally smaller, both two- and three-story working class row homes with small factories and stables mixed into neighborhood. These were built later, many in the second half of the 19th century, some as late as the 1890s when electricity came to the neighborhood. Factories in the northern end of the neighborhood included wagon works and breweries, some of which have been converted into loft-style apartments and condominiums. Irish and German immigrants and their descendents made up the most significant part of the population north of the Fairmount, and over time south of Fairmount as well. In 1839, St. Francis Xavier Church (and its elementary school in 1922) was built to serve Catholics in the community, while a variety of Protestant churches, particularly on the eastern end of the neighborhood, served a variety of denominations. During the anti-Catholic/anti-Irish riots of 1844, the church was closed, as rioting spread from Kensington westward.

Early in the 20th century, Polish and Ukrainian immigrants moved into the neighborhood where they became a significant presence in its northernmost sections. St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church, a Russian Orthodox Church, each serves those communities today. St. Hedwigs, a Roman Catholic church for Polish Catholics closed in 2005 and was demolished in February 2007.

In the 1960s and 70s, Fairmount was affected by the larger trends in Philadelphia and similar rustbelt cities. Factories closed, and poverty and crime increased during these years, as white residents moved to suburban areas, and parts of the neighborhood became predominantly African-American or Hispanic. The western end of Fairmount remained more stable than many Philadelphia neighborhoods, retaining its largely white and working class population until the real estate booms of the 1980s and 1990s, when a large number of younger professional families and singles - including many gay and lesbian households - began to move into the neighborhood, attracted by its location adjacent to Center City (downtown), the Art Museum, and Fairmount Park.

Gentrification continues in the early 21st century in both the western end of the neighborhood as well as in its now mostly African-American and Hispanic east end south of Fairmount Avenue. Long-time families make up an important but shrinking part of the neighborhoods population, and the tone of the neighborhood is increasingly that of a more cosmopolitan, downtown district. While the demographic profile of the neighborhood remains very diverse, it remains largely segregated along racial lines and by economic status.

The western end of Fairmount Avenue has seen village scale shopping and popular bars and restaurants succeed in the last 30 years, and the Penitentiary is the site each year for a Bastille Day Celebration sponsored by local businesses, in which a woman dressed as Marie Antoinette is led to the guillotine while she cries "Let them eat Tastykake!," a local Philadelphia brand of cupcake. Housing prices have increased to the point where new market-rate housing is being built for the first time in decades wherever space is available.

Neighbors have combined to beautify parts of the area, successfully converting a parcel adjacent to Eastern State into a small park and dog run. A large neighborhood community garden, the Spring Gardens, occupies the site of a former open-air drug market.

Early Fairmount incorporates the Spring Garden community, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway museum district on its periphery and borders Fairmount Park.
In 2005, service resumed on SEPTA's long-delayed Girard Avenue trolley at the northern boundary of the neighborhood. Many hope that the historic trolley will help bring more investment to the Girard Avenue corridor and the Fairmount neighborhood.

Demographics
Fairmount enjoys a multiethnic mix from all socioeconomic strata. Its southern half has become increasingly gentrified in recent years, with newcomers to the city settling in the neighborhood for its proximity to Center City.

As of the census[1] of 2000, the racial makeup of Fairmount, Spring Garden, and Francisville is 65.23% White, 24.24% African American, 3.93% Asian, and 4.09% from other races. 7.63% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.

The population of Fairmount grew by 3% between the 1990 and 2000 censuses.