Fairmount Park, according to a recent study, is worth $1.9 billion a year in income, services and taxes.

For 9,200 acres, that's dirt cheap.

"I would submit," Mayor Nutter said Monday, "that a well-run, properly funded and focused park system is priceless," though in the recent past none of these conditions has applied.

On Tuesday, City Council took a giant leap toward achieving those edenic goals, recommending a vital November ballot initiative. If passed, the measure would fuse the Department of Recreation with Fairmount Park while removing the Court of Common Pleas - mired as it is in patronage and cronyism - from the trail-and-bench business.

In major cities everywhere, green space is controlled by the government. In Philadelphia, a place where change has long been anathema, the Court of Common Pleas Board of Judges has been selecting park commissioners since the Johnson administration.

The Andrew Johnson administration.

"What do they say about sausage and legislation?" Council's James F. Kenney quipped. That you never want to see how either gets made.

The quote is attributed to Count Otto von Bismarck, and it's fitting, since he was ruling Germany when the Fairmount Park Commission was established to protect the city's drinking water.

Seven years

"If I'd known how long it would take," said cosponsor Councilman Darrell L. Clarke, "I may not have gotten involved."

Clarke served on the Fairmount Park Commission as a government appointee. But it wasn't for him. He quit after five years.

"I love the park. I grew up across the street from the park. I have enormous respect for Fitz Dixon and Ernesta Ballard," he said of the former commissioners, grand philanthropists, both now gone. "But I wanted to see a commission that was more inclusive of the city, that reflected more diversity."

To put the city's green in black and white, the split was generally along class and even racial lines.

The Rec Department was working-class black and white, while the Fairmount Park Commission was predominantly elite, the sort of people who eschew rec centers for cricket clubs.

Much of the park system decayed as staff and funding were whittled down to kindling, in part by government indifference to a department removed from its control.

Clarke was respectful of the gentle park commissioners, Robert N.C. Nix III, son of the former state Supreme Court judge, and Philip Price Jr., a fourth-generation member whose great-grandfather served on the original board. It was an elegiac, touching moment, like watching a walking stick pass from the old guard to the new.

A greener hue

With this merger, and a shared vision, every field stands to benefit. The rec centers present an oasis of potential, an opportunity for leadership to attract talent and resources to make Philadelphia a better, safer place to be a child. How great it would be if the names that now embellish our cultural institutions funded the playgrounds and parks, too. The Lenfests can't do it all.

We've got the funding, the focus. For leadership, Nutter and Council could do no better than to tap Mike DeBerardinis, now in Harrisburg, to head the newly empowered, enriched department, given how ably he served as rec commissioner under Mayor Ed Rendell.

So City Hall has tended to William Penn's vision of a green country town. How about a new day for our other antediluvian institutions? May we suggest the courts?