In Fairmount Park, Philadelphia’s largest municipal park, there’s something askew. It’s the Old Falls Road Trolley Bridge, today known as the Skew Arch Bridge, which consists of 14 brick ribs, each set at a 30-degree angle. Built in the late 1800s, the stone-clad bridge originally allowed the park’s trolley line to run beneath it, where the skewed ribs form a corkscrew-like tunnel. After the city decommissioned the trolley route in 1947, the bridge received little attention until the past couple of years, when Fairmount Park Conservancy started a multiphase effort to restore it.

“The bridge [was] mostly suffering from deferred maintenance,” says Tara Rasheed, senior director of capital projects at the conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to improving Philadelphia’s parks. Decades of water infiltration had destabilized the bricks, and roots from vegetation on top of the bridge had damaged parts of the structure. The team removed some of the vegetation, with help from volunteers; sourced salvaged bricks to replace those that were missing; and repointed the mortar in the areas that needed it most. After completing phase one of the project in late 2024, Fairmount Park Conservancy is now fundraising to conduct further restoration, which will entail a deep repointing with lime mortar. The bridge is a key landmark on the Trolley Trail, a 4-mile loop through Fairmount Park that follows portions of the original route and contains interpretive signage about the trolley’s history.