Plan to create horse stables in Fairmount Park could provide base for city’s iconic urban cowboys

Philadelphia City Council has taken the first step toward putting horse stables in East Fairmount Park that could serve as a much-needed base for at least some of the city’s iconic urban riders, the focus of the fictionalized 2021 Netflix film Concrete Cowboy.

Though formal plans are still months away, Council introduced an ordinance Thursday that would allow animal husbandry on a several-acre wedge of land off Reservoir Drive between Sedgley Woods and Kelly Drive that officials are eying for the “Stables at the Cliffs.” The ordinance is necessary to allow for care and stabling of horses.

However, details are few.

“We don’t have much information to share at this point, as funding from Council District 5 is still pending and we don’t have a schedule for the project,” Charlotte Merrick, a spokeswoman for Parks and Rec, said in an email.

The ordinance was introduced by Council President Darrell L. Clarke. It needs a public hearing before being adopted and before any structures can be built for the stables.

Joe Grace, a spokesman for Clarke, said there is no timetable for the hearing, and he expects “we’re still a good three to six months away before work can be completed and the horses can be moved” from their current temporary stables on Fletcher Street.

Grace said Clarke’s office worked with Ellis Ferrell, now in his 80s, who started the nonprofit Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club in 2004, to find a suitable location. The club’s mission is to provide an alternative outdoor activity for youth while “teaching life skills, instilling discipline and promoting academic excellence.”

Ellis could not be reached immediately for comment.

“We think it’s an important thing for the community,” Grace said.

The Wynnewood-based Philadelphia Urban Riding Academy is another nonprofit with goals similar to the Fletcher Street Club and was founded in 2019 to teach youth equestrian skills. It is raising funds for permanent stables with the help of the Concrete Cowboy producers.

Both groups, and other riders, continue to make use of makeshift stables in Strawberry Mansion.

However, the groups are separate, and the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club has expressed concern in the past that Concrete Cowboy viewers might think the film was based on the club and might hurt its own fund-raising efforts. The film is a fictionalized look at the urban cowboys, sometimes referred to as the city’s Black cowboys.

Regardless, the stables would signify a commitment by the city to preserve a unique slice of Philly history that stretches back a hundred years of urban cowboys who began stabling horses and riding city streets after migrating from the South. Many of the migrants continued to use horse-drawn wagons for work or were already accomplished cowboys or riders.

They continued the tradition of riding through the decades.

The riders eventually established a sort of base on a vacant city-owned lot on Fletcher Street near 26th in Strawberry Mansion and on the fringes of Fairmount Park. But the city needed the land for senior housing, and animal welfare officials complained about conditions at the stables, which were razed in 2008.

Remaining stables are squeezed into a smaller slice of land.

The city would continue to own the land that would house the stables in Fairmount Park. But any financial agreement with Ellis’s group or other urban riders, as well as whether the public would have access, remains unclear.