On March 26, 1928, twenty second-floor galleries in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's new Fairmount building opened to the public, even though much of the interior was still unfinished. The event marked the public arrival of the museum's monumental Parkway home, a project shaped by Horace Trumbauer's office, Zantzinger, Borie and Medary, Howell Lewis Shay, and Julian Abele. The galleries initially presented English and American art, turning an institution rooted in the 1876 Centennial Exposition into one of the United States' major encyclopedic art museums. The opening also fixed the museum's civic identity at the head of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where architecture, collection-building, and public urban planning converged in a single landmark.
The opening anchored Philadelphia's art museum on the Parkway and set the stage for its national stature.