On the west side is the Wissahickon Gorge, which is also part of Fairmount Park, beyond which lies Roxborough and Manayunk.

Beyond Stenton Avenue is Cedarbrook (which is considered to be part of Mount Airy by some) and West Oak Lane.

[2] The special relationship linking the two has its roots in the time before the Act of Consolidation, when Germantown was a borough separate from the City of Philadelphia, and its rural environs were what is now Mount Airy.

[2] William Allen, a prominent Philadelphia merchant and Chief Justice of the Province of Pennsylvania, created his summer estate and mansion on Germantown Avenue at Allens Lane in 1750, and the area eventually took the building's name, Mount Airy, as its own.

[5] It was a section of the township that was allotted to a group of original Germantown settlers who acquired rights to land either directly or indirectly from William Penn.

It covered the area from Stenton to Wissahickon Avenues and from Mermaid Lane to roughly Sedgwick Street.

The name is derived from a town known today as Kriegsheim in the Palatine in Germany which was the hometown of a few German Quaker families who had settled in Germantown in the 1680s.

Throughout much of the 18th century, this area of Germantown Township was known in the land and tax records as simply Cresheim or Cresham.

An account published in 1770 states that the area received its name as a result of its first resident's begging for money to build his house, which later became the home of the Germantown Church of the Brethren.

The name for this area disappeared by the late 19th century, and it was sometimes called Pelham, Germantown, or Mount Airy.

Much of modern Mount Airy was developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, spreading out from Germantown Avenue and two railroad lines.

Large three-story, gray-stone Victorian, colonial revival, and Norman and Cotswold-style houses and mansions, with stained glass windows and slate roofs, are situated on many of the area's tree-lined streets.

[8][9] Mount Airy residents organized to resist blockbusting, panic selling, and redlining, especially during the period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s when those practices were prevalent.

The neighborhood is also served by bus routes 18, 23 (formerly a trolley line), 53 (formerly a trolley line), H, and L. In 2011, The New York Times described the influx of new businesses to Mount Airy as a "cultural revival" buoyed by "the neighborhood's reasonable housing costs and relatively safe streets.

[21] The Sedgwick Theater, notable for its art deco style, has been a cultural center in the past, and now houses the Quintessence Theatre Group.