History

Settling In

In the 1640s, a tiny group of Swedish settlers first established a foothold in the area that would become Philadelphia. (You can see two models of the ships that brought them over in Gloria Dei Church.) Although justly credited with the creation of the city, William Penn was not the region's European discoverer. Instead, Penn owes his status to his father, an admiral and a courtier under Charles II of England. The king was in debt to Admiral Penn, and the younger Penn asked to collect the debt through a land grant on the west bank of the Delaware River, a grant that would eventually be named Pennsylvania, or "Penn's forest." Penn's Quaker religion, his anti-Anglicanism, and his contempt for authority had landed him in prison, and the chance for him to set up a Quaker utopia in the New World was too good to pass up. Since Swedish farmers owned most of the lower Delaware frontage, he settled upriver, where the Schuylkill meets the Delaware, and named the settlement Philadelphia -- City of Brotherly Love.

A City Is Born

Penn's original city plan still adequately describes Center City, down to the public parks, tree-lined streets, and the site for City Hall. Penn, who had learned the dangers of narrow streets and semidetached wooden buildings from London's terrible 1666 fire, laid out the city along broad avenues and city blocks arranged in a grid. As he intended to treat Native Americans -- members of the Lenape tribe were among his friends -- and fellow settlers equally, he planned no city walls or neighborhood borders. Front Street faced the Delaware, as it still does, and parallel streets were numbered up to 24th Street and the Schuylkill. Streets running east to west were named after trees and plants (although Sassafras became Race St., for the horse-and-buggy contests run along it). To attract prospective investors, Penn promised bonus land grants in the "Liberties" (outlying countryside) to anyone who bought a city lot; he took one of the largest for himself, now Pennsbury Manor (26 miles north of town). The Colonies were in the business of attracting settlers in those days, and Penn found that he had to wear a variety of hats -- those of financier, politician, religious leader, salesman, and manufacturer.

Homes and public buildings filled in the map slowly. The Colonial row houses of Society Hill and Elfreth's Alley (continuously inhabited since the 1690s) near the Delaware docks were the earliest homes. Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence almost a century later in 1776, could still say of his boardinghouse on 7th and Market that it was away from the city's noise and dirt!

Ben Franklin, Busybodies & a Nation's Birth

One man who will always be linked with Philadelphia is the multitalented, insatiably curious Benjamin Franklin. Inventor, printer, statesman, scientist, and diplomat, Franklin was an all-around genius. It sometimes seems that his influence infiltrates every aspect of the city worth exploring. Colonial homes were protected by his fire-insurance company; the post office at 3rd and Market streets became his grandson's printing shop; and the Free Library of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce streets, the American Philosophical Society, and "busybodies," curious double-mirrored contraptions affixed to the fronts of row houses near upper-floor windows (which allow occupants to see who's at the door) all came into being thanks to Franklin's inspiration.

Like most important Philadelphians, Franklin considered himself a loyal British subject until well into the 1770s, though he and the other colonists were increasingly subject to what they considered capricious English policy. Colonists here weren't as radical as those in New England, but tremendous political debate erupted after Lexington and Concord and the meeting of the First and Second Continental Congresses. Moderates -- wealthy citizens with friends and relatives in England -- held out as long as they could. But with the April 1776 decision in Independence Hall to consider drafting a declaration of independence, revolutionary fervor gained a momentum that would become unstoppable.

"These are the times that try men's souls," wrote Thomas Paine, and they certainly were for Philadelphians, who had much to lose in a war with Britain. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams talked over the situation with George Washington, Robert Morris, and other delegates at City Tavern by night and at Carpenters' Hall and Independence Hall by day. On July 2, the general Congress passed their declaration; on July 8, it was read to a crowd of 8,000, who tumultuously approved.

Your visit to Independence National Historical Park will fill you in on the Revolution's effect on the City of Brotherly Love. Of the major Colonial cities, Philadelphia had the fewest defenses. The war came to the city itself because British troops occupied patriot homes during the harsh winter of 1777 to 1778. Woodford, a country mansion in what is now Fairmount Park, was hosting Tory balls while Washington's troops drilled and shivered at Valley Forge. Washington's attempt to crack the British line at Germantown ended in a confused retreat. The city later greatly benefited from the British departure and the Peace of Paris (1783), which ended the war.

Problems with the new federal government brought a Constitutional Convention to Philadelphia in 1787. This body crafted the Constitution that the United States still follows. In the years between the ratification of the Constitution and the Civil War, the city prospered. For 10 of these years, 1790 to 1800, the U.S. government operated here while the District of Columbia was still marshland. George Washington lived in an executive mansion where the Liberty Bell is now; the Supreme Court met in Old City Hall; Congress met in Congress Hall; and everybody met at City Tavern for balls and festivals.

A Growing Global Center

Around 1800, the city spread west to Broad Street. Philadelphia grew along the river -- not west as Penn had planned. Southwark, to the south, and the Northern Liberties, to the north, housed the less affluent, including many sailors. These were Philadelphia's first slums -- unpaved, without public services, filled with taverns set up in unofficial alleys, and populated by those without enough property or money to satisfy voting requirements.

Nonetheless, the quality of life was considered high. The resources of Franklin's Library Company became available to the public. Both men and women received "modern" educations, with more emphasis on accounting and less on classics. The 1834 Free School Act established a democratic public school system. Private academies, such as the William Penn Charter School, Episcopal Academy, Germantown Friends School, and Friends Select, are still going strong today.

Culture flourished: In 1805, painter and naturalist Charles Willson Peale and some contemporaries founded the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (now housed in a glorious Frank Furness building at Broad and Cherry sts.), the first American museum, with exhibits that included a portrait gallery and the first lifelike arrangements of taxidermy animals. The Walnut Street Theater was founded in 1809 and is the oldest American theater in continuous use. The Musical Fund Hall at 808 Locust (now apartments) hosted operas, symphony orchestras, and chamber ensembles.

Manufacturing, financial services, excellent docking facilities, and fine Pennsylvania farm produce soon gave status to Philadelphia, the first city of the Colonies. It was the largest English-speaking city in the British Empire after London. Colonial Philadelphia was a thriving city in virtually every way, boasting public hospitals and streetlights, cultural institutions and newspapers, stately Georgian architecture, imported tea and cloth, and, above all, commerce. The "triangle trade" shipping route between England, the Caribbean, and Philadelphia yielded estimated profits of 700% on each leg.

After the capital moved to Washington, Philadelphia retained the federal charter to mint money, build ships, and produce weapons. The city's shipyards, ironworks, and locomotive works fueled the transportation revolution that made America's growth possible. Philadelphia vied with Baltimore and New York City for transport routes to agricultural production inland. New York eventually won out as a shipper, thanks to its natural harbor and the Erie Canal. Philadelphia, however, was the hands-down winner in becoming America's premier manufacturing city, and it ranked even with New York in finance. During the Civil War, Philadelphia's manufacturers weren't above supplying both Yankees and Confederates with guns and rail equipment. Fortunately for Philadelphians, the Southern offensive met with bloody defeat at Gettysburg before reaching the city. With the end of the Civil War in 1865, port activity rebounded, as Southern cotton was spun and shipped from city textile looms.

University City in West Philadelphia saw the establishment of campuses for Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania, and public transport lines connected all the neighborhoods of the city.

Philadelphia became the natural site for the first world's fair held on American soil: the Centennial Exposition of 1876. It's hard to imagine the excitement that filled Fairmount Park, with 200 pavilions and displays. There's a scale model downstairs in Memorial Hall -- now better known as the Please Touch Museum -- one of the few surviving structures in the park; it gives a good idea of how seriously the United States took this show of power and prestige.

Into the 20th Century

The turn of the last century marked Philadelphia's most prominent times. From 1901 to 1908, City Hall was the tallest habitable building in the world. Around it, other major buildings grew. Even today, the cornerstones of the massive buildings along Broad Street testify to the city's turn-of-the-20th-century success in the banking industry. Still, for all its rising marble monuments to all things monetary, post-wartime Philadelphia became known for its public corruption and all-around acceptance of the way things were. Politics descended into an ugly business; Prohibition was flagrantly ignored; the mob rose to power, and, once the Depression hit, those banks closed in spades. It wasn't surprising that if you lived in the city around then, you were probably trying to move out.

Still, it wasn't all bad news. In the first half of the 20th century, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened, the Ben Franklin Bridge connected the city to New Jersey, subway lines first ran, and the skyline welcomed some of the world's most innovative skyscrapers, including the still-striking, International-style PSFS Building, now the Loews Philadelphia Hotel. Even the New Deal had some of its best dealings in the city; FDR's Works Progress Administration provided 40,000 jobs to Philadelphians.

World War II affected Philadelphia as it did much of America: Residents planted victory gardens, allowed their sons to enlist, met war bond quotas, and gave jobs to women and African Americans -- many of whom lost those same jobs when the war ended.

Still, the city itself remained deeply mired in corruption until the 1950s, when a pair of reform-minded mayors, Joseph S. Clark and Richardson Dilworth, helped draft a new city charter that, at least temporarily, cleaned up the dirty dealings in and around City Hall. Today, you can still see the facade of Dilworth's simple Colonial house on the eastern edge of Washington Square Park, and the area in front of City Hall is known as Dilworth Plaza.

The tumult of the '60s and '70s manifested as marches and sit-ins in universities and colleges. The city became a hotbed of racial tension, playing host to riots in a prison as well as a neighborhood. In 1971, the city elected a hardscrabble former police chief as mayor, a controversial figure who came down with an iron fist on gang warfare, but divided the city with fiscal mismanagement and take-no-prisoners diplomacy. Later, under the nation's first African-American mayor, Philadelphia seemed beyond repair: In 1985, Mayor Wilson Goode gave the go-ahead to bomb the home of MOVE, a radical black roots group. Eleven members of the group (including four children) died. Sixty-two neighboring houses were destroyed. And the city's infamy reached an all-time low.

Luckily, things seemed to turn around with the next mayor, an outsider who wiped away the deficit with investment, and glad-handed his way into the hearts of all manner of Philadelphians.