Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia

In the decades after American independence, the atmosphere of liberty in Philadelphia spawned an artistic spirit that earned this city its reputation as the Athens of America.  Here, enthusiasm for the arts grew with the same fervor and in the same houses, streets, and shops where the seeds of political freedom had been sown and ⇒ Read More

When naming a newborn, you feel the weight of the decision, the fond hope that the right name might provide a push along a hoped-for path. Even as names seek to nudge destiny, sometimes they merely set up irony: Faith, the fiery atheist; Victor, the embittered failure. We can’t know all the thoughts that coursed ⇒ Read More

The Convention and Visitors Bureau touts Philadelphia as “a city of firsts.” The Independence Hall Association lists five pages of “Philadelphia Firsts” on its website.  A walking tour of the city links “Philadelphia Firsts” to its home page. George Morgan may have been the first to title a book on Philadelphia The City of Firsts, ⇒ Read More

In the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia developed dual personalities.  While industry intensified, making the city a hard-driving, muscular “workshop of the world,” by the 1880s civic boosters also promoted Philadelphia’s more domestic qualities as a “city of homes.” Philadelphians’ pride in home ownership had deep roots in the founding and growth of the city. But ⇒ Read More

In 1843, a student at the “med school of the University of Pennsylvania,” as he called it in a letter to a friend in Boston, declared Philadelphia “decidedly the city of the Union for doctors, the facilities for study making it a perfect little Paris.” The comparison reflected the renown of the French capital at ⇒ Read More

William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia, grew up in the Tower Hill section of London, one of the many storied neighborhoods in the capital of England. Before Penn set foot on the Delaware River shoreline in October 1682, he lived in a number of European cities including Paris, Dublin, and Amsterdam. Each of those centuries-old ⇒ Read More

In July 1903, at the height of the period of reform we have come to call the Progressive Era, crusading journalist Lincoln Steffens published the fifth in a series of articles exposing municipal corruption in the United States. His subject was Philadelphia, and to his mind it was worse than any other place he had ⇒ Read More

Philadelphians snort at the idea that a building in Boston—Faneuil Hall, a marketplace and meeting place–should presume to be called “the cradle of liberty” just because James Otis gave a fiery anti-British speech there in 1761. How can that compare to a city where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States were ⇒ Read More

Civic boosters in the late nineteenth century adopted “Greater Philadelphia” as a phrase denoting aspirations for progress as well as way of describing the region including Philadelphia and extending beyond its boundaries. For more than a century since, numerous businesses and other organizations, including The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, have signaled their regional scope by ⇒ Read More

How often have you heard people proudly call Philadelphia a “greene country towne,” quoting William Penn’s evocative description of the city he founded?  Along with “city of brotherly love” – another catchy Penn coinage – the phrase ranks as the granddaddy of all municipal brands, pre-dating “Big Apple” and “Big Easy” by almost three centuries. ⇒ Read More

What might you do if you found yourself with almost 50,000 square miles of seemingly virgin land in a place you have never seen, far from home? In 1681, when William Penn – entrepreneur, scholar, religious mystic, Enlightenment intellectual – acquired Pennsylvania, he had a ready answer. Primed with forward-looking ideas about equality and shared ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia’s central role in the birth of a new nation is not to be underestimated. But the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence, the work of the Continental Congress, and the writing of the Constitution in the city have tended to overshadow the ways in which the Philadelphia region’s entire story is in many ways ⇒ Read More

From its origins as a series of settlements at the edge of the Atlantic World to the age of international air travel, Greater Philadelphia has been a crossroads of global interaction and exchange. With a diverse population from the start, inhabited by Native Americans and then colonized by Dutch, Swedes, Englishmen, Germans, and Africans, the ⇒ Read More

What does it mean if a place loves you back? That was the question posed by the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC) when it chose the slogan “The Place That Loves You Back” to promote the Philadelphia region as a tourist destination in its 1997 advertising campaign. This was of course not the city’s ⇒ Read More

William Penn (1644-1718), the founder and proprietor of Pennsylvania, had high hopes for Philadelphia. He wanted the city to become the economic and moral hub and showpiece of the nearly 50,000 square miles that he had been granted as Pennsylvania (Penn’s Woods). Penn outlined his radical notion when he advertised the city for settlement in ⇒ Read More

How will they know? How will future generations of Philadelphians have any inkling that their city once thrived as a premier manufacturing center, the fine products issuing from its shops, mills, and plants prized by customers around the nation and the world? There are few traces left of this history—abandoned factory buildings here and there—and ⇒ Read More