Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia

Contents » Transportation

Admiral Wilson Boulevard

Admiral Wilson Boulevard, a two-and-a-half-mile section of U.S. Route 30 extending from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Camden to the Route 70 overpass in Pennsauken, was the first “auto strip” in the United States. Originally named Bridge Approach Boulevard when it opened in 1926, it was renamed in 1929 to honor Rear Admiral Henry Braid ⇒ Read More

Airports

Commercial aviation grew dramatically in the United States in the twentieth century, and a number of airports in the Philadelphia area grew to become regional centers of the industry. There was nothing assured or inevitable about this growth, however. It depended on the efforts of local political leaders, investments by the aviation companies, and state ⇒ Read More

Automobile Racing

Motorsports developed into a popular leisure activity in the Philadelphia area during the twentieth century. Originally an activity enjoyed by wealthy car owners, the advent of the Model T Ford allowed local technophiles to build their own race cars and compete in regional races. By mid-century, drivers raced at fairground horse tracks and purpose-built speedways ⇒ Read More

Automobiles

Since appearing in the 1890s, automobiles have in many ways shaped Greater Philadelphia’s history and geography. Initially a luxury item and later available on a massive scale, cars, while enhancing mobility, required billions of dollars in infrastructure, reordered the landscape of every town and city, and made indelible marks on the region’s architecture, culture, and ⇒ Read More

Automotive Manufacturing

Once a mainstay of Greater Philadelphia’s industrial might and a reflection of the socioeconomic transformations of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the manufacturing of automobiles and related components provided mobility for millions, jobs for many thousands, and lifeblood for towns and cities. First appearing in the 1900s, flourishing during the interwar and postwar periods, ⇒ Read More

Bicycles

Since the nineteenth century, bicycles have enamored the American public as tools of transportation, sport, exercise, and joy. The Philadelphia area has been intimately connected with the development of the two-wheeled, human-powered machine from its early appearance in North America to the adoption of bike-share programs and the blazing of interstate trail networks in the ⇒ Read More

Blue Route

Famous for the many protracted conflicts that delayed its full construction for decades, Pennsylvania’s Mid-County Expressway, also referred to as the Veterans Memorial Highway and, more commonly, the “Blue Route,” is the southernmost section of Interstate 476. The expressway stretches through southern Montgomery and Delaware Counties, linking the Pennsylvania Turnpike interchange at Plymouth Meeting with ⇒ Read More

Broad Street

“No other street in America quite compares with Broad Street,” wrote E. Digby Baltzell, author of Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, of the varied architecture north and south of City Hall. Philadelphia’s Broad Street goes past stores, churches, synagogues, museums, funeral parlors, fast food places, gas stations, apartment houses, and rows and rows of row ⇒ Read More

Buses

Beginning in the 1920s, the Philadelphia region’s independent transit companies added motorized buses (autobuses) to their networks. Superior in comfort to the horse-drawn omnibuses of the nineteenth century and with more range and versatility than electric trolleys, autobuses offered passengers easier means to traverse the metropolitan area. Prior to the internal combustion engine, mass transit ⇒ Read More

Canals

Canals transformed the economic and geographic scope of Greater Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century. By providing a cheap and reliable mechanism for shipping goods, these complex technological systems funneled the products of broad hinterland regions to the Quaker City. Although canals delivered a wide variety of goods including farm products, lumber, ⇒ Read More

Commuter Trains

Commuter trains have helped to shape and define Philadelphia and its region since their introduction in 1832. The trains influenced suburban development and shaped Center City. For most of this period, the trains charged higher fares than other forms of public transit and remained a largely middle-class means of transport. Commuter trains connected middle-class homes ⇒ Read More

Crosstown Expressway

The Crosstown Expressway, a proposed limited-access highway on the southern edge of Center City, became the subject of prolonged controversy during the 1960s and 1970s as redevelopment schemes met with neighborhood resistance. The envisioned highway first appeared in redevelopment plans for Center City during the 1940s and came to play a role in regional traffic ⇒ Read More

Cycling (Sport)

The Philadelphia area’s connections to the sport of cycling have spanned nearly 200 years, reflecting its rise, decline, and resurgence in the United States. The region’s history of road, track, and all-terrain races began before the invention of the modern “bicycle” and continued into the twenty-first century with new variations of the sport and the ⇒ Read More

Delaware Avenue (Columbus Boulevard)

Delaware Avenue, the north-south thoroughfare closest to the Delaware River in Philadelphia, owes its existence to the richest man in America, who wanted a grand avenue along the central waterfront. The street, including a portion renamed Columbus Boulevard in the 1990s, played a significant role in the development of Philadelphia’s maritime activity, particularly food distribution ⇒ Read More

Delaware River Port Authority

The Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) was created nearly one hundred years ago as a bi-state commission for the purpose of building a single toll bridge. By the 1930s regional leaders had started to envision a larger maritime role for their new agency, but efforts to broaden its powers to include port operations were repeatedly ⇒ Read More

Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) was founded in 1965 to coordinate planning activities within a nine-county area, which included Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, and Delaware Counties in Pennsylvania and Camden, Burlington, Gloucester, and Mercer Counties in New Jersey. In the decades since its founding, DVRPC has worked to foster economic development, direct transportation projects, ⇒ Read More

Ferries

Long before bridges, trestles, and elevated expressways, the people and products of Greater Philadelphia required a network of ferries to traverse the region’s numerous waterways. Once ubiquitous on the area’s rivers, ferries were economic necessities that were phased out over time as industry changed and transportation improved. Until the advent of steam and internal combustion ⇒ Read More

Gallery at Market East

Following the birth and success of suburban shopping malls, the Gallery at Market East was Philadelphia’s attempt to revitalize the city’s deteriorating retail environment in order to lure suburban shoppers back to Center City.  In an effort to emulate the popular suburban shopping experience, Philadelphia urban planners created an enclosed, multistory shopping center and attempted ⇒ Read More

Gas Stations

The widespread adoption of the passenger automobile during the twentieth century altered the physical landscape of Greater Philadelphia and the United States. By the late 1910s, gas stations began to serve Philadelphia drivers seeking fuel for occupational and recreational travel. Since consumers could not visually determine the quality of gasoline, petroleum companies distinguished themselves from ⇒ Read More

General Strike of 1910

On March 5, 1910, between 60,000 and 75,000 workers complied with the Central Federated Union’s call for a general strike in solidarity with the striking streetcar workers employed by Philadelphia’s Rapid Transit Company (RTC). Business and political elites feared that the strike would spread to other parts of Pennsylvania and to cities where workers had ⇒ Read More

Helicopters

From barns and airfields throughout the Delaware Valley, during the twentieth century innovative individuals and local companies made greater Philadelphia the nation’s cradle of rotary-wing aviation.  They successfully launched autogiros, gyroplanes, and helicopters, and the Boeing Company paired with Bell Helicopters in Buffalo, New York, to produce the world’s first production tilt-rotor aircraft, the V-22 ⇒ Read More

Hog Island

Hog Island, at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, exemplifies many broad trends in the environmental history of the region.  Once improved for agriculture, the natural landscape ultimately deteriorated through overexploitation, leading to its conversion for industrial, commercial, and other forms of development.  No longer productive in the early twentieth century, the island ⇒ Read More

Horses

Horses played a critical role in Philadelphia’s growth and development as an industrial city, but over time their role as prime movers gradually diminished, and after the mid-twentieth century their role was primarily recreational. Although horses have become associated with the countryside or the American West, American cities had large, concentrated populations of horses well ⇒ Read More

I-95

Interstate 95—known as the Delaware Expressway in the Philadelphia area—is one of the region’s key transportation conduits. Running alongside the western bank of the Delaware River, it links central Philadelphia with Mercer County in New Jersey and Bucks and Delaware Counties in Pennsylvania. Conceived and built in an era when planners promoted automobile traffic above ⇒ Read More

Lincoln Drive

The 4.1 miles of Lincoln Drive that link Philadelphia’s northwest neighborhoods to Center City was built in three distinct segments over the course of five decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At its south end, a winding mid-nineteenth-century section along the Wissahickon Creek was originally constructed to provide access to water-powered industrial ⇒ Read More

Locomotive Manufacturing

For over one hundred and twenty years, railway locomotives were built in Greater Philadelphia. From the pioneering manufacturers of steam locomotives in the Spring Garden section of the city in the 1830s to the sprawling plant of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Delaware County in the twentieth century, the products, the companies, and the buildings ⇒ Read More

Maps and Mapmaking

As the country’s largest city, and for a time capital of the new nation, Philadelphia was well situated to chart the young republic’s changing geography. Using its capacity to attract all the manufacturing elements necessary for successful publishing—printers binders, colorists, engravers and others—Philadelphia became the home of the nation’s first full-time geographical publisher and soon ⇒ Read More

Market Street

Market Street, one of Philadelphia’s primary east-west thoroughfares, originated in the 1682 city plan devised by William Penn (1644-1718) and Thomas Holme (1624-95) as High Street, one hundred feet wide and located at the longitudinal center of the city. Penn’s knowledge of plague and a devastating conflagration in 1660s London prompted the width of the ⇒ Read More

Omnibuses

One of the earliest forms of public transportation in Philadelphia (and its early suburbs prior to the 1854 consolidation of the city with the county) was the horse-drawn omnibus introduced in 1831. The omnibus, together with the railroad, created the first urban commuters and it effectively became the model for all future street-based public transportation ⇒ Read More

PATCO

The Port Authority Transit Corporation (PATCO) Speedline combined two sets of underutilized transit infrastructure to create a groundbreaking model for regional passenger transportation when it opened in 1969. It was one of Greater Philadelphia’s major public transportation successes of the mid twentieth century. In the early twentieth-first century, however, PATCO struggled to maintain both the ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) Strike

The Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) strike, a five-day stoppage of the city’s mass transit system during World War II, resulted from longstanding racial animosities. Preceded by years of protest and ending only after the dispatching of federal troops, the strike exposed the dangers of workplace discrimination while threatening the material output of the nation’s third-largest ⇒ Read More

Pipelines

Reaching hundreds of miles to the Philadelphia area from western Pennsylvania, pipelines carrying oil and gas were critical to Philadelphia’s emergence as an industrial power and linked the fates of suppliers and consumers for more than 160 years. The development of the pipelines, marked by both challenge and innovation, supplied energy for residential and business ⇒ Read More

Public Transportation

For more than three centuries public transportation has helped both to shape and define the Greater Philadelphia region. Befitting one of the world’s largest cities, Philadelphia and its hinterland have been served by a bewildering array of transportation options, and these vehicles and routes have helped to define the extent of the region. Public transportation ⇒ Read More

Railroad Stations

Railroad stations in Greater Philadelphia evolved with the railway industry into a wide variety of forms and functions. For most passengers and casual observers, railroad stations are buildings, but for the railways, these locations are also key operating points for loading and unloading passengers and freight. The vast majority of railroad stations in the Philadelphia ⇒ Read More

Railroad Strike of 1877

The first nationwide strike in the United States occurred in the summer of 1877 as rail workers and their supporters throughout the nation protested conditions under corporate control. While Philadelphia largely escaped the turmoil that erupted in other cities as authorities worked vigorously to quash labor opposition, the city’s National Guard regiment nonetheless became entangled ⇒ Read More

Railroads

The history of the railroad industry in the United States and the growth of the Greater Philadelphia region are inextricably linked. Philadelphia money and engineering built the national network and, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, railroads helped make and maintain Philadelphia as a “Workshop of the World,” ⇒ Read More

Red Arrow Lines

The Red Arrow Lines of the Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Company (1936-70) became a national model and local brand of marketable mass transit in the 1950s, when few private companies still built, managed, owned, and operated suburban public transportation services, let alone profited from them. At a time when motor-vehicle commuting forced most transit proprietors into ⇒ Read More

Roosevelt Boulevard

Snaking its way through parts of North and Northeast Philadelphia, the Roosevelt Boulevard, formally known as the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Boulevard, has become one of the most heavily traveled thoroughfares in the Philadelphia metropolitan region. Initially conceived amid political maelstroms during the “corrupt and contented” phase of Progressive Era Philadelphia, “the Boulevard,” as it became ⇒ Read More

Schuylkill Expressway

Fully opened for traffic November 25, 1958, Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Expressway was gridlocked from the first day of its operation. Envisioned by city planners as a panacea for economy-suffocating urban traffic congestion, but built on flawed engineering assumptions about traffic flows, the expressway ignored any concern for postwar social and regional realities.  Rather than being acclaimed, ⇒ Read More

Schuylkill Navigation Company

While eighteenth-century Philadelphians looked almost exclusively to the east and the Delaware River to connect them to the wider world, by the turn of the nineteenth century they looked increasingly to the Schuylkill River and the west. After several failed attempts to fund improvements that would make the rapid-filled Schuylkill River navigable in the 1780s ⇒ Read More

SEPTA

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (better known by its acronym SEPTA) is a state authority charged with funding and operating public transportation in the city of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania counties of Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery. Created in 1963, SEPTA often struggled with management issues, employee morale, strikes, aging equipment, inadequate funding, and poor public ⇒ Read More

Shipbuilding and Shipyards

Perhaps no business, industry, or institution illuminates the history of the Greater Philadelphia region from the seventeenth century to the present day more clearly than shipbuilding and shipyards. This may seem surprising since Philadelphia and nearby Delaware riverfront ports lie one hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean up an often treacherous Delaware Bay and river ⇒ Read More

Sprawl

Despite Philadelphia’s twenty-first century resurgence as the urban center of a vital multistate region, the city’s revival did not stem the tide of outward expansion in a largely uncontrolled pattern known popularly as “sprawl.” The steepest population growth in the region continued to occur in the newer suburbs and rural locales, in a low-density and ⇒ Read More

Streetcar Suburbs

Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s growing streetcar network facilitated the movement of upper and middle class Philadelphians to residential districts outside of the urban core. New streetcar-centric suburban developments combined the allure of pastoral living with fast access to work and commerce in central Philadelphia. In this way, streetcar suburbs represented ⇒ Read More

Streetcars

For more than 150 years streetcars have served the Philadelphia area and helped Center City Philadelphia retain its commercial, retail, and entertainment supremacy in an ever-expanding region. Although the motive power switched from horses to electricity (with short detours into steam and cable), most change has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Perhaps the greatest transformation ⇒ Read More

Subway Concourses

Originally built by the Philadelphia Transit Company in the early twentieth century, the underground concourses in Center City Philadelphia played a crucial part in the construction of subway tunnels and then expanded into a network of private and publicly owned pedestrian walkways and storage facilities. In 1912, the City of Philadelphia assumed active development of ⇒ Read More

Subways and Elevated Lines

Philadelphia’s subway and elevated network consists of four lines that connect with other transportation options to serve much of the region. Although the network is relatively simple compared with systems in other cities, its history is complex. It took over eight decades to plan and to build, and its construction required a variety of public-private ⇒ Read More

Trails (Indian)

In the Philadelphia region prior to European settlement and during the colonial period, the Lenapes and other Indians used their knowledge of the landscape to engineer the most efficient routes through forests, mountains, and often shallow, treacherous waterways. Their complex system of overland paths crisscrossed the region to reach east to the shell fisheries on ⇒ Read More

Trails (Recreational)

An expanding network of recreational paths for walkers, hikers, cyclists, joggers, and commuters serves the Greater Philadelphia region.  The first recreational paths date to the mid-nineteenth century, when upper-class residents sought idyllic walking grounds in rural cemeteries and urban parks. In the twentieth century, grassroots hiking clubs built additional footpaths, but by the early twenty-first ⇒ Read More

Vine Street Expressway

The Vine Street Expressway (Interstate 676), a 1.75-mile depressed limited-access highway traveling east-west across the northern edge of Philadelphia’s central business district, resulted from more than sixty years of effort to connect I-95 and I-76 and move traffic more easily between and through the city to surrounding counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Its route ⇒ Read More

West Philadelphia

One of the single largest sectors of the city of Philadelphia at almost fifteen square miles between the Schuylkill River to the east and Delaware County to the west, West Philadelphia at its peak, in the early twentieth century, attracted an influx of new residents to its verdant, suburban-feeling neighborhoods. But over the course of ⇒ Read More

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