Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You Back
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 first attempt to sell itself as a tourist destination, but it marked a departure from previous attempts that mostly focused on Philadelphia’s ample stock of historically significant artifacts in Center City (“America’s most historic square mile”) such as Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, none of which could be said to necessarily “love you back.”
The odd claim that something as abstract as a place loves you grabs your attention, sticks in your head, and thus makes for a successful slogan. It also provided a reply and a challenge to the “I Love New York” slogan – and indeed, a large portion of the print ads that used the “Place that Loves You Back” showed up in New York magazine. The slogan was also meant to conjure up Philadelphia’s heritage as the “City of Brotherly Love,” infused with the Quaker values of universal love, nonviolence, tolerance, and equality.
Yet the claim that Philadelphia loves you is really the opposite of Quaker-inspired universal love. The slogan suggested intimacy, while universal love is cold and impersonal. If I love everyone, I love no one in particular. And Philadelphia has indeed often been perceived as a uniquely cold and unwelcoming place, as explained by sociologist and native Philadelphian Digby Baltzell in his 1979 book Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. According to Baltzell, the radical equality and antiauthoritarianism of the city’s Quaker leaders fostered a uniquely individualistic culture that was more tolerant of dissent than the more paternalistic culture fostered by the authoritarian Puritan leaders of Boston. The culture of Philadelphia was one in which people tended to disavow leadership roles and break off into inward-looking groups that were inhospitable to outsiders. As first lady Abigail Adams, who was forced to live in Philadelphia on account of her husband being the president, wrote in a letter to her sister in 1798, “These Philadelphians are a strange set of people…They have the least feeling of real genuine politeness of any people with whom I am acquainted.”
A big city’s reputation is of course always a fiction in that it cannot describe much of what actually happens in such a large place, but it is also very real in that it sets people’s expectations and defines their shared understanding of the community in which they live and work, and which others visit – or choose not to visit, as the case may be. And Philadelphia maintained its antisocial reputation for at least two centuries. One of the characters in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 novel The Gilded Age noted of Washington, D.C., that “it doesn’t need a crowbar to break your way into society there as it does in Philadelphia.” Forty years later journalist Edward Hungerford commented in his book Personality of American Cities, that “there is little use carrying social ambitions to Philadelphia. . . No city in the land, not even Boston or Charleston, opens its doors more reluctantly to strange faces and strange names, than open these doors of the old houses roundabout Rittenhouse Square.” The same reputation was captured later by the comic actor W.C. Fields in a series of now-legendary quotes, such as, “Last week I went to Philadelphia, but it was closed.”
Negative Undercurrents
Though generally considered a negative characteristic, Philadelphia’s antisocial reputation was intimately connected to the city’s perceived virtues – the opposite side of the coin of tolerance and acceptance is indifference and disregard. How else could we explain the pride that Philadelphians have traditionally taken in their antisocial reputation? As Baltzell noted, “Cheering against the home team is a time-honored tradition in Philadelphia.” Pride in Philadelphia’s antisocial reputation was captured in a notorious billboard that hung over the city’s Schuylkill Expressway in 1972, designed to promote a chamber of commerce event, though it became one of the better-known slogans for the city: “Philadelphia isn’t as bad as Philadelphians say it is.”
Not surprisingly, Philadelphia’s reputation did not help the city’s tourism industry, which by the 1990s had great potential. Big American cities, having recovered from high crime rates in the previous decades, were becoming increasingly popular sites for entertainment and leisure, yet a 1995 Pew Charitable Trusts report found that “Philadelphia has a negative image as a vacation destination” and, “Despite the fact that Philadelphia does have good product, the perceptions – and therefore the reality – among potential travelers is that the product is weak.” Thus the state legislature and the city in 1996 established the GPTMC, funded primarily through a 1 percent hotel sales tax, and tasked with selling Philadelphia to the leisure travel market. The GPTMC hired the firm Longwoods International to do an initial market survey, which found that people who had visited the city within the previous three years were more likely to rate it positively – in terms of being more likely to say that they “strongly agreed” that there were such urban amenities available as “excellent shopping” – than people who had never visited. The conclusion of Bill Siegel, Longwoods CEO and Chairman, was that “To know Philadelphia is to love it.”
Longwoods estimated that the “Place That Loves You Back” campaign attracted over 1 million new tourists to the region, and in 2010 the GPTMC reported 10 million more leisure visitors than in 1997. Philadelphia has thus arguably at least partially overcome its antisocial reputation as it has been promoted as a warm and welcoming place. As Bill Cosby says in one 1997 ad, in a stark reversal of how the city had previously been represented, “there’s nothing warmer than the hearts of THE PEOPLE who live here, in THE FRIENDLIEST CITY in America. My friends, come visit THE WARMEST PLACE ON EARTH.”
Since the city’s antisocial reputation also defined some of the city’s perceived virtues of tolerance and acceptance, it seems worth asking what shared sense of community we gave up in selling ourselves more successfully to tourists. “The Place that Loves You Back” suggests that we offered to welcome tourists into a warm and intimate community. We want you to have fun; in fact, we’re going to insist that you have fun, because we love you and we care. But in making this new offer, have we forsaken the mixed history of tolerance and indifference that allowed anyone to come here and do what he or she wanted while the rest of us didn’t care?
Richardson Dilworth is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Public Policy at Drexel University. His books include Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
Topics: Distinctively Philadelphia

1776
The story of American independence comes to life in the musical 1776, which dramatizes the debates, drafting, and signing of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress. The musical, which debuted on Broadway in 1969 and became a film in 1972, highlights Philadelphia as the site of the fateful decisions made at the ⇒ Read More

American Bandstand
American Bandstand (1952-89) was a massively popular music television program with strong Philadelphia roots, storied national success, and the power to shape the music industry and society. The show epitomized many important aspects of ever-evolving American popular culture: mass communication, popular music, youth culture, dance and fashion trends, as well as race and gender relationships. ⇒ Read More

Avenue of the Arts
The Avenue of the Arts is the appellation for a section of Broad Street—from Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia to Glenwood Avenue in North Philadelphia—devoted to arts and entertainment facilities. The Avenue was conceived in 1993 by a coalition of public and private entities to attract visitors to Center City. Amid a decline in manufacturing, ⇒ Read More

Bartram’s Garden
Located on the west bank of the Schuylkill River, Bartram’s Garden, considered the oldest surviving botanic garden in North America, has served as a monument to the storied history of Philadelphia’s botanical endeavors and to the genius of John Bartram (1699–1777) and his descendants. Established as a family farm and garden by John Bartram in ⇒ Read More

Baseball (Professional)
From the time the game was created to its organization into a professional league, and from the first National League game ever played to some of the earliest World Series, the city of Philadelphia has played a prominent role in professional baseball history. Variations of the game of baseball became popular some three decades prior ⇒ Read More

Bicentennial (1976)
Planners of Philadelphia’s Bicentennial celebration in 1976, aware of the incredible success of the 1876 Centennial as well as the flop of the 1926 Sesquicentennial, hoped to showcase the growth and ambitions of the city while also commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. While the big celebrations drew crowds of Americans, the ⇒ Read More

Big 5
The Big 5, an association of Philadelphia-area college basketball programs that have competed locally while also belonging to different conferences, formed in 1955 among five universities: La Salle, Penn, Saint Joseph’s, Temple, and Villanova. Showcasing the basketball talent of the region, the round-robin doubleheaders between Big 5 teams have attracted raucous fans and produced intense ⇒ Read More

Boathouse Row
Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row is a National Historic Landmark that reflects the city’s fusion of sport, culture, and history. The boathouses, built in the second half of the nineteenth-century, line the eastern bank of the Schuylkill River just north of the Fairmount Waterworks. Lit at night with thousands of glowing bulbs, they form a welcoming beacon ⇒ Read More

Broad Street Bullies
The Philadelphia Flyers, formed as a National Hockey League expansion team in 1967, became known as the Broad Street Bullies for their aggressively physical play during the 1972-73 season. As the Flyers racked up penalty minutes at a record pace, Philadelphia’s press corps tried to create a colorful nickname for the team. Jack Chevalier and ⇒ Read More

Burlesque
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Philadelphia became one of the central nodes of American burlesque, a genre with origins in the ribald Victorian “travesties”—theatrical parodies of well-known operas that relied upon risqué and absurd humor. Distinct from its English counterpart, American burlesque incorporated elements of minstrelsy and, especially by the end of ⇒ Read More

Centennial Exhibition (1876)
The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, more simply known as “the Centennial,” opened in Fairmount Park to great fanfare on May 10, 1876, and closed with equal flourish six months later. Modeled after the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and the first in a long ⇒ Read More

Cheesesteaks
A cheesesteak is a sandwich unlike any John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792), might have encountered. Thin bits of frizzled beef served on a locally-made Italian roll, usually topped with fried onions and Cheez Whiz drawn from the can with a paint stirrer, the Philly cheesesteak also is distinguished, in part, by its ⇒ Read More

Children’s Television
Local children’s programming in the Philadelphia area flourished during the “Golden Age of Television,” from the rise of commercial broadcasting after World War II to the early 1970s. During its heyday the hosted children’s show was a mainstay of locally produced programming. In the Philadelphia area, original children’s shows were produced by the three local ⇒ Read More

Classical Music
Classical music stands apart from vernacular (or “folk” music) and from “popular” music (in the form of simplified commercial entertainment) in its complexity of structure and high level of performance requirements. Philadelphia established a major position in American classical composition and performance in the early nineteenth century, and maintained that position through its premier professional ⇒ Read More

Convention Centers
Philadelphia-area residents and visitors have required places for large assemblies since the colonial era, and a variety of temporary and permanent facilities served this purpose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Modern, multipurpose convention centers appeared in the late 1920s and have since grown in size and scope. By the early twenty-first century, many of ⇒ Read More

Elfreth’s Alley
Nestled between Second Street and the Delaware River, thirty-two Federal and Georgian residences stand as reminders of the early days of Philadelphia. Elfreth’s Alley exists today as a residential street, historic landmark, and interpreted site labeled the “Nation’s Oldest Residential Street.” The heroic efforts of residents and local historians from the 1930s to 1960s preserved ⇒ Read More

Football (Professional)
From the 1950s onward, pro football’s Eagles ruled the sports roost in Philadelphia, having built a dedicated fan base that filled the stadium each week and careened emotionally from each gridiron success and failure. Moreover, fierce play on the field was echoed by unbridled passion in the stands. That did not change even as the ⇒ Read More

Hotels and Motels
As one of the busiest and most influential port cities in colonial and later independent America, Philadelphia became an early leader in hotel development and continued to elevate industry standards throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hotels presented travelers with a desirable alternative to staying in private residences, and luxury hotels became signifiers of a ⇒ Read More

I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia
The expression “I’d rather be in Philadelphia” is derived from a fictional epitaph that locally-born entertainer W.C. Fields (1880-1946) proposed for himself in Vanity Fair magazine in 1925: “Here lies W.C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.” By implying that Philadelphia would be slightly preferable to the grave, the joke tapped a vein ⇒ Read More

Ice Hockey (Professional)
In February 1966, the National Hockey League decided that the future was now. Responding to forces transforming other professional sports leagues, such as the growth of televised coverage and the expansion of franchises to the West Coast of the United States, the NHL decided to expand its static lineup of “Original Six” franchises in Eastern ⇒ Read More

Independence Hall
Originally the Pennsylvania State House, this eighteenth-century landmark associated with the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution evolved from a workplace of government to a treasured shrine, tourist attraction, and World Heritage Site. Its history encompasses more than 275 years of struggles for freedom and public participation in creating, preserving, and debating the founding ⇒ Read More

Independence National Historical Park
Encompassing fifty-four acres in Center City Philadelphia, Independence National Historical Park preserves and provides access to Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and other sites associated with the American Revolution and early American history. Authorized by Congress in 1948 in response to lobbying by Philadelphians, creation of the park transformed an aging commercial district into a ⇒ Read More

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a comedy series that premiered on the FX cable television channel in August 2005, follows a group of five friends as they engage in narcissistic and questionable schemes from their Irish bar, Paddy’s Pub, fictionally located at Dickinson and Third Street in South Philadelphia. Created by executive producer Rob McElhenney ⇒ Read More

Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts
The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts was designed as the centerpiece of the Avenue of the Arts, a rebranded stretch of Broad Street devoted to performing arts venues. Built by a partnership of public and private entities, the Kimmel Center was part of a wider plan to revitalize Center City via the construction of ⇒ Read More

Liberty Bell
It is America’s most famous relic, a nearly sacred totem. Several million people each year make a pilgrimage to see it, many dabbing their eyes as they gaze at it intently. Around the world it is regarded as a universal symbol of freedom. It began inconspicuously as a two-thousand-pound mass of unstable metal; it nearly ⇒ Read More

LOVE (Sculpture)
The sculpture commonly known as “the LOVE statue,” first placed in Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Plaza for the 1976 Bicentennial, was not the only sculpture of its kind—by the twenty-first century, it was not even the only sculpture of its type in Philadelphia. Yet LOVE, by Robert Indiana (1928-2018), came to be embraced by Philadelphians ⇒ Read More

Meschianza
On May 18, 1778, four hundred British officers and elite Philadelphians embarked on a regatta down the Delaware River. This aquatic procession kicked off the Meschianza, an extravagant fete to honor General William Howe (1729-1814) and his brother, Admiral Richard Howe (1726-99), on their departure from North America. General Howe’s army took control of Philadelphia ⇒ Read More

Mummers
The Mummers Parade, an institution in Philadelphia since 1901, brought together many of the loosely organized groups of folk performers who roamed the streets each year between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. Known variously as mummers, shooters, belsnickles, fantasticals, and callithumpians, these masqueraders traced their roots to immigrants from England, Sweden, and Germany who ⇒ Read More

Murals
Murals in the Greater Philadelphia region, like those in the United States at large, belong to an extraordinarily diverse set of histories and genealogies, from indigenous rock carving to decorations for private houses to paintings in public buildings and community initiatives. Philadelphia-area murals have spanned this diverse heritage, including three particularly important mural movements: Beaux-Arts ⇒ Read More

National Parks
National parks figure prominently in Greater Philadelphia’s cultural, economic, and natural landscapes. Morristown (1933), Independence (1948), Valley Forge (1976), and First State (2015) National Historical Parks all preserve and provide access to sites associated with the American Revolution and early American history. Together they welcome nearly six million visitors each year and create more than ⇒ Read More

ODUNDE Festival
The ODUNDE Festival, held in South Philadelphia each year on the second Sunday in June, celebrates the history and heritage of African people around the globe and serves to instill and encourage cultural pride. Taking its name from the word meaning “Happy New Year” in the Yoruba language (placed in all capital letters by the ⇒ Read More

Papal Visits
Popes use their visits to encourage faith, emphasize their priorities, and fulfill their role as pastors. The places visited use these trips to highlight their successes, history, and culture on an international stage. Prior to the visit of Pope Francis (b. 1936) to Philadelphia on September 26 and 27, 2015, only one other pope had ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia (Film)
As a form of cinematic activism, Philadelphia (1993) attempted to reform the public understanding of AIDS in a time when ignorance and fear of the disease fueled prejudice and hate. The film is not merely set in the city of its title, but in a large part, the people of Philadelphia performed it. Extras who ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia Award
Founded in 1921, each year the Philadelphia Award honors one or more Philadelphians for service “to advance the best and largest interests of Philadelphia.” Awardees have included scientists, educators, university administrators, directors of nonprofits, philanthropists, ministers, lawyers, politicians, artists, writers, and sports figures. Established by Edward Bok (1863–1930), retired editor of the Ladies Home Journal, ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia Folk Festival
Seeking to contribute to the folk revival that reached its peak in the United States during the mid-1960s, folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein (1927-95) and radio DJ Gene Shay (b. 1935) organized the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1962. During a hiatus of the similar Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, Goldstein and Shay sought to demonstrate ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent
In 1938, the City of Philadelphia amended its charter to create a museum that would collect the city’s material culture and display it for the public. The institution, long known as the Atwater Kent Museum, took its name from radio manufacturer A. Atwater Kent (1873-1949), who purchased and donated the former Franklin Institute building on ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia Orchestra
Founded in 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra developed into an iconic organization for Philadelphia through its musicianship, commitment to culture and education, and service as a cultural ambassador. The musical tastes and personalities of a series of influential conductors infused the orchestra with a rich history and distinctive sound as it became one of the finest ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia Story (The)
The Philadelphia Story (1939) is a comedy of manners presented as a three-act play set in the late 1930s in a magnificent mansion in Philadelphia’s western Main Line suburbs, a location of wealth and exclusivity. Written by Philip Barry (1896-1949), a prolific dramatic and comic playwright, The Philadelphia Story centers on the lives of an ⇒ Read More

Political Conventions
Philadelphia has hosted national political conventions from the time of the Revolution to the modern era. The Pennsylvania State House, later known as Independence Hall, was the site of both the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787. In the mid-nineteenth century, as national party conventions became the ⇒ Read More

Pretzels
Soft pretzels are to Philadelphia as crepes are to Paris. Both are icons of their respective cities, but one goes better with Nutella and the other with mustard. Indeed, comedian David Brenner (who, like Will Smith’s Fresh Prince of Bellaire, was “West Philadelphia born and raised”) even titled his 1983 memoir Soft Pretzels with Mustard. ⇒ Read More

Radio DJs
Disc jockeys—“DJs” who play music on the radio—have had a key role in shaping Philadelphia musical tastes since the 1950s. They reflected national and local musical trends, exposed audiences to new music, and in some cases produced records and managed artists. Many Philadelphia DJs became celebrities, actively engaged and influential in the local music scene. ⇒ Read More

Restaurants
From colonial-era taverns to the celebrity chef establishments of the early twenty-first century, Greater Philadelphia’s restaurants illuminated the region’s socioeconomic, cultural, and culinary trends while also providing sustenance for millions, employing thousands, and in some cases emerging as historic and nostalgic treasures. Taverns and public houses (“pubs”) represented the area’s earliest food-serving establishments; many operated ⇒ Read More

Rocky
More than just a popular series of Hollywood films or the fictional prizefighter whose life and career they chronicle, Rocky is a late-twentieth-century cultural phenomenon that reframed Philadelphia for local, national, and international audiences. Rocky premiered in 1976. Written by and starring Sylvester Stallone (b. 1946), the film introduced audiences to Rocky Balboa: a down-and-out ⇒ Read More

Saint Patrick’s Day
In March, Philadelphians of many backgrounds join together to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, the city’s Irish citizens, and their heritage. Celebrated in Philadelphia since 1771, the holiday began as a Catholic holy day and evolved into a rambunctious affair marked throughout the region by parades, music, dancing, drinking, and wearing kelly-green clothing to symbolize the ⇒ Read More

Sesquicentennial International Exposition (1926)
In 1926, Philadelphia hosted the Sesquicentennial International Exposition, a world’s fair, to commemorate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Although it opened to great fanfare, the exposition failed to attract enough visitors to cover its costs. The fair organization went into receivership in 1927 and its assets ⇒ Read More

Silver Linings Playbook
The 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook, directed by David O. Russell (b. 1958) and based on the novel by Collingswood, New Jersey, native Matthew Quick (b. 1973), experienced overnight success when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and earned the highly sought-after Audience Award. Filmed in and around Philadelphia, the movie showcases the ⇒ Read More

Skate Parks and Skateboarders
During the 1980s, Philadelphia and its surrounding communities emerged as a mecca for the sport of skateboarding. The region developed more than twenty skate parks, and local professional skateboarders achieved international fame over the next four decades. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, approximately 105,000 of Philadelphia’s 1.5 million residents skateboarded. Despite occasional opposition ⇒ Read More

Social Dancing
Dancing has been popular in Philadelphia since the city was founded, in spite of religious opposition, especially from Quakers. Far from succumbing to religious criticism, social dancing gained in importance as a way for socially ambitious Philadelphians to demonstrate their gentility. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, well-to-do families gathered for formal balls ⇒ Read More

SPHAS
In 1917, a group of Jewish high school graduates in Philadelphia formed a basketball team that competed against other local teams. Affiliated with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) at first, the team soon became known as the SPHAS (South Philadelphia Hebrew Association) after the YMHA withdrew its sponsorship because it considered the sport too ⇒ Read More

Sports Cards
Sports card collecting, a classic American hobby, has strong ties to Philadelphia. Its history can be traced through Philadelphia firms such as the American Caramel Company, Fleer Corporation, and Bowman Gum Company. Those three, all pioneers and innovators in the sports card industry, helped to build collecting as a popular hobby. Sports cards developed from ⇒ Read More

Sports Fans
In the sports world, Philadelphia fans gained a reputation for enthusiasm as they passionately supported winners and losers, publicly booed, and privately cheered. Many sports fans across the country gained their only understanding of residents of Greater Philadelphia from the region’s sports fans, and out-of-town sportswriters often pointed to select incidents as evidence that Philadelphia ⇒ Read More

Sports Mascots
The origins of the word “mascot” can be traced to France, where it was once used to describe anything that brought luck. But in the sports world, mascots are much more than good-luck charms. They are larger-than-life cheerleaders who encourage fans to root for the home team, laugh, and even have some fun at the ⇒ Read More

Stadiums and Arenas
The stadiums and arenas of the Greater Philadelphia region provide a physical venue not only for athletic contests, but also for Philadelphians’ passionate connection to their sports teams. Deeply embedded in regional identity and personal memories, the history of the area’s stadiums and arenas reflects broad patterns of regional development and change. During the 1860s ⇒ Read More

Tastykake
“Nobody bakes a cake as tasty as a Tastykake” has been a brand tag line known by virtually every Philadelphian for a century. Indeed, few things are as iconically associated with the city and region as Tastykakes. The company was founded in 1914 by Philip J. Baur and Herbert T. Morris, in the Germantown neighborhood ⇒ Read More

Tomato Pie
Served by Italian bakeries in South Philadelphia since the early twentieth century, the tomato pie became known by many names: church pie, square pizza, red pizza, granny pizza, and red pie. Although made in a rectangular or square shape similar to Sicilian-style pizza, tomato pie within the city and surrounding region remained distinct from contemporary ⇒ Read More

Tourism
Philadelphia has been a tourist destination since leisure travel emerged as a common pastime for the middle and upper classes in the nineteenth century. By the twenty-first century, the region’s economy depended heavily on tourism to Philadelphia and nearby destinations such as the Brandywine Valley, Valley Forge, and the Jersey and Delaware shores. Historic sites ⇒ Read More

Trees
Trees have been culturally, environmentally, and symbolically significant to the Philadelphia region since the city’s founding. They were believed to improve public health, they beautified and refined city streets, parks, and other green spaces, and several were revered as living memorials to past historical events. Trees also faced their fair share of destruction during the ⇒ Read More

TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)
In spring 1974, “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” became a hit song for Philadelphia International Records, the local record label renowned for its “Philly Soul” sound of the 1970s. Written by Philadelphia International’s owners and chief songwriter/producers, Kenny Gamble (b. 1943) and Leon Huff (b. 1942), and recorded in late 1973 by MFSB with the ⇒ Read More

Wanamaker Organ
Originally designed for the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, the organ purchased by John Wanamaker (1838-1922) for his unprecedented Philadelphia department store at Thirteenth and Market Streets expanded over time to produce the sound power of three symphony orchestras. Regarded as the largest playable instrument in the world, the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ remained ⇒ Read More

Whiz Kids
The 1950 Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, which surprisingly won the National League pennant but lost to the New York Yankees in the World Series, gained the nickname the “Whiz Kids” from Newspaper Enterprise Association sports editor Harry Grayson (1894-1968) during spring training in Clearwater, Florida. The team had a roster dominated by young players, including ⇒ Read More
Gallery: Distinctively Philadelphia
Timeline: Distinctively Philadelphia
Map: Distinctively Philadelphia
[google-map-sc width = 630 height = 630 zoom= 13 cat = 33]Links & Related Reading: Distinctively Philadelphia
Links
- "Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You Back" Commercial Featuring Oprah Winfrey (YouTube)
- Audio, "Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You Back," Greater Philadelphia Roundtable discussion, February 22, 2012, Independence Visitor Center
- Summary, "Philadelphia the Place that Loves You Back," Greater Philadelphia Roundtable, February 22, 2012, Independence Visitor Center
- Visit Philadelphia (Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation)
- New slogan launched to help promote Philly (NewsWorks, February 12, 2014)
- Economic impact of Philadelphia tourism? Not everyone agrees (Philadelphia Business Journal via NewsWorks, March 5, 2014)
- Philly region sets new tourism record (NewsWorks, May 16, 2015)
Related Reading
Baltzell, E. Digby. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership. New York: Free Press, 1979.
Conn, Steven. Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Dilworth, Richardson, ed. Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Stevick, Philip. Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers’ Views of the City from 1800 to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Collections
Brightbill Postcard Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia.
Office of the City Representative Records, Philadelphia City Archives, 3101 Market Street, Philadelphia.