Throughout much of its modern American history, barbering has been derided as “servile” work, unfit for native-born, white citizens. As such, the profession has been dominated by marginalized groups. In the Philadelphia region, African Americans owned and operated the majority of barber shops during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since then, waves of immigrant ...
Businessman, chemist, educator, and art collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) established the Barnes Foundation in 1922 as a center for art education organized around his growing collection of paintings, sculpture, and furniture. The institution earned international renown, less for its pedagogy than for its art collection, which, by mid-century, was world-class. Initially based in the ...
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 ...
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 ...
For eight remarkable decades, local Philadelphia fans consistently supported a series of black baseball clubs whose successes generated racial pride and represented a triumph of African American institution-building. The Negro Leagues gave extremely talented local baseball players the chance to play the game they loved during a time when the Major Baseball Leagues remained ...
Professional basketball has a long history in the Philadelphia region, from the first professional league, formed in 1898, to the National Basketball Association (NBA). The city produced memorable teams, including the Warriors and 76ers, and Hall of Fame players such as Wilt Chamberlain (1936-99) and Dawn Staley (b. 1970). Philadelphia teams and players from the Philadelphia region contributed to ...
Created in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway connected the heart of Philadelphia’s downtown to its premier park and over time became a district of cultural institutions and a commons for civic celebrations. The broad boulevard and its monumental structures reflected the European-inspired, nationwide City Beautiful Movement embraced by the ...
The Better Philadelphia Exhibition, which ran from September 8 to October 15, 1947, at Gimbels department store in Center City, showcased new ideas for revitalizing Philadelphia after decades of depression and war. Conceived by young architects and planners and funded by prominent citizens, the exhibition introduced more than 350,000 people in the metropolitan area, free of charge, to a vision of ...
The big celebrations of the Bicentennial drew crowds of Americans, but the summer of ’76 also produced conflict and ultimately failed to fulfill the dreams of the city and its ...
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 ...
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 ...
Billiards has been played in Philadelphia since at least the late 1700s. Played on a table with six pockets and either nine or fifteen balls, billiards is referred to as pocket billiards and is popularly known as “pool” in the United States. By the mid 1800s, the more-affluent members of Philadelphia society were playing billiards in exclusive men’s clubs while working-class men played ...
The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania North America; as it appeared in the Year 1800 is a masterpiece of American copperplate engraving and the first book of views to be entirely produced and published in the United States. Comprising twenty-seven scenes or “views” of Philadelphia’s buildings and streetscapes, the book aimed to ...
Black Lives Matter (BLM) as an organization and a movement came to public attention after the deaths of two young Black men, Trayvon Martin (1995-2012) in Sanford, Florida, and Mike Brown (1996-2014) in Ferguson, Missouri. A Philadelphia chapter of the decentralized, nonhierarchical movement officially formed in May 2015. With direct ties to earlier civil rights era organizations, the movement ...
Black Power, a movement significant to the Black freedom struggle in Philadelphia, came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s through the combined efforts of local and national organizations including the Church of the Advocate, the Black Panther Party, the Black United Liberation front, and MOVE. Before and after Stokely Carmichael (1941-98) of the national ...
Philadelphia’s Fifth Ward, south of Chestnut Street near the Delaware River, became infamous in the late nineteenth century for election-day riots among the Irish, Black people, and the police, with ward boss William “Bull” McMullen (1824-1901) at the center of the violence. By the early twentieth century, the area had become known as the “Bloody ...
Set against the hyperpatriotic background of Philadelphia amidst the United States Bicentennial, the 1981 film Blow Out grapples with the themes of political paranoia and obsession, coupled with the demanding moviemaking process. Directed by Brian De Palma (b. 1940), it is a lesser-known De Palma thriller, inspired by the 1966 film Blow-Up. ...
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 ...
Philadelphia has had a thriving blues music tradition since the early twentieth century. While not renowned as a blues city like Chicago or Memphis, and celebrated more for related African American genres such as jazz, rhythm and blues, gospel, and soul music, Philadelphia has nevertheless been home to several influential blues artists and has nurtured the development of blues and blues-based ...
Philadelphia suffered numerous outbreaks of epidemic disease throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was not until 1794, in the wake of the disastrous 1793 yellow fever outbreak, that a group of concerned citizens founded the Board of Health, independent of the city’s control. In the nineteenth century, the city supported the board with an annual budget and continuously ...
Distinguished by its ubiquitous row houses and high rates of home ownership, Philadelphia has been long been known as a “city of homes.” But for much of its history, it also has been a city of boardinghouses. “Boarding” and “lodging” houses did not enter the local lexicon until the late eighteenth century, but the practice ...
Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row is a National Historic Landmark that reflects the city’s fusion of sport, culture, and history. The circumstances that led to the distinctive row of boathouses on the Schuylkill date to the early nineteenth century when Philadelphia, a commercial and cultural center of the early American Republic, became one of most historically rich and lively rowing cities in ...
Between 1750 and 1800, Philadelphia became the center for book printing and publishing in the United States, surpassing New York and Boston. Although Philadelphia lost that primacy in the nineteenth century, firms specializing in medical and religious publishing continued to do well. By the mid to late twentieth century, however, as the publishing industry consolidated, few independent ...
Bookstores have long been an important part of the economic and cultural fabric of Philadelphia. As early as the eighteenth century, booksellers set up shop in the city, eager to serve a highly-educated population hungry for ...
Bootleg liquor, produced illegally during Prohibition (1920-33), flowed into the Philadelphia region from a variety of sources, including overseas shipments, small home stills, large stills in urban factories and country barns, beer breweries, and manufacturers of industrial alcohol. Philadelphia’s location at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, just inland from the Atlantic ...
Beginning in the eighteenth century with the botanical enthusiasts who explored the world around them as part of a larger interest in natural history, botany became an integral part of the Philadelphia region’s national and international reputation. It brought scholars and enthusiasts from across the globe to study and explore Philadelphia’s collections and gardens, influenced ...
For over one hundred years, Philadelphia neighborhoods, for better and worse, played a significant role in molding fighters. Over two dozen world boxing champions throughout various weight classes called Philadelphia home. Nearby communities such as Camden, New Jersey, and Easton, Pennsylvania, also produced world champions. Over time, Philadelphia-area boxing was supported by a wide network ...
Less than an hour west of the Quaker City lies the Brandywine Valley, for centuries a green and pleasant counterpoint to the dense urbanism that has defined America’s first great metropolis. A region synonymous with gracious living and cultural tourism, the Brandywine Valley has drawn visitors from around the world to enjoy its many public gardens, house museums, and historical attractions. ...
The city of Philadelphia was built with bricks, giving it an appearance many neighborhoods retained into the twenty-first century. An abundance of local clay allowed brickmaking to flourish and bricks to become the one of the most important building materials in the region. Because it could be accomplished with just a few rudimentary tools, brickmaking ...
Bridge crossings in the Delaware River watershed area have been a measure of the connectedness of the inhabitants with each other and surrounding regions. Through the eighteenth century bridges were of modest size and relatively limited in number. During the nineteenth century the rate of bridge construction rapidly increased, allowing for commerce and travel on an unprecedented scale. It was ...
Bridgeton, the governmental seat of Cumberland County, originated in the late seventeenth century as a fording place at the upper tidal reach of the Cohansey River, a tributary of the Delaware Bay. Located seven direct miles from the bay (though twenty by meandering river), and about forty miles south of Philadelphia, Bridgeton drew on water ...
On September 26, 1777, the British army marched into Philadelphia, beginning an occupation that lasted until the following spring. Its arrival led patriots to flee and Loyalists to rejoice, although wartime shortages soon led to suffering for those who remained in the city. The occupation, however, led to no concrete gains, and the British abandoned ...
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 ...
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 ...
First designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1995, the polluted tracts of land known as “brownfields” resulted from Greater Philadelphia’s industrial heritage. For more than a century, manufacturers generated vast amounts of waste and runoff. After industry declined between the 1950s and the 1980s, acres of abandoned structures and soiled land remained. Hundreds ...
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 ...
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 ...
From the arrival of its first patients in 1911 to 1990, when the Commonwealth formally closed it down, the Philadelphia State Hospital, popularly known as Byberry, was the home for thousands of mental ...
Incorporated in 1828 and named county seat of the newly formed Camden County when it separated from Gloucester County in 1844, Camden City long served as the heart of the South Jersey region directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Besieged in the second half of the twentieth century by losses of population and economic stability as industry declined, Camden lost its once premier ...
Anderson & Campbell Preserve Company formed in Camden, New Jersey in 1869. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the company grew to become one of the largest food companies of the twenty-first ...
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, and manufactured items, ...
Philadelphia was home to many of the nation’s leading candy makers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and played a key role in the development of the American candy industry. Large-scale candy production began in the city in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the turn of the twentieth century a number of major candy manufacturers ...
As the national capital from 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the seat of the federal government for a short but crucial time in the new nation’s history. How and why Congress selected Philadelphia as the temporary Unites States capital reflects the essential debates of the era, particularly the balance of power between North and South. These debates, as well as the creation of new national ...
Library buildings funded by the Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) played an important role in the development of library systems in Philadelphia and the surrounding region. Carnegie funded many libraries, including twenty-four branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia, which greatly increased the availability of library services to the public. Many of the libraries funded by ...
In its early twentieth-century heyday, Philadelphia’s carpet and rug industry represented this nation’s greatest concentration of factories making household and commercial floor coverings. The Public Ledger boasted that “two wards, in the northern section of the city, produce more carpets than the whole of Great Britain and Ireland.” Indeed, as early as 1882, those Kensington wards ...
American cartooning began in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin, who introduced cartoons to North America, used images to galvanize viewers to action on the issues of their day. As the political, economic, and cultural capital of the early United States, Philadelphia became a center for producing political cartoons and humorous caricatures. Although New York eventually supplanted Philadelphia as ...
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, casino gambling became an accepted public policy in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other states desperate to generate tax revenue and create jobs. But the gains often came with significant social and economic costs in Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and other communities in the ...
Over a period of four decades, from 1840 through 1880, a commercial district of distinctive cast iron buildings developed in Center City Philadelphia. Born of the iron wealth of Pennsylvania and fashioned by the city’s architects and mechanics at a time of technological innovation, these buildings helped define the downtown of the emerging modern ...
Established in 1846, the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul at Eighteenth and Race Streets became the principal church and center of Catholic life for the clergy and faithful of the Philadelphia archdiocese. During a turbulent era of immigration and anti-Catholic nativism, Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick (1796-1863) desired a “common church of the whole ...
Cemeteries have been integral features of the Philadelphia-area landscape since the earliest European settlements of the mid-1600s. Over the centuries the region’s cemeteries matured from small, private grave sites, potter’s fields, and church burial yards to rural cemeteries, national cemeteries, and memorial parks. From the colonial period to the present, cemeteries reflected the area’s ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy