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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Country clubs originated in the 1890s as elite, family-oriented havens usually emphasizing golf, but they have never been just about golf or even sports. Clubs fostered sportsmanship, appropriate deportment, and social development while also providing opportunities for exercise. A “golden age” of country clubs lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the number of clubs grew ...
The rise, fall, and rebirth of the sport of cricket in the Philadelphia region reflected political, social, and economic change. Cricket once flourished in the city, which produced some legendary players known throughout the cricketing world. The rise of other leisure activities supplanted the game, however, until a moderate resurgence in the late twentieth and ...
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 ...
Fairmount Park was developed in the nineteenth century in an effort to protect Philadelphia’s public water supply and to preserve extensive green spaces within a rapidly industrializing cityscape. It became one of the largest urban riparian parks in the United States and comprises the largest contiguous components of Philadelphia's public park system as administered by Philadelphia Parks & ...
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 fan base drew more from the suburbs and corporate clients watched ...
Fox hunting, the sport of mounted riders following a pack of hounds that are hunting a fox by scent, became a popular leisure activity of the emerging gentry in the Philadelphia region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It survives as a twenty-first-century pastime, even though development has reduced the available countryside, and animal-rights activists have sometimes challenged ...
Originating in the nineteenth century, high school sports accompanied the spread of secondary schooling and became a nationwide phenomenon as students initiated team competitions and schools instituted physical education programs. In the Philadelphia region, early scholastic sports gained legitimacy from mentoring provided by the area’s many colleges and from the School District of ...
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 ...
During the Cold War, conflict between the global superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union took many forms, including sports. One such theater was Franklin Field on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, which hosted an international track and field athletic competition known as the Liberty Bell ...
The Immaculata College women’s basketball teams of the early 1970s, known as the Mighty Macs, won the first three national tournaments of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) in 1972, 1973, and 1974. Basketball brought the Immaculata community together, and Immaculata’s success showcased the high quality of basketball played by Philadelphia’s Catholic schools. ...
Although an unemployed Philadelphia salesman, Charles Darrow (1889-1967), was long credited as the creator of the world’s most popular board game, the origins of Monopoly stretch several decades before Parker Brothers purchased the rights from Darrow in 1935 and beyond the iconic streets of Atlantic City featured in the game. The proper history of Monopoly began in the early 1900s when a ...
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, children’s play became an important concern of urban reformers, who regarded playgrounds as essential components in shaping behavior and ordering urban space. Many public and semipublic playgrounds established as a result of their efforts became permanent features of the Philadelphia landscape, and were (and remain) deeply valued by residents and city ...
Since 1914, police officers in urban areas have seen the need for better relations between the police and local youth as a means of reducing crime and promoting wholesome play under proper supervision. In that spirit, the first Police Athletic League (PAL) in the greater Philadelphia area formed in North Philadelphia in 1947 “to build positive relationships between youth, the communities in ...
The importance of cleanliness and personal hygiene increased considerably during the nineteenth century. Philadelphia's working class rarely had access to facilities for regular bathing until the 1890s, when the construction of public baths aided in the fight against urban ...
Philadelphia boasts the oldest and one of the largest urban park systems in the United States, comprising more than one hundred parks encompassing some ten thousand acres. With origins in William Penn’s innovative city plan, Philadelphia’s public green spaces range in size and type from small neighborhood squares to extensive watershed and estuary parks along the Delaware and Schuylkill ...
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 ...
Once a prominent feature of the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden, Smith’s and Windmill Islands were shifting signifiers of the recreational, commercial, and financial development of the region. Originally one island, then segmented by a canal in 1838, the islands attracted early but unsuccessful proposals for bridges between Camden and Philadelphia. Although they served as a ...
Soccer has been played in the Philadelphia area since the late nineteenth century. The rules of Association football, known in the United States as soccer, were formulated in England in 1863. Various forms of football were played in Philadelphia before that time and after, but the first game of soccer in the city “under proper ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Mascots are larger-than-life cheerleaders who encourage fans to root for the home team, laugh, and even have some fun at the expense of opponents. In Philadelphia, mascots have become as much a part of the fabric of sports culture as the city’s ...
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 ...
The Philadelphia region had a key role in the ascent of television in American popular culture. From the manufacturing of television sets to the production of innovative programming, researchers, technicians, and creative talents in the region produced many of the “firsts” that propelled television to success as a new mass medium in the twentieth ...
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 ...
In 1777 the Continental Army, unable to prevent the British forces from taking Philadelphia, retreated to Valley Forge for the winter of 1777-78. Selected for its strategic location between Philadelphia and York, along the Schuylkill River, Valley Forge had natural defensive positions, access to water, enough land to support the army, and was far enough ...
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 ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy