To many, there were clear parallels between Athens in the Great Age of Pericles (480 BC-404 BC) and Philadelphia in the early national period (1790-1840).  Athens’ architectural monuments, sculpture, wall painting, pottery, furniture, literature, music, and theatre established the fundamental elements of these arts for more than two thousand years.  Philadelphia was poised to take the lead artistically for America in the same way Athens inspired the ancient world.

For Philadelphians—artists and patrons alike—of the 1790s and early 1800s, the term Athens of America was (and perhaps remains) more an aspiration than an accomplishment; more a vision than a triumph. And it was as much about producing art as it was about a government that fostered artistic creation.

Following the 1788 ratification of the U.S. Constitution, many Americans were full of heady ideology as they hearkened back to the purity of the democracy of ancient Athens and the importance of the individual to the success of the whole.

Athenian Art Revival

Visually, the imitation of ancient Athenian art—broadly referred to as classical art—emerged in the mid-1700s during the archaeological excavations of the cities of ancient Greece.  Europeans soon revived the arts of ancient Athens (and later Rome) as the prevailing taste, evident in everything from temple-like architecture to high-waisted columnar dresses. This embrace of classical art was uniquely timed with Americans’ enthusiasm for  democracy.

When the federal government moved to Philadelphia in 1790 for a ten-year stint, the city was ripe for the flowering of a golden age. Not only was it the most populous and most commercially active American city, the new nation’s capital was an epicenter of intellectual thought and visual expression. Philadelphia institutions were the first to provide access to literature, to encourage artistic and scientific innovation, and to display paintings publicly: consider Benjamin Franklin founding the Library Company (1731) and American Philosophical Society (1743) and Charles Willson Peale opening a portrait gallery (1782) and natural history museum (1786).

From this foundation, the city embarked on an aggressive campaign to build banks, religious and municipal buildings, theatres, art and music schools, academies, and extraordinary residences. The architecture of the new United States was identified by the Philadelphia court house, which became Congress Hall and still stands at Chestnut and Sixth Streets.  The temple front, proportions, flat surfaces and arches, Greek-key cornice, and interior plaster ornament reference Greek architecture—in contrast to the State House (now Independence Hall, completed in 1753), Christ Church (completed in 1755), and Carpenter’s Hall (completed in 1773).

By the 1800s, the subtlety of Congress Hall gave way to more and more pronounced imitation, such as the creations of British-born architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820): the Waterworks at Center Square (1800, now the site of City Hall), the Bank of Pennsylvania (1801), and the house and furniture of William and Mary Waln (1808).  Latrobe’s protégées continued his legacy: Second Bank of the United States (William Strickland, 1816), Washington Hall (Robert Mills, 1816), the Fairmount Water Works (Frederick Graff, 1822), Girard College (Thomas U. Walter, 1833), and Nicholas Biddle’s estate, Andalusia (Latrobe, 1811 and Walter, 1837).

Classical Columns and Draperies

Sculptor William Rush progressed from carving ship figureheads to major public monuments in the classical style. Painters, led by Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, and the Peale family, depicted the city’s leaders flanked by classical columns and draperies, and composed pictures based on Greek mythology and literature.  Stuart recalled his time in Philadelphia in the 1790s by saying “when I resided in the Athens of America….”

The design of furniture, fabrics, upholstery, silver, and ceramics followed architecture’s classicizing trend.  Where furniture once had voluptuous carving, there was low relief carving and colorful wood inlays of vases, urns, and intricate geometric patterns.  Chairs had backs in the shape of vases and by 1805 wholly imitated antique Greek Klismos chairs. Upholsterers (who functioned as interior designers) contrasted sharp seat edges with flowing drapery.  They modeled it on upholstery depicted on Greek pottery, which was illustrated in the catalogue of antique pottery from the “cabinet” (collection) of British antiquarian Sir William Hamilton—available at The Library Company in 1775.

Porcelain like the shell-encrusted pickle stand produced by Philadelphia entrepreneurs Messrs. Bonnin & Morris between 1770 and 1772 evolved into the lustrous smooth porcelain made at the Philadelphia factory of William and Thomas Tucker from 1826 to 1838.  The Tucker’s shapes mimicked Greek pottery, with the white of the porcelain body suggesting marble.

The term Athens of America to refer to Philadelphia was used as early as 1783, though later some applied the same phrase to Boston, and towns named Athens dotted the American landscape.  Henry Latrobe’s May 8, 1811, oration (in good Greek fashion) to Philadelphia’s Society of Artists is often cited as affirming the city as the Athens of America: he dreamed that “the days of Greece may be revived in the woods of America and Philadelphia become the Athens of the Western World.”  Latrobe pointed out the importance of the academies and schools of art in Philadelphia—the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1805), the Walnut Street Theatre (1809), and the Society of Artists (1811)—and their associated buildings, endowments, administrators, and teachers.

The Philadelphia Athenaeum

The Philadelphia Athenaeum — literally a place for the promotion of reading and higher learning — was founded in 1814. In The National Gazette, a writer defined the Athens of America as “A city where the public library is open three to four hours in the day.”

Could Philadelphia sustain its lofty aspiration? In 1825, a Richmond, Va., newspaper reported that “Philadelphia is determined, as far as her public buildings will effect it, to establish her claim to the title of the Athens of America.” But by the 1840s, the fervor that gave rise to Philadelphia’s claim as “Athens of America” diminished. New York — the Empire City — dominated, culturally as well as economically.

Still, the image resonated into the 1890s, when the Acropolis-like site of the reservoir for the old Fairmount Waterworks was chosen for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Institutions created during the golden years continue to produce great painters and sculptors, and cultures from around the world add new layers to the city’s visual and performing arts.

Named by William Penn, Philadelphia — from the Greek Philos (loving) and adelphos (brother) — achieved greatness by modeling itself after Athens through placing importance on the arts. While cultural centers formed around the country, Philadelphians remain both the beneficiary and the inheritor of the pursuit to be the Athens of America. None would recognize the city without its arts.

Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley is Associate Curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Author information current at time of publication.)

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 through William Penn’s mind when he chose Philadelphia as the name for his new city, tucked onto the peninsula between the Delaware River and the Schuylkill. What we do know is that he chose boldly, aiming for the vault of heaven, daring irony to strike. The name he gave his city combined the Greek words for love (phileo) and brother (adelphos), setting up the enduring civic nickname: the City of Brotherly Love.  Then Penn gave his city a street grid, a charter and a diplomatic first act that he hoped would enable it to live up to that name.

So how did it turn out, this Holy Experiment?

In modern popular culture, the verdict is often rendered with a sneer.  “City of Brotherly Love” has turned into a phrase invoked more often in sarcasm than admiration.

In 1994, a Gallup Poll named Philadelphia America’s most hostile place. The most durable stereotypes about the city cluster around its fans’ penchant for booing and the colorfulness of its crime and corruption.

So William Penn’s choice can sometimes seem less destiny than irony.

But that judgment is neither complete nor fair. It ignores so much evidence.

Thanks to its founder’s impetus, and to the furthering energy of citizens from Benjamin Franklin to Richard Allen, from Lucretia Mott to John Wanamaker, from Richardson Dilworth to Mary Scullion, Philadelphia has remained one of America’s most inventive laboratories for exploring the civic potential of brotherly love and sisterly affection.

Destiny vs. Irony

Its history can be read as a long duel between destiny and irony, each vying to seize the upper hand in interpreting City of Brotherly Love.  Philadelphia hosts a continuing dialogue about what brotherly love looks like in the civic sphere.

Be clear on this:  It won’t do to reduce the notion of brotherly love to saccharine sentiment, to feelings only tender and soft.

Brotherly love does not imply the absence of conflict. Have you ever seen young brothers together?  Their bond, strong as cement though it might be, gets expressed often as not through competing, jousting, gibes, and dares.

Anger is also a way to express caring, and in Philadelphia’s long history, a common one.   Even today, some of Philadelphia’s best rowhouse citizens, who work doggedly to keep blocks decent and children safe, regard their hometown with what can only be called an angry love.   It is loyal, it endures – but it has spikes and edges.

Like the nation that chose this city (and not by accident) as the spot to declare, then define, itself, Philadelphia has struggled to define brother. Who is inside the circle, who not?

The city’s story follows a cycle: high aspiration thwarted by weakness, strife, and division, then redeemed by a new round of noble struggle, which broadens understanding and widens the circle.

Penn himself, while nobly distinguished among colonizers for his fair and respectful relations with the native Lenape, had a blind spot about blacks. He owned slaves, and excluded blacks from many of the protections of Pennsylvania’s charter. While he founded his city upon a writ of religious tolerance that made it a rare and fruitful haven, he still excluded Catholics, Jews, and Muslims from the franchise.

Some Quakers later on repaired the lapses of Penn and other forebears, becoming leaders of the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad.  Richard Allen and Absalom Jones helped advance Penn’s vision of religious freedom by insisting that it extended to the black person as well.

Abolitionist Lucretia Mott also sounded the clarion call that women, too, deserved a full role in America’s civic drama – that in fact, they were vital to bringing phileo to the polis.

As Philadelphia thrived, thanks in no small part to Penn’s legacy of openness, immigrants poured in.  The inevitable backlash flared, especially in the nineteenth century.  The Nativist riots of 1844 in Kensington were anti-Catholic bias at its ugliest. But in the long run the disorder helped make the case for the consolidation of the city into a larger, more governable but also more diverse whole.

Back and forth through the decades the dialogue flows around the city’s public squares, noisily and sometimes violently: Will the City of Brotherly Love embrace the destiny of its name, or reject it with cruel irony?

Along with dark moments – riots and beatings and tribal corruptions –  Philly has birthed great testaments to shared civic bonds, from Fairmount Park to the settlement houses to the Free Library to the Mural Arts Program.

Its National League ball team once taunted Jackie Robinson most shamefully, but the Phillies now boast two beloved African American MVPs, whose jerseys are proudly worn on backs white as well as black.

Penn’s Legacy Persists

Through it all, the legacy of William Penn, his dreams, wisdom and example, still hums in the city’s blood – despite our cantankerous failings, our ritual suspicions about the latest bidders to join the circle of brothers and sisters.

Philadelphia, by its very name, is an unfinished dream of civic feeling and common purpose, an audacious wager upon the better angels of our nature.

We, the heirs and inhabitants of a city named for love, remain quick to anger, prickly and prideful, wary of the new.

It is our way, and God knows we have some reason for it.

But we are also stubborn in love, fierce in loyalty, and our embrace of those we let inside the circle is warm, protective and unfailing.

We need to let more in, and more easily, with fewer tests.

But we Philadelphians are young, still, in this Holy Experiment, and still learning.

May the Spirit that inspired civic heroes such as William Penn, Absalom Jones,  Barnard Gratz and  St. Katharine Drexel to the heights of brotherly love and sisterly affection continue to guide us.

Chris Satullo is Executive Director of News and Civic Dialogue at WHYY. (Author information current at time of publication.) 

The firsts did not begin with Ben Franklin. Philadelphia was a vision before it was a city, and its grandest innovations were in place before Franklin was even born. The ideas that revolutionized the West, religious freedom and political democracy, were proclaimed by William Penn and put into practice by the first sturdy settlers of his colony.

Franklin did do mighty work.  But he never did it alone, and the work went on after he left the city and even after he died.  Together, in the years before 1800, Philadelphians organized almost all the essential institutions of the modern America that emerged in the nineteenth century. They created the country’s first banks, first insurance companies, and first stock exchange. The first daily newspaper, the first magazine, the first political cartoon, and the first public library.  The first patent and the first trade show.  The first turnpike and the first steamboat. The first non-sectarian college and the first university, and the first night school.  The first hospital, the first medical school, and, maybe more tellingly, the first asylum for the insane. The first law firm and the first formal teaching of the law. The first labor organization and the first strike. The first protest against slavery, the first anti-slavery society, and the first independent African American church. The Army, the Navy, and the Marines, and for that matter the nation itself, and its first flag besides.

The pace of invention scarcely slowed after 1800.  In the nineteenth century, Philadelphia claimed America’s first automobile, electric car, advertising agency, collegiate school of business, museums of science and of art, telephone, photograph, professional schools for women, books and magazines for the blind, municipal waterworks, Newman Club, rabbinic college, religious newspaper, YMCA, and more.  In the twentieth century, it had the country’s first radio license, television station, modern skyscraper, airmail delivery, scientific management, black-owned-and-operated shopping center, computer, and more.

Fanciful Firsts, Too

And the city birthed not only those great engines of progress but also inventions of delight: the nation’s first circus, balloon flight, merry-go-round, ice cream, soda  (and then, inevitably, ice cream soda), pencil with eraser, Girl Scout cookie, western novel, bubble gum, zoo, movie, revolving door, Slinky, uniforms with numbers to identify players, and more.

Still, the census did announce that New York surpassed Philadelphia in population in 1800, and Washington did displace Philadelphia as the national capital at the same time.  Later commentators have speculated with numbing regularity that Philadelphians developed an incorrigible inferiority complex after those losses and that the sense of inferiority came naturally to a city of Quakers.

But those speculations are rubbish.  Philadelphia was never a city of Quakers – by 1800, Friends were less than a tenth of its population – and Quakers were never so modest.   In William Penn’s portrait, he wore a gleaming suit of armor. He turned to Quakerism to temper his pride and try to turn it to love.  And the non-Quaker majority was never modest either. Ben Franklin expected that Philadelphia would become the capital of the British Empire and that king and Parliament would in time relocate from the Thames to the Delaware.

When the 1800 census counted more people in New York than in Philadelphia, arrogant Philadelphians simply refused to credit the count. Even in 1810, when the next tally found New York’s advantage increasing, Philadelphians still maintained that their city was larger. By 1820, they did finally concede that New York might have more inhabitants, but they insisted that Philadelphia excelled its upstart rival in law, medicine, science, art, architecture, and every other amenity of cosmopolitan culture.

Discouraging Pattern

Philadelphians did eventually grow discouraged competing with the emerging colossus to the north. After decades, even generations, of primacy, they did ultimately reconcile themselves to second place in the American urban pecking order. And when they did – when they gave up measuring themselves against New York – they launched on their most distinctive and most marvelous innovation of all.

Others cities followed New York, and in boosting and boasting they still do. Long before the nineteenth century was out, Philadelphia ceased to be an American city in that sense. It gave up braggadocio as a way of life.

It did, to be sure, mount the Centennial of 1876. It did send the Liberty Bell on promotional tours of the nation for decades.  But it did so in its own chastened way. As observers as different as Henry James and Lincoln Steffens said, it became a city peculiarly contented with itself. It did not imbibe modesty from its Quaker founders, but it did not imbibe the American disease of belief in divine blessing from them either. Quaker egalitarianism precluded  such a sense of chosenness. Quakers considered themselves merely a people among peoples. They lived well, but they did not trumpet that they lived better than anyone else.

In the nineteenth century, in New York, the Four Hundred  made fabulous fortunes while the Four Million scrambled to escape the city’s tenements and slums. In Philadelphia, the American Dream that Franklin first formulated actually touched the masses.  As one observer put it, in 1877, the city “exceeded in comfort within the reach of the poorest classes any other city in the world.”  At a time when barely a fifth of New Yorkers did, most Philadelphia families owned their own homes. The city’s people were skilled workers who made good wages, not de-skilled employees whose labor made their bosses rich. In significant numbers, they even had vacation homes in the mountains or down the shore, a full generation or two before unions and the New Deal brought such benefits to workers elsewhere.

When Philadelphia ceased to be the first city, it took to itself the title of city of firsts. The title was at once a harmless expression of pride and a profound expression of identity. It signified a place that could look backward and appreciate its past as New York never did. A city civilized in an un-American way. A city urbane as well as urban. A city of well-being as well as wealth. A city that could be an object of affection as well as an arena of ambition. Perhaps, as Penn hoped, a city of love. Certainly, a city to love.

Michael Zuckerman is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphians’ pride in home ownership had deep roots in the founding and growth of the city. But even as the boosters of the nineteenth century celebrated the city’s high proportion of homeowners, aging housing stock and developing slum conditions began to pose challenges. With prosperous residents moving outward as neighborhoods sprouted along new transportation lines, reformers and later government agencies responded to the housing needs of the poor. By the twenty-first century, Philadelphia and the surrounding region retained a housing landscape ranging from eighteenth-century rowhouses to high-rise condominiums.

Philadelphia gained its early reputation as a city of medicine through the development of hospitals and medical schools. The founding of Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 (America’s first general hospital) was an indication that by the mid-eighteenth century, Philadelphia had grown into a substantial urban complex with needs for services beyond what family and church could provide. Founded by physician Thomas Bond (1712-84) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), the nation’s first hospital joined a movement—rooted in Enlightenment thought, then underway in Britain—to create “voluntary hospitals” to care for “strangers” and the “worthy poor,” funded and conducted by private philanthropy. From the outset, the hospital contributed to the city’s allure in medical education. Its Wednesday and Saturday morning demonstration “clinics” drew crowds of nineteenth-century medical students.

Numerous hospitals subsequently arose within neighborhoods and nearby townships, supported by religious denominations or particular segments of the citizenry, such as African Americans or women. The city opened Blockley Almshouse in 1732, which later became Philadelphia General Hospital; and the origins of the Municipal Hospital for Contagious and Infectious Diseases can be traced to before 1818.  Specialty hospitals arose for care of the eyes, children, and maternity work. Reflecting the Quakers’ concern for those “deprived of reason,” Pennsylvania Hospital spawned a progressive Hospital for the Insane (1841) on then-rural grounds west of the city; a Friends Asylum (1817) was founded in the Frankford countryside. With other Quaker women, in 1862 pioneer woman doctor Ann Preston (1813-72) founded Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia to provide clinical training for women medical students and nurses. Temporary hospitals, some immense, were thrown up throughout the city to care for soldiers during the Civil War, the Satterlee in West Philadelphia being the best known. Eventually the city’s medical schools established their own hospitals.

The numerous hospitals served as objects of neighborhood pride and philanthropy, particularly service by women. In addition, their accident wards supported the city’s vast industrial growth in the nineteenth century.

Philadelphia’s place as a center of medical education can be traced to 1762 when William Shippen Jr. (1736-1808), son of a physician and educated in England and Edinburgh, initiated some lectures on anatomy and midwifery on Walnut Street near Third. Also a product of Edinburgh and European experience, the energetic John Morgan (1735-89) in 1765 proposed an enlightened plan for medical education, and with Shippen, inaugurated lectures at the College of Philadelphia intended as part of a course of study leading to a degree in medicine. From 1789 through 1791, both the revived College of Philadelphia and the newly chartered “University of the State of Pennsylvania” offered medical lectures, by feuding faculties (Philadelphia’s early teaching physicians were a notably feisty bunch). The factions united as the forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, America’s first. It won standing during the nineteenth century as one of the strongest in the nation, though strong in a stolid sort of way.

Perceiving room for another medical school in Philadelphia, if not an actual need, surgeon George McClellan (1796-1847) and some collaborators opened Jefferson Medical College in 1824. Both Penn and Jefferson welcomed huge classes, and so produced a high proportion of early American doctors. Jefferson’s faculty came to rival Penn’s in national reputation.

Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s, in Philadelphia (and elsewhere in the United States), the making of new medical colleges swelled into a kind of mania. Those after Penn and Jefferson that endured into the twentieth century included Hahnemann Medical College (1848); the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (1850; the first of its kind in the world); the Medico-Chirurgical College (1881); the Philadelphia Polyclinic and College for Graduates in Medicine (1883); and the Philadelphia College and Infirmary of Osteopathy (1899). Other schools, ranging from fully creditable to entirely fraudulent, came and went. Extinct schools included (among many) the co-educational Penn Medical University (1853), which had nothing to do with William Penn and was surely not a university. Lastly, the Medical Department of Temple College, later Temple University School of Medicine, opened in 1901. The availability of strong medical education for women, and the presence of several women’s hospitals, fostered growth of a sizeable community of women physicians and surgeons who practiced and taught here. Hahnemann Medical College taught the therapeutic system of German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1745-1843) called homeopathy, which flourished in Philadelphia.

By 1890, about 2,000 names appeared in the city’s medical directories, for a population of approximately one million. Most were doctors in the neighborhoods—serviceable, often hard-working. They saw patients in their homes and during office hours, and some attended at a hospital. They looked after illnesses severe and trivial, delivered babies, vaccinated, repaired fractures and lacerations, gave advice; and, more or less successfully, made a living.

But it was the downtown physicians and surgeons, most with senior faculty positions at Penn or Jefferson, who built Philadelphia’s reputation as the nation’s medical capital. Among the early figures were Benjamin Rush (1749-1813), a reformer interested in everything, concerned with better care of the insane, and signer of the Declaration, recalled (unfortunately) for his ferocious use of mercury and bleeding for yellow fever; Philip Syng Physick (1768-1837), “father of American surgery”; and editor and ophthalmologist Isaac Hays (1796-1879). Later in the nineteenth century came anatomist and brilliant polymath Joseph Leidy (1823-91); master teacher of internal medicine Jacob Mendez Da Costa (1833-1900); physiologist, neurologist, psychiatrist, and popular novelist S. (Silas) Weir Mitchell (1829-1914); internationally known surgeons Samuel D. Gross (1805-84), and W.W. (William Williams) Keen (1837-32), the latter very much a progressive mind and a teacher at Woman’s Medical, Jefferson, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (anatomy). Gynecologists included Washington L. Atlee (1808-78), among the first to remove uterine fibroids, and Emeline Horton Cleveland (1829-78), one of the earliest women to perform abdominal surgery. Others gained repute through specialty practice centered on disorders of the eye, ear and throat, skin, nervous system, and mind. Active as well were oddballs and dissidents–followers of arcane sectarian systems, or the radical Quakers from Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester Counties who upheld the right of women to study medicine.

It was not, of course, novels or Arctic ice that established the stature of Philadelphia doctors in the nineteenth century. What then? One can extrapolate from what the distinguished anatomist and historian George W. Corner (1889-1981) wrote about the senior faculty at Penn: “The University’s medical teachers had always been superb clinicians—masters of diagnosis and treatment and polished expositors.” That is, they brought comprehensive knowledge and experience to their practices and teaching (and many were broadly erudite beyond their professional expertise).

For most of the nineteenth century, medical practice drew upon the foundational sciences of anatomy and morbid anatomy (pathology, the study of structural change in organs caused by disease). Philadelphia’s skilled anatomists dissected, taught, and wrote books that added to the city’s reputation as a city of medicine. Several brought back the ideas and methods they had studied in Paris. The reputations of Philadelphia’s doctors spread through their participation in national organizations, consulting or teaching visits out of town, and the praise of their students. They benefited from Philadelphia’s centrality in medical publishing: its enormous production of medical books in the nineteenth century far exceeded that of New York or Boston. Philadelphia physicians readily fed the publishers’ demands for new textbooks and manuals (including homeopathic). For more than 100 years, the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, edited and published in Philadelphia, prevailed as the country’s leading such periodical.

In the early twentieth century, however, Philadelphia lost its edge. Significantly, the influence of Philadelphia’s American Journal of the Medial Sciences declined, while the New England Journal of Medicine, published in Boston, gained scriptural standing. Not only Boston but also New York and Baltimore challenged Philadelphia for medical leadership of the United States, and in some ways won. The destabilizing factor was experimental laboratory research—or, unhappily for the Quaker City, the paucity of it in the city’s medical colleges. The decisive factor was philanthropy—or the paucity of it for Philadelphia’s medical colleges.

By the 1880s and 1890s the center of advance in medical science had shifted from the hospital wards and autopsy rooms of Paris to the universities and laboratories of Germany. Beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, the acceptance of microbes as the cause of many diseases leant enormous luster to the laboratory and its workers. Physiology, the study of function, seemed a promising field. A handful of young American medical graduates worked under German scientists in the 1880s and 1890s, then returned home to seek a place to do original laboratory research. The only likely locus in Philadelphia in this period was Penn, but it was not to be. One of these German-trained men, Simon Flexner (1863-1946), came to the university in 1899 but left in 1903, disappointed by the lack of interest and resources for investigation. He went to New York to head the new Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. In a history of Penn’s medical school, George W. Corner wrote that in this period its leaders failed to recognize that “for a generation and more to come, the advance of medicine was going to depend on discoveries in biology and biochemistry that would rapidly alter the physician’s whole outlook.” Corner might have added physiology and bacteriology. It was indicative of local inertia that neither Jefferson nor Penn required course work in bacteriology until ten years after Robert Koch (1843-1910) in Germany announced the discovery of the microbe causing tuberculosis.

Aware of the need to move forward, progressive leaders at the Penn medical school in 1910 effected a reform program (really a coup), which promoted David Edsall (1869-1945), an alumnus and faculty member with sound credentials in both laboratory and clinical work. The insurrection displaced several senior professors and brought in promising researchers from outside the city. Regrettably, the “old guard” among faculty managed a counter-revolution: Edsall left Penn and soon guided the rise of Harvard University Medical School to pre-eminence.

Perhaps these events reflected the larger intellectual outlook of Philadelphia in the nineteenth century. Never as overtly concerned with pure knowledge as Bostonians, Philadelphians excelled in the realm of the useful and tangible: mechanical innovation and making things well, illustration and lithography, architecture and building, and the practice of medicine and surgery. Unlike at Harvard and Yale, at Penn the science, engineering, and medical schools occupied most of the space. Of course erudition and scholarship could be easily found in the city, but for the most part, the practical prevailed. The leading nineteenth-century physicians and surgeons of Philadelphia did publish a great deal that was new—careful anatomical and pathological observations, discerning descriptions of diseases, novel procedures and remedies. But animal experimentation in the laboratory seemed foreign.

As medical science advanced in Boston under Edsall, several accidents of philanthropy favored the ascent of Baltimore and New York City as national centers of medical education and research. In the nineteenth century, Americans saw medicine as practical work and a source of livelihood and thus not as an object of charitable support. Neither government nor individuals subsidized medical research. Few Philadelphians made donations to the city’s medical schools. (A modest exception was the Woman’s Medical College, embraced by its Quaker friends.)  Nor did this usually occur elsewhere. But in Baltimore, Quaker businessman Johns Hopkins unexpectedly bequeathed his immense fortune to the founding of a hospital and a university. The early trustees chose to build the university on the German research model, including a medical school linked to the hospital. The Johns Hopkins Medical School opened in 1893—with former Philadelphian William Osler (1849-1919) as one of its prized founding faculty.

In 1910 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, founded in 1905, in conjunction with the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association, engaged educator Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), Simon’s brother, to carry out an inspection of North American medical schools. Flexner’s famous report of 1910, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, furthered a process already underway to raise standards and close marginal, or worse, schools. Subsequently, Flexner directed the distribution of grants from the Rockefeller General Education Board to the stronger schools. Dogmatic and sometimes arrogant, Flexner insisted on the “full-time plan” (essentially, that medical school teachers be on salary, not mainly in private practice); nurturing of research; and assured access to hospital teaching beds. His vision also demanded a continued reduction in the number of medical schools in the United States, with no more than one school, fully part of a university, in each metropolis.

Neither “full-time” for clinical faculty nor the giving up of schools much appealed to medical Philadelphia, where at each older institution a distinct personality and heritage had evolved, upheld by alumni, faculty, and even students. For a time, however, Penn and Jefferson diligently worked towards a merger, or at least an awkward sort of coupling that would perhaps look like a merger to Flexner, but still preserve individual identities. The press touted the plan: “Philadelphia is now in a fair way to become a contender for the title of the medical center of America” said the Philadelphia Press on June 3, 1916—tacitly admitting that the city already had lost such status (other newspapers agreed). The unlikely merger plan dissolved in 1917, and with it, the expectations for major foundation funding. By 1920, the Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropies had contributed approximately $80 million for the development and endowment of American medical schools. None of this money came to Philadelphia.

Although some meaningful local gifts aided the city’s medical schools in this period and Philadelphia surely had wealth, no one in the city matched John D. Rockefeller. The largest single act of philanthropy aimed at education was by banker Anthony J. Drexel (1826-93), whose admirable creation of the Drexel Institute for Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University) in 1893 centered for the most part on providing affordable practical education matched to the industrial needs of the city and the age. An assessment of Philadelphia philanthropy from 1893 praised Drexel, while declaring that the city’s millionaires tended to send their dollars far away–to “famine stricken Russians,” the “red man on the frontier,” and, generally, to “the dark and hidden places of the earth.”

A sampling of the leading journals of experimental work in medicine in the mid-1920s reveals that although Philadelphia sent forth a few papers, Boston, Baltimore, and New York generated substantially more. The earliest American medical scientists to win Nobel prizes in physiology or medicine included researchers at the Rockefeller Institute in New York and Harvard Medical School in Boston, but none from Philadelphia. Of course, the city’s medical fabric was not entirely dormant. Sound scientific work developed in microbiology and in some of the stronger “basic science” departments of the medical schools. In the early 1920s, A. Newton Richards (1876-1976) at Penn, who as a young imported pharmacologist-physiologist managed to survive the counter-revolution of 1910, carried out with colleagues brilliant studies of the function of the kidney. In doing so, he attracted some of the city’s earliest research support from a foundation, the Commonwealth Fund.

Philadelphia’s opportunity for a medical revival came in the 1950s. A flood of research support which appeared from the National Institutes of Health (and other governmental funding) led to, if not a leveling, at least considerable opportunity for all of Philadelphia’s medical schools, and some hospitals, to expand their clinical services and increase research productivity. Soon the schools swelled into “academic medical centers,” keenly competing with each other while looking more and more like each other. Woman’s Medical admitted men, and Hahnemann ejected Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathy, as it made an astonishing transformation from minute doses (a tenet of this practice) to a skyscraper stacked high with intensive care units. In the absence rational planning based on needs of the citizens, many of the old neighborhood hospitals became poor and closed, while a corridor of high-tech clinical centers—Pennsylvania Hospital, Jefferson, Hahnemann/Drexel, Penn, Presbyterian—formed an imposing east-west alignment downtown. Temple to the north struggled valiantly with the burdens of caring for the sick and shot-up poor, as did the surviving hospitals in deteriorating districts. Beyond the city’s borders, some of the larger community hospitals, such as Lankenau and Abington in the suburbs and Cooper in Camden, expanded their educational functions and established successful research programs. All of this growth created jobs for nurses, physicians, scientists, technicians, billers and coders, and more, and required the ceaseless construction of buildings and additions. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics documented “education and health services” (combined in its statistics) as the region’s largest employment supersector.

Even in the period of decline in the early decades of the twentieth century, Philadelphia’s medical institutions never lost their reputation for the highest quality training of medical students, residents, nurses, and pharmacists; in fact, the attraction grew as the major centers expanded.  By the later decades of the twentieth century, “health care” and health-care education became the region’s dominant industry. White coats, short and long, continued as an enduring visible attribute of the city and region.

Steven J. Peitzman is Professor of Medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine. His historical work includes the book  A New and Untried Course: Woman’s Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850 – 1998 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), and articles about medicine and medical education in Philadelphia and Germantown. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Curiously, the moniker of “The City of Neighborhoods” is carried by the city Penn founded instead of one of the European cities where firmly established neighborhoods existed long before Philadelphia was even a figment in Penn’s imagination.

New York City, formally founded before Penn’s arrival in America, has hundreds more identified neighborhoods than Philadelphia, judging by the list of nearly two hundred neighborhood names compiled by the Philadelphia City Department of Records. In New York, for example, there are nearly ninety neighborhoods in Queens, one of the five boroughs comprising America’s largest city. Yet New York’s Department of City Planning references America’s largest city merely as “A City of Neighborhoods” – not using “the” as a distinguishing word as Philadelphia does. Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities also regard themselves as “a” City of Neighborhoods.

Origins of “Neighborhoods” Label Unclear

The origins of Philadelphia’s claim as “The City of Neighborhoods” are unclear. The city was regarded as “The City of Homes” as far back as the 1870s, and an 1893 book termed Philadelphia “a city of residences” with praise for the legacy of homeownership by “employers and employees” dating from Penn’s arrival. A 1976 booklet on the historical development of Philadelphia neighborhoods published by Philadelphia’s City Planning Commission stated, “Philadelphia as a city of neighborhoods has antecedents as far back as the city’s founding.”

Referencing Philadelphia as “The City of Neighborhoods” – whether the savvy snagging of an adroit marketing slogan or sheer happenstance – is consistent with the fact that historically Philadelphia has a track record of defining itself through its residential character.

Implicit in Philadelphia’s “City of Neighborhoods” dynamic is the intense pride Philadelphians hold regarding the distinct residential communities comprising this city. While Philadelphians love their city they particularly love those sections of their city where they were born, raised, and in many instances continue to live.

Many of the current neighborhoods around Philadelphia existed as separate boroughs, districts, or townships in the County of Philadelphia before absorption into the city via the 1854 Act of Consolidation.  Until that time, the city’s boundaries followed Penn’s original plan, extending from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River and from Vine to South Streets.

Tacony Is Oldest

The distinction of being Philadelphia’s oldest continuously occupied neighborhood belongs to Tacony, with records of residents dating from a decade prior to William Penn’s arrival. This neighborhood located along the Delaware River, in what is now Philadelphia’s Lower Northeast section, is near the place where Penn made a Treaty of Peace with the Native Americans who originally inhabited the Philadelphia region.

Consolidation brought previously separate jurisdictions into the city such as Spring Garden on the northwest edge of Penn’s original city boundaries and historic Germantown, formally founded one year before William Penn’s arrival.

Germantown, eight miles outside the original boundaries of Philadelphia, retains evidence of its past in its many historic buildings, including a house George Washington used during his presidency. Spring Garden, now a middle-class neighborhood, in the twentieth century gained an additional designation as the “Art Museum Area” for its location near the famed Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Neighborhoods also formed through transportation innovations and real estate development. Mount Airy, in Philadelphia’s leafy Northwest section, inherited its name from the mansion owned by a Colonial-era Chief Justice of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court.  But it expanded residentially in the late 1800s, spurred partly by the extension of trolley and commuter train lines from the city core. Girard Estates, in South Philadelphia, arose in the early 1900s when the City of Philadelphia built rental homes on land once owned by banker Stephen Girard, the richest man in the United States when he died in 1831.

Byberry Known for Abolitionist Leanings

Byberry, in the Far Northeast section, was the most rural section of Philadelphia County at the time of the 1854 Consolidation and had a vibrant abolitionist/anti-slavery presence prior to the Civil War. One of the nation’s first protests against school segregation occurred there in 1853 when a wealthy African American, the richest resident in that community, refused to pay taxes and forced town leaders to quickly reverse their edict on banning black children from the public school.

Philadelphia neighborhoods appear to be stable, yet they are continually changing.

This is evident in Society Hill, the lauded upscale community of colonial-era homes adjacent to Independence National Historical Park. The name Society Hill originated with the Free Society of Traders, a colonial-era merchant’s society, and once applied to the entire region from today’s Pine Street down to Christian Street. The name fell out of use by the nineteenth century, but assumed new life during the 1950s period of urban renewal.

Urban renewal transformed Society Hill from a hardscrabble residential area filled with commercial buildings into an elite enclave. However, that renewal also triggered removal of Philadelphia’s oldest African American community dating from colonial times – the area examined in Dr. W.E.B. DuBois’ seminal 1899 book, The Philadelphia Negro, prepared as sociological research for the University of Pennsylvania.

Powelton Village, a West Philadelphia neighborhood north of Drexel University and adjacent to Thirtieth Street Station, began its residential life in the late 1800s as a location desired by some of the city’s industrial tycoons. After some descent on the economic ladder, Powelton Village again gained distinction as the locus for Philadelphia’s counter-culture and anti-Vietnam War scenes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Currently Powelton Village, with streets lined with Victorian-era homes and a listing on the National Register of Historic Places, enjoys a quiet residential character.

Other neighborhoods have physically disappeared.

Wissahickon Residents Bought Out

The rugged wilderness-like Wissahickon Valley in Fairmount Park, listed as a National Natural Landmark, once contained residential clusters of housing for workers in the scores of water-powered mills along the Wissahickon Creek. During the late nineteenth century, the housing and mills were razed as the Fairmount Park Commission bought land to preserve the purity of the creek for Philadelphia’s water supply.

During the 1980s a large section of Logan was demolished because homes built there decades earlier were constructed on unstable ground, causing the foundations to sink and some houses to collapse. That razing of nearly 1,000 homes left an eerie landscape of street grids with no structures.

Surprisingly for a city steeped in history, the neighborhood-memory of most Philadelphians extends back for only a couple of decades. Neighborhood histories sometimes become lost as populations and places change, but new histories are constantly being created.

Few among the thousands coming to the Sports Complex in South Philadelphia yearly to cheer the city’s professional baseball team are aware that Philadelphia’s century-plus-long baseball tradition began in North Philadelphia during the nineteenth century.

Beginning in the 1870s, North Philly housed six of the thirteen facilities used by the city’s professional baseball teams. Two teams from that era remain active in Major League Baseball, including the Phillies, who played in North Philly until Veterans Stadium opened in South Philadelphia in 1971. The other is the American League team once known as the Philadelphia Athletics, now the Oakland Athletics following a move to the Midwest in the 1950s and then to the West Coast.

Pastoral North Philadelphia

North Philadelphia, although identified in the public mind as quintessentially inner-city urban, began as a rural pastoral area.

North Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion section, once known as Summerville, traces its name to a mansion-housed restaurant that once served strawberries and cream to wealthy guests in the nineteenth century. In a placid park section on the western edge of Strawberry Mansion are a series of architecturally significant colonial-era mansions located on ridges overlooking the Schuylkill River.

Now overwhelmingly African American, in the first half of the twentieth century Strawberry Mansion housed Philadelphia’s largest Jewish community, numbering more than 30,000 residents. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the neighborhood’s total population dropped to 22,562, and 97.58 percent of those residents were African American. Whites in Strawberry Mansion – of all religious and ethnic groupings – comprised less than one-half of one percent of the community’s population.

Successive waves of immigrants from across Europe, blacks migrating from the South, and Latinos (primarily Puerto Ricans) have added distinctive imprints on the complexions of neighborhoods.

Many currently think of Philadelphia’s Latino community as historically rooted in northeastern North Philadelphia and western Kensington, but there is also a fading memory of the once-vibrant Puerto Rican presence in Spring Garden, evidenced by the Roberto Clemente Playground. That facility honors Clemente, the Puerto Rican-born professional baseball star and respected humanitarian, who was the first Latino selected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. (Interestingly, Clemente has no direct connection to Philadelphia.)

Many see South Philadelphia as historically the Italian section of the city. Few are aware of that area’s origins with Swedish settlers as evidenced by the Gloria Dei (Old Swedes’) Church, the oldest church in Pennsylvania. And along with Italians, the area has growing Mexican and Southeast Asian populations.

Asian Immigration

Most recently, immigration from East Asian countries like Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam expanded the business ownership complexion of Philadelphia’s Chinatown, located in Center City a few blocks east of City Hall, and other city neighborhoods.

Ironically, Philadelphia’s famous nickname – the “City of Brotherly Love,” derived from the translation of the Greek name Penn gave his city – masks a history of un-neighborly turmoil.

Philadelphia’s earliest turf-related race riots targeted African Americans in today’s Society Hill in the early nineteenth century, and by the 1840s anti-Catholic sentiment targeted Irish immigrants in Kensington and Southwark.

In the 1950s and 1960s efforts to preserve racial integration by staunching “white flight” became defining struggles in neighborhoods like Mount Airy and the Wynnefield section of West Philadelphia. Today Mount Airy is widely recognized as a national model for an integrated neighborhood.

In the 1980s some politicians in Philadelphia’s Northeast mounted a campaign to have that section secede from the city and become an entity known as Liberty County.  Secession supporters cited their feeling of being overtaxed but receiving short-shrift in city services. Critics of the movement claimed the campaign rested in part on a desire to sustain the then-overwhelming white population character of that sprawling area, which built up residentially largely after World War II.

The proposed state legislation to create the separate Liberty County died from inaction. In the decades that followed, diversity in the Northeast increased with non-whites from other sections of Philadelphia and immigrants from Russia and other countries.

The dawn of the twenty-first century did not lessen turf-related tensions. South Philadelphia High School witnessed attacks on Asian students by black classmates and tensions roiled in Southwest Philadelphia between blacks and immigrants from African countries.

Neighborhoods are sometimes places of conflict but at the same time they remain sources of pride. The heartfelt loyalty held by Philadelphians about their neighborhoods radiates through the collective psyche of the city. That loyalty animates the Philly-centric sense of place and purpose manifest in an emotional swagger referenced locally as “Attytood.”

“Attytood” is a driving force in Philadelphia, contributing to national reputations for the love of local cuisine like juicy cheesesteaks and dry soft pretzels and the often-raucous sports fans’ allegiances to local professional sports teams. Consistent with “Attytood.”  the name for the mascot of Philadelphia’s Major League Baseball team is the “Phillie Phanatic.”

Although Philadelphia’s population fluctuates and the features of its communities change, the pride in being a part of a neighborhood remains resilient.

Linn Washington Jr. is Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University and Co-Director of Philadelphianeighborhoods.com. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Steffens’ reports helped launch a period of investigative reporting that President Theodore Roosevelt labeled “muckraking” in a moment of pique, but the phenomenon was otherwise quite compatible with his own reform orientation. Muckraking faded with the reform era itself, but the impression never fully disappeared that Philadelphia deserved the label Steffens had given it. Inquirer columnist Karen Heller invoked Steffens more recently in connection with reports of political pressure to direct $50 million to a favored candidate to operate a charter school. Can so little have changed?  Is Philadelphia still corrupt and still contented?

Steffens was in the business of selling magazines, and no doubt he heightened his account for effect. There’s no evidence, really, for the story he recounted of a “party of boodlers” divvying up their graft in unison with the ancient chime of Independence Hall. His account of  misfeasance was well enough documented to leave a lasting effect, however. Despite a number of good government efforts, some of which continue today, including the Committee of Seventy dating to 1904, the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, which started as the Bureau of Municipal Research, and the Fels Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, the suspicion lingers that the public remains all too acquiescent in a political system riddled with conflicts of interest and hidden from adequate public scrutiny.

Anti-Immigration Sentiment

The system Steffens described had its roots in the nineteenth century. Some blamed election day improprieties and the exchange of political favors on the bad effect of masses of newcomers to the city, many of them immigrants with little experience with democratic practice. Anti-immigration sentiment reached a peak with the mid-century rise of a nativist movement, which attempted to extend the waiting period for citizenship to 21 years for the foreign born and to discipline immigrant workers through the prohibition of alcohol. The year this movement reached its peak, in 1854 with the election of a nativist mayor, the city consolidated with the county, and a very different political dynamic ensued.

An expanded city needed a variety of public services. The provision of new streets, gas and water mains, and public transportation all generated opportunities for money to change hands. As permits were issued, as charters were granted, as the number of city workers expanded to 15,000 by the time Steffens wrote, the lines between public power and private profit converged.  Something had to hold this fragmented system together, and taking a cut—“honest graft’ as Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkitt famously labeled the practice—seemed to be part of the necessary price. But that price could be exorbitant too. The traction magnates William L. Elkins and Peter A.B. Widener consolidated so much money and power for themselves, they formed the model for Theodore Dreiser’s own muckraking trilogy, beginning with The Financier in1912.

One  monument to the system not matched in any other city Steffens examined was Philadelphia City Hall. Covering fully four acres at the heart of the city where William Penn had laid out four squares to form a central park, the massive structure took thirty years to build and cost $24 million, fully $14 million in overruns. Politicians shepherding the project extracted a host of benefits for themselves, all the time keeping thousands of city workers employed.

The political machine Steffens described had only recently consolidated, following a reform effort that culminated in passage of a new city charter in 1887. What he described was the aftermath of such efforts, when the “morning glory” reformers, as their critics liked to call them, retired from public life to take up their private pursuits once again.  Given even greater power under the new rules, partisan politicians again emerged triumphant, supported by continued growth in patronage positions that reached 23,000 in the 1920s, second only to New York City.

1951: Republican Reign Ends

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal failed to unseat the city’s Republican political machine, but spurred by many of the reforms instituted at the national level in the 1930s, Joseph Clark, together with Richardson Dilworth, brought the Republican reign to an end with their elections as mayor and district attorney respectively in 1951.  Not incidentally, their election coincided with passage of a home rule charter, which instituted a professional managing director for the city and required civil service exams for many jobs that had been previously doled out as political patronage.

It might be too much to accept Karen Heller’s implication that the Clark-Dilworth years represented only a short hiatus between 85 years of entrenched and calcified Republican rule and 60 years of entrenched and calcified Democratic rule. Whatever good intentions or formal mechanisms were instituted in the 1950s, however, they clearly did not prevent the practice we routinely describe as pay-to-play from infecting public governance, not just in Philadelphia but throughout the region. The central features of the ward system Steffens described in 1903 remain in place today in the city, and in the suburbs service contracts can be repaid quite legally in the form of political contributions to the party controlling the bidding.  Occasionally a politician will step far enough over the line to be punished under the law. Vincent Fumo and Wayne Bryant come most readily to mind. For the most part, the system prevails in forms that would be still recognizable to earlier generations.

It was Steffens’ belief that his reports would arouse public opinion sufficiently that it would ultimately cleanse the system.  That tradition continues with investigative journalism and widespread use of the Internet to expose corruption. It’s just possible that the Tea Party and Occupy Philadelphia each manifest signs of an awakened electorate. Like Steffens, however, we should not be blind to the obstacles to reform. Transparency and accountability need mechanisms for their sustainability. It won’t be enough to reign in political excesses like DROP (Deferred Retirement Option Program) or to assure that only verified voters cast their ballots.  If this is to be yet another Progressive era, voters need to pressure both political parties to make far more effective use of public revenues, even while acknowledging how important those investments are to the modern metropolis.

Howard Gillette is Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Pride of place, if we can be generous for a moment, can be shared. Mark Twain once called Switzerland the Cradle of Liberty because alpine-born democracy had roots there too. Indeed the world is full of cradles of liberty, and some are now being violently rocked by young people hooked into social media as the Arab Spring turns the Middle East upside down.

Yet, Philadelphia is a special cradle of liberty.

It not only was where the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention did their epic work.  Indeed, a century and more before, it was the city imagined by the visionary William Penn as a place where people of all classes, cultures, and ancestral backgrounds would learn to live together. Penn and his Quaker followers were determined to establish a unique colony free of the violence, intolerance, and corruption that were widespread on both sides of the Atlantic.  Just a generation before, Puritans in Massachusetts were hanging Quakers on the Boston Common, and only a few years before Penn arrived they were bent on eradicating Wampanoag people from the Bay Colony

Religious and Ethnic Tolerance

Philadelphia—to be called the “city of brotherly love”—never entirely lived up to its visionary founding principles; but nowhere else in the hemisphere did colonizing Europeans display such substantial toleration for religious and ethnic differences and such peaceful relations with Native Americans.  “I deplore two principles in religion,” Penn wrote memorably; “obedience upon authority without conviction and destroying them that differ with me for Christ’s sake.” Most European visitors were astounded at such words and at how they took hold.

For a while, Penn’s vision of “putting the power in the people” was realized in good measure.  And then, nearly a century after Penn’s arrival, Philadelphia was the place where those stirring words that ricocheted around the world—“inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and “we the people”—were written and enshrined.  For generations to come, a storm of strangers would cherish Philadelphia as the place where these founding documents were written and ratified.

But many of the strangers came unfree and involuntarily. From Africa, they would wait a long time before they saw Philadelphia as a cradle of liberty. But they insisted that liberty should be theirs as well and were not shy about invoking the principles espoused in the nation’s founding documents. “Search the legends of tyranny and find no precedent.” thundered James Forten, accomplished sailmaker, businessman, church leader, and philanthropist, in 1813.  “It has been left for Pennsylvania to raise her ponderous arm against the liberties of the black, whose greatest boast has been that he resided in a state where civil liberty and sacred justice were administered alike to all.”  Shaking the cradle of liberty, he warned, in his effort to ward off vicious laws restricting free black men and women, that “the story will fly from the north to the south, and the advocates of slavery, the traders in human blood, will smile contemptuously at the once boasted moderation and humanity of Pennsylvania.”

Two decades later, when “the cradle of liberty” motto was gaining currency, abolitionists in Boston and New York, seizing on the words from Leviticus inscribed on the brim of Philadelphia’s old State House bell, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.”  Rechristening the bell as “the Liberty Bell,” they shamed Philadelphia for lagging behind in the crusade to cleanse the nation of its deep-dyed sin of chattel bondage.

Clash of Liberty and Slavery

This put Philadelphia on the defensive, its cradle of liberty motto under attack. “Shame on you,” shouted one abolitionist pamphlet with the Liberty Bell on its cover. “Is it to be tyrants amid slaves that Americans, with liberty glowing on every page of their history, and the glorious Declaration of Independence upon their lips, have been found willing to degrade themselves?” Another charged: “Hitherto, the bell has not obeyed he inscription: and its peals have been a mockery, while one sixth of all inhabitants are in abject slavery.”

And with that, the bell tarnished, the cradle of liberty needed repairs.  That came as Philadelphians of different political persuasions paraded their own brand of liberty—Protestant nativists who put the Liberty Bell on a pedestal, literally, in Independence Hall in 1855 while attacking Catholics; pro-labor advocates such as the wildly popular journalist George Lippard, who fought to protect blue collar liberty from exploitative capitalists; and black Philadelphians struggling for social justice and the right to vote. In a fast-growing, immigrant-filled city many wanted to claim part of the cradle.

In time, the city cemented its claim as the cradle of liberty. The millions who thronged to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in1876 had plenty of encouragement in reaffirming that Penn’s green country town was the cradle of liberty. Ownership of the cradle was strengthened as surging crowds paraded down Broad Street for the centennial of the Constitutional Convention in 1887.

Then into the twentieth century people of all political persuasions came to Philadelphia to embrace the Liberty Bell as the preeminent talisman of freedom.  Among them were women suffragists during the Great War for whom the “cradle of liberty” terminology was dishonestly used while women were denied the suffrage.

Ideals vs. Realities

Similarly, when he was working to establish a National Freedom Day on which Americans could annually measure the distance between the nation’s glittering ideals and the somber realities on the ground, Richard R. Wright Sr., who had been born in slavery, knew just where to come. By laying a wreath in 1942 at the feet of the Liberty Bell, he furthered the notion of mending a splintered cradle of liberty. Civil rights activists repeated this ritual in the 1960s and 1970s by conducting sit-ins and demonstrations at Independence Hall

After World War II, leaders from newly independent countries—David Ben Gurion from Israel, Jomo Kenyetta from Kenya, a Ghanaian delegation, and many others—came not to New York or Boston but to Philadelphia, where they stood in Independence Hall and before the Liberty Bell to honor freedom’s birthplace that inspired their own quests for freedom. Cold War statesmen followed: Albert Tarchiani, the Italian ambassador to the U.S. in 1948; Ernst Reuter, mayor West Berlin, and Mohammed Mossedeq, premier of Iran, in 1951; Clement Atllee, prime minister of England in 1952; Nicholas Kallay and Mario Scelba, premiers of Hungary and Italy respectively in 1955.

The stream of international figures coming to pay their respects to Philadelphia as the cradle of liberty continues to the present day as they partake in the city’s historic role in building the nation. Yet the cradle still has cracks and blemishes. Perfecting it and keeping it in good repair requires an ongoing commitment to shoulder the responsibility of living up to the motto. This is the work of citizens, organizations, institutions, and politicians.  Boasting about Philadelphia as the cradle of liberty is one thing; cradling liberty is another.

Gary B. Nash is Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA and the author of many books, including First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Yet it would be wrong to assume from this history that Penn instilled Philadelphia with a commitment to public space. From the city’s earliest days, its parks have been underfunded and under-appreciated. Instead of valuing them as places for leisurely enjoyment, Philadelphia has too often treated its parks as workhorses that can be harnessed to practical municipal goals, especially economic development. Philadelphia’s beautiful parks have continually defended themselves against private interests, parochial concerns, and municipal parsimony in a never-ending struggle for survival.

While Penn envisioned Philadelphia as a lush American Eden, he was, at his core, a real estate developer – among America’s first. He recognized that the inclusion of open space could help make his urban experiment more appealing to buyers. The five squares were useful because they helped relieve the regularity of Philadelphia’s street grid, while increasing the value of nearby house lots. But deep down, Penn didn’t really like the idea of parks. As historian Elizabeth Milroy has noted, as a young man Penn had written articles warning of the ungodly temptations of public gardens. Meditative strolls had their place, he acknowledged, but such unproductive fun as “bowling greens, Hors races…and such like Sports” was to be avoided at all cost.  Ultimately, Penn’s need to move real estate overrode his moral reservations. That pragmatic approach has informed the city’s attitude toward its parks ever since.

Penn was suspicious of cities in general. His attitudes were shaped, in part, by the back-to-back disasters that befell London during his youth – the outbreak of plague in 1665, followed by the massive fire in 1666 that destroyed the city’s medieval center. When it came time to lay out Philadelphia’s grid with surveyor Thomas Holme in 1683, Penn was determined to improve upon London’s plan. To limit the spread of disease and fire, he insisted that Philadelphia’s houses should be set on big lots and arrayed along wide streets. Penn declared that Philadelphia would be a “greene Country Towne which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.”

Five Squares With a Funding Dilemma

Having bequeathed those five public squares to the city as part of the plan, Penn then established the great Philadelphia tradition of not funding them. Because no money was allotted for turning the wild blocks into landscaped parks, Philadelphians quickly developed the habit of using their public spaces to dump trash. They became convenient places to hang criminals and bury the poor. It wasn’t until 1820 that the city government agreed to take responsibility for their upkeep. Philadelphia’s reluctance to financially support its parks would become a regular theme.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia began to accumulate the large tracts that would eventually become Fairmount Park.  What motivated the purchases? The appeal of Sunday carriage rides along the Schuylkill River was certainly one factor, but what really spurred the city was the practical need to protect the city’s water supply from polluting industries that clustered upriver. Once again, Philadelphia saw no reason to hire a landscape architect to give the park form, unlike other large cities that clamored for the services of Frederick Law Olmsted and other planners.  Philadelphia did fund some improvements in the years leading up to the Centennial Exhibition, as Fairmount Park grew to 2,600 acres, but contributions fell as soon as the event was over. Milroy calculates that in the 1870s the city was spending roughly $83 an acre, a pittance compared to the $916 that New York lavished on each of Central Park’s 862 precious acres.

Today Philadelphia has the unfortunate distinction of spending less on its park system than any big city in America. Fairmount Park has not seen its budget increase in more than two decades. In 2010, the operating budget for Fairmount Park’s 9,200 acres sank to a woeful $12.6 million. Consider: New York devotes $8 million to the four acres of Bryant Park alone. Chicago, which imposes a special tax assessment to keep its green spaces looking spiffy, spends 30 times as much as Philadelphia on parks.

One reason that Philadelphia’s parks are underfunded is because they are not seen as having any practical value. Like Penn, today’s public officials still think of parks as a tool – rather than as an amenity where residents can relax or play games.  It is no accident that we often refer to green space here as a “resource,” a word that suggests the potential for money-making exploitation, as if a park were as fungible as reserves of oil and timber.  It’s no wonder that the city faced little opposition in the 1960s when it sliced off a beautiful stretch of its Schuylkill River frontage to build a highway. Even nowadays when the city adds parkland, it is often with a practical policy objective in mind. The two biggest park projects of the last half-century – Penn’s Landing and Independence Mall – have been viewed as part of a strategy for marketing the city to tourists. It’s telling that neither space includes that most basic of residential amenities: a children’s playground.

Parks vs. Business Interests

This way of thinking about parks cannot simply be ascribed to the misjudgments of the urban renewal years.  When Fox Chase Cancer Center needed room for expansion in 2008, the John F. Street Administration offered to sell the hospital twenty acres from Burholme Park, a popular park in the Northeast. His successor, Mayor Michael Nutter, continued to push the deal until it was overturned in court. The judge had to remind the city that Robert Ryerss – a wealthy Quaker, like Penn – had donated Burholme Park’s sixty acres “for the use and enjoyment of the people forever.” Despite this reprimand, Mayor Nutter came up with a plan two years later to trade away more parkland, this time to help out a tour boat operator called Ride the Ducks. The company called for cutting a trench through the popular Schuylkill Banks recreation trail to make it possible for boats carrying kazoo-tooting tourists to access the river. The scheme was dropped only after a public outcry.

Mayor Nutter certainly would not consider himself to be anti-park. Within months of announcing his intention to hand over a section of Schuylkill Banks to the Ducks, he released a commendable scheme to enlarge the Fairmount Park system by converting the city’s asphalt schoolyards to mini parks. Of course, the plan has a practical benefit that goes beyond providing a softer, more natural environment for kids to play catch. The green surfaces will slow water run-off, thus reducing the need to add costly sewer pipes.

Shortly after this proposal to green 500 acres was announced, the new census confirmed what many in Philadelphia had long suspected: The city’s population was growing again, for the first time in half a century. As energy prices rise, dense urban centers like Philadelphia are well placed to attract more new residents. But, in the age of the internet, the city will have to compete to keep its residents satisfied, and that means providing high-quality parks and amenities.  After three centuries of describing itself as a green country town, it’s time for Philadelphia to live up to its brand.

Inga Saffron is the Architecture Critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Author information current at time of publication.)