When the Benjamin Franklin Bridge (originally named Delaware River Bridge) opened in 1926, the accompanying egress road on the New Jersey side attracted little fanfare. Yet boosters in Camden envisioned Bridge Approach Boulevard as the flagship road in an automotive-centric civic project known as “Greater Camden’s Gateway to New Jersey.” They hoped the project would elevate Camden’s position in the region and make Camden a “second Brooklyn,” the hub of southern New Jersey.

To this end, the city hired landscape architect Charles Wellford Leavitt (1871-1928) to create an intricate web of highways that would connect Camden to the suburbs all the way to the Atlantic coast. Leavitt was an advocate of the “City Beautiful Movement,” which advanced the idea that the beautification of cities through parks and monuments would have a positive effect on the morals and behavior of their residents. Leavitt believed the entryway into South Jersey should showcase Camden, and city boosters lobbied for a hotel near the foot of the bridge, as well as a civic center. The remainder of the Boulevard, which extended into the suburbs, would feature extensive landscaping and a park with a view of the western tributary of the Cooper River and Camden High School.

It was not long before business interests saw opportunities on the new Boulevard that would alter its original civic goals. When it decided to open its first store in Camden, Sears, Roebuck & Company insisted on a location along the Boulevard, rather than in downtown Camden. The company and the city struck a deal that modified the original plan for a civic center near the western end of the Boulevard, and instead a new Sears with ample parking opened there in 1927. Although the city abandoned the civic center concept, it still influenced the design of the store. Unlike other Sears retail stores it had designed in Boston and Chicago, the architecture firm Nimmons, Carr and Wright adopted the classical revival style for the Camden location, influenced by Leavitt and the City Beautiful Movement.

With the opening of Sears, other businesses envisioned opportunities to appeal to the driving consumer on the Boulevard. In 1933, Camden native Richard Hollingshead Jr. (1900-75) opened the world’s first drive-in movie theater on the north side of Admiral Wilson. Based on a design he worked out in his driveway, Hollingshead combined his blueprints and received a patent on the drive-in theater in 1932. The drive-in resonated with an automobile– and Hollywood-crazed public, and Hollingshead’s first night showing of Wives Beware, in June 1933, was a sellout. In ensuing years, drive-in movie theaters opened all over the country. Unfortunately for Hollingshead, most of the theater owners ignored his patent and he received few royalties from their success. Hollingshead’s own theater struggled to make a profit, as an independent theater owner during the studio era he had to pay upwards of $400 for each film shown, and many of the pictures had already shown at traditional theaters before he acquired them. Hollingshead sold the theater in 1935 to a Union, New Jersey, theater owner who relocated the screen and equipment to that city.

Other automotive entertainments were attempted on the Boulevard, including the “whoopee coaster,” a Depression-era attraction in which drivers could take their cars on a series of roller coaster-like tracks. Unlike Hollingshead’s drive-in, the whoopee coaster failed to gain national footing.

Changing City, Changing Boulevard

Businesses continued to grow and expand through the 1950s and 1960s. Several car dealership franchises found success on Admiral Wilson, jointly declaring it “the right route for savings” in a 1952 newspaper advertisement, and motels thrived on both sides of the Boulevard. The opening of a bar in 1949 called The Admiral prompted Henry Wilson to unsuccessfully petition the city to remove his name from the Boulevard, after which he vowed never to travel on the road again.

In the 1970s a business model that had not been seen before on the Boulevard emerged: the go-go club. A Camden City ordinance passed in 1977 restricted businesses related to “prurient interests” to Admiral Wilson Boulevard and banned such businesses from the rest of the city. By the 1980s, adult-themed clubs, hourly rate motels, and other businesses related to sex work dominated the southeastern end of Admiral Wilson. At the same time, Camden’s uptick in crime left employees and customers of these businesses vulnerable to robberies, assaults, and other crimes. In addition to the clubs and motels, many sex workers lined the Boulevard working outside the sanctioned businesses. As these new businesses thrived, the car dealerships and retail businesses that had been at the heart of the Boulevard for much of its existence closed or moved to new suburban locations, following Sears, which left Camden for Moorestown in the early 1970s.

The Gateway Project

In the 1990s, the state of New Jersey and the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) proposed a new plan for the road that would incorporate the original tree-lined design with new development. Called the Gateway Project (later expanded to the Gateway Redevelopment Plan), the proposal called for the destruction of a majority of the businesses on the southeast end of the Boulevard, to be replaced by a park along Cooper River with paths for pedestrians and cyclists.

The plan remained dormant until the national Republican Party announced it would hold its 2000 presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia. Convention planners expected many delegates would stay in hotels in the South Jersey suburbs, using the Ben Franklin Bridge and Admiral Wilson Boulevard to commute back and forth to the city. With that prospect in mind, New Jersey’s Republican governor, Christie Todd Whitman (b. 1946), seized the opportunity to accelerate the Gateway Project by pledging $45 million to “restore Admiral Wilson Boulevard to the beauty that it enjoyed long ago.” Thus beginning in 1999, demolition of the strip clubs, hourly motels, and other businesses advanced, and by the time the Republican National Convention opened in late July 2000 the south side of Admiral Wilson Boulevard once again resembled the tree-lined road imagined in the original design, with a public park to be completed at a later date. There were exceptions: A new gas station and mini-mart opened on the south side of the road along Cooper River, and the Sears Building remained on the Boulevard until it too was demolished in 2013. In 2018, Subaru of America moved thier headquarters from Cherry Hill to the southwest of the Boulevard, next to the corporate headquarters of Campbell’s.

At the other end of the Boulevard, the planned Gateway Park project had yet to be implemented as of 2025,  runoff gas and oil as well as remnants of the demolished buildings required an environmental cleanup in order for the space to be suitable for public use.

Throughout the twentieth century, Admiral Wilson Boulevard played a significant role in expanding Camden’s retail center from downtown and facilitating the exodus of that center to the suburbs. Originally designed to be a “gateway to Camden,” the Boulevard became a gateway through the city to both the inner and developing outer suburbs. In the twenty-first century, the Boulevard reflects the tree-lined road imagined by Leavitt as well as a new focus on corporate office parks influenced by twentieth century suburbia. One consistency was Admiral Wilson Boulevard’s debt to the driving public. With over one thousand parking spaces, the new office park on the old Sears site would continue the auto-centric nature of the Boulevard.

Bart Everts is a reference librarian at the Paul Robeson Library at Rutgers University-Camden and teaches history at Peirce College. (Author information current at time of publication.)

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

Parks and racetracks served as the first landing areas for airplanes in Philadelphia, but by the late 1920s designated airfields dotted the city and surrounding region. While most were privately owned, the federal government established a flying field at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and a seaplane base on the Delaware River in Essington, Pennsylvania.  Just upstream from Essington in the Eastwick section of southwest Philadelphia, the city built its first municipal airport in 1926 to serve as a site of operations for a Pennsylvania National Guard squadron, a commercial flying service called the Ludington Exhibition Company, and the U.S. Post Office’s new airmail flights between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

While the Eastwick field was soon deemed inadequate for Philadelphia’s needs, constructing a larger city-owned and -operated airport proved difficult.  Work began in 1931 on an expanded tract, which included the Eastwick property and land on adjacent Hog Island purchased from the federal government, but this project ground to a halt the next year, a victim of the Depression and a fiscally conservative mayor, J. Hampton Moore (1864-1950), who cut the city’s public works budget. Most flying activity, including the airmail service, had already shifted across the Delaware River to the less flood-prone Central Airport on Crescent Boulevard in Pennsauken, New Jersey, and  construction languished until 1936 when a new mayor, S. Davis Wilson (1881-1939), restarted the work with funds made available under the New Deal.  Although a laborer strike and a dispute between the city and the federal government over the location of a runway delayed completion, the new Philadelphia Municipal Airport officially opened in 1940.

When the United States entered World War II, military operations at area airports increased.  Philadelphia Municipal Airport and the Greater Wilmington Airport in New Castle County, Delaware, served as Army Air Corps bases, and Mercer Airport near Trenton functioned as a test site for Navy planes built at a nearby plant. The government also purchased a few privately owned airfields during the war. One in Northeast Philadelphia was improved and donated to the city in 1944, while another in Montgomery County, Willow Grove Naval Air Station, would remain an active military facility for decades after the war.

Postwar Aviation Boom

With the war’s end, commercial aviation in the United States boomed, and the City of Philadelphia worked to make its municipal airport a part of the growing industry.  It renamed the facility Philadelphia International and turned to the federal government for money to help build longer runways and a larger terminal. Before 1946, the U.S. government funded municipal airport development on an ad hoc basis, via New Deal work relief programs and wartime national defense projects.  In 1946, though, Congress established a grant program to subsidize construction and renovation and thereby promote a national network of airports. Federal grants became a continuous source of funding for airport construction from the late 1940s into the twenty-first  century and helped fund a new international airport on Hog Island that opened in December 1953.

In the 1950s, Philadelphia International gained more flights to other cities in the United States and abroad.  City leaders also campaigned to terminate the leases of the National Guard and air force reserve squadrons based at the international airport, believing they impeded commercial flying operations. Military leaders offered to pay for an expansion of the Northeast Philadelphia Airport if their units could operate there, but the city rejected the idea and the units eventually relocated to Willow Grove Naval Air Station in the early 1960s. The Mercer County and New Castle County fields served less controversially as homes to National Guard squadrons in the decades after World War II  and, along with the Northeast Philadelphia Airport, supported business aviation, charter and recreational flying, and light manufacturing.

By the mid-1960s, traffic at Philadelphia International had reached record levels, and officials decided it would have to be expanded to accommodate future growth.  With financial support from the state and federal governments, the city began construction of new runways, terminals, parking lots, and a SEPTA regional rail line connecting the airport to Center City.  While the investments were welcome, their management drew heavy criticism in the 1970s because of delays, cost overruns, and revelations that city and political party officials had accepted bribes from construction firms bidding on contracts.  Some critics called on Philadelphia to cede its control of the airport to an independent authority that they said would manage it impartially and in the best interests of the whole metropolitan region, but city leaders successfully resisted the idea.

When Congress voted in 1978 to deregulate the airline industry by abolishing the Civil Aeronautics Board, the airline business and the business of airport management both changed.  For forty years, the CAB had dictated who could start an airline, what cities it could serve, and what fares it could charge. After 1978, market competition answered these questions and cities assumed more direct responsibility for attracting airlines to their airports.  Greater competition encouraged airlines to establish hubs—specific airports where they concentrated their operations— and cities competed for hub status to gain more flights, jobs, and revenues.  Deregulation also allowed low-cost carriers to proliferate. These airlines usually provided fewer amenities and routes but offered travelers lower fares and helped offset the inflationary effect a larger carrier operating a hub at the same airport tended to have on ticket prices.

Hub for US Airways and UPS

While the 1980s and 1990s were a volatile time for the industry as airlines grappled with the realities of deregulation and many new and long-established carriers went out of business, traffic at Philadelphia International generally increased. The airport became a hub for US Airways and United Parcel Service, attracted service from a number of low-cost carriers, and saw new facilities develop to handle growing airplane, passenger, and automobile traffic.  This expansion sparked conflicts with neighboring communities like Delaware County’s Tinicum Township, in which much of the airport lay, over property tax payments and plane noise.

In the early twenty-first century, discount airlines began flying from some of Greater Philadelphia’s smaller regional airports.  With reduced operating costs and less tenant demand, the fields charged airlines lower rents and landing fees, making them compatible with the budget airline business model, and the airports’ locations along limited-access freeways made them accessible to area travelers.  The Atlantic City, Mercer County (now Trenton-Mercer), and New Castle County (now Wilmington-Philadelphia) airports all gained new service from discount airlines in this period.

Global demand for private jets and civilian helicopters grew after 1980, and a number of aircraft companies established assembly and maintenance facilities at area airports during that time.  AgustaWestland, an Italian-British helicopter builder, opened a shop at Northeast Philadelphia Airport in 1982 that later expanded into a manufacturing facility; Dassault Aviation of France established a maintenance, repair, and overhaul station for its business jets at Wilmington-Philadelphia Airport in 2000; and in 2007, American firm Sikorsky began assembling helicopters in a plant at the Chester County Airport in Coatesville, Pennsylvania.

State and local governments helped entice these companies with tax breaks and construction financing. The fields also offered manufacturers less air traffic and lower rents than large commercial airports; proximity to deep-water ports, interstate highways, and railroads; and an established supply chain and skilled labor pool, thanks to Boeing’s long-time presence as a helicopter builder in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania.

By the early twenty-first century, many of Greater Philadelphia’s airports were regional centers of the world’s commercial aviation industries. While globalization led to the loss of traditional industrial jobs in the area, it fostered new employment, including manufacturing and mechanical jobs, at the airports. The growth of the local aviation economy was not an inevitable consequence of globalization, however.  Intentional policies of development and investment, both public and private, made it possible.

Demian Larry is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Temple University.  His dissertation is about the politics and economics of airport development in Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Founded in 1908, the association formed as a branch of the New York-based organization named for Civil War General Samuel C. Armstrong (1839-93), who led the 8^th United States Colored Troops. After the war, in 1868, Armstrong founded the Hampton Institute in Virginia as an industrial school for students of color and to produce African American teachers. The Armstrong Association raised funds for the Hampton Institute and for Tuskegee University in Alabama, founded in 1881 by one of Hampton Institute’s most famous graduates, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915).

Philadelphia’s Armstrong Association began after Hampton educator John Thompson Emlen (1878-1955), who was part of the organization in New York, came to Philadelphia intent on bettering the conditions for African Americans. He believed that a branch of the Armstrong Association could supplement existing social institutions to address the needs of a steadily growing population of African Americans migrating from the South (a trend later termed the Great Migration). After a meeting between Emlen and Richard R. Wright Jr. (1878-1967), a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia branch began its work.

Originally, the Armstrong Association consisted primarily of wealthy white philanthropists, but Emlen believed that an interracial board was key to the organization’s success. Each position on the board had two appointees: a white person as well as an African American. Emlen served as the organization’s secretary, and Wright acted as field secretary.

Joining forces with the Philadelphia Housing Association and the Traveler’s Aid Society, the Armstrong Association studied living conditions and overcrowding during the Great Migration as African Americans flocked to northern cities seeking economic opportunities and better social conditions. In 1900, the African American population of Philadelphia was 63,000. By 1910, it had grown to 84,459 and within another ten years it surpassed 134,000.  In addition to a housing shortage, new arrivals found it difficult to find employment, especially in their previous fields. Wright, who earned his doctorate in sociology, noted in his dissertation that many African American migrants to Philadelphia were skilled laborers, but they often faced discrimination from employers and had to take jobs outside their skill sets. In response, the Armstrong Association developed initiatives such as an annual job fair, reports to monitor working conditions of African Americans, and representation in cases of workplace disputes.

Using the Thomas Durham Public School at Sixteenth and Lombard Streets as a case study, the organization created a learning and social center to help African Americans with job placement and skill assessments. The school, named for a former administrator in the Philadelphia School District, was established in 1910 and served a predominantly African American student body.  In a study, the Armstrong Association found that only 53 of the 163 students of working age were able to secure work. Those who did found occupations that required very little skill and no room for advancement and provided a poor living wage. The Armstrong Association determined that providing students with better vocational training would prepare them to enter the workforce.

The association also provided job placement services for African American migrants, documented by oral history interviews conducted in the 1980s by historian Charles Hardy. The association’s industrial secretary, Alexander L. Manly (1866-1944), who joined the organization in 1913, secured more than $35,000 in contracts for African Americans within his first eight months in the position. Despite racial discrimination, the organization succeeded in aiding many newcomers searching for employment.

Emlen spent the remainder of his career in public service with the organization, while Wright left the group in 1909 because he favored self-help over the Armstrong Association’s emphasis on philanthropy. Wright later became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Armstrong Association of Philadelphia went on to affiliate with the National Urban League in a merger that created the Urban League of Philadelphia in 1957. Through its work, the Armstrong Association of Philadelphia helped a generation of African Americans who migrated from the South find housing and employment in their new city.

Sharece Blakney is a graduate student in American History at Rutgers-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s connections with the Atlantic predated William Penn’s founding of the city in 1682. Imperial rivalries among European powers in the seventeenth century made the Delaware Valley a site of colonization, conflict, and diplomatic wrangling. In 1638, the powerful Swedish monarchy established the colony of New Sweden in the area that later became portions of Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. The colony survived until 1655, at which point the Dutch Republic conquered it and incorporated New Sweden into New Netherland. Less than ten years later, in 1664, the English took over New Netherland (renaming New Amsterdam as New York in the process), although the Dutch recaptured the colony during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74). The Treaty of Westminster (1674) relinquished New Netherland to the English. Such contests among European monarchies and republics gave the Delaware Valley a cosmopolitan hue. Before Penn arrived, Lenape people lived alongside Swedes, Dutch, Finns, and Germans; enslaved African people have been documented around the Delaware region from 1639.

Within a few decades of the city’s founding, Philadelphia had become a bustling port city and a center of transoceanic trade. Commercial networks bound Philadelphia to the Atlantic World. By the 1750s, Philadelphia had outgrown Boston to become the busiest port in British America. Its shipping carried flaxseed exports to Ireland and sugar grown by enslaved people in the Caribbean for refining along the Delaware waterfront. Philadelphia, in other words, quickly became integrated into the dense web of connections stretching across the Atlantic and beyond. From the beginning, pirates took advantage of these connections as they preyed on vessels. William Penn discovered to his dismay in a 1699 visit to his city that pirates thrived in Philadelphia, where they received significant support from some of the city’s well-to-do residents and royal officials, and from whence they ventured to target Muslim pilgrims in the Indian Ocean.

Religious Freedom, Economic Opportunity

Transatlantic migration peopled early Philadelphia and its surroundings. Irish, English, Welsh, and German Quakers accompanied Penn across the ocean, drawn—like other dissenting groups—by Penn’s promise of the religious freedom denied to them in the Old World. Other newcomers in the eighteenth century, frequently from the British Isles and Germany, flocked to the rich agricultural land to the west of the city. Their small farms offered better economic opportunities than could be found in Europe, giving the region a reputation as “the best poor man’s country.”

But that land belonged to other people and, consequently, European immigration to the Delaware Valley assumed a settler colonial character marked by diplomacy and conflict. Negotiations between Lenape people and Europeans in Greater Philadelphia became an important, if much mythologized, part of the early history of the region. Some Native Americans appear to have preferred dealing with pacific Quakers and established productive relationships with them. At least in the beginning, Penn and Quakers seemed to negotiate in good faith. However, as time passed, more and more Europeans arrived in the region, eyed Native American lands covetously, and plotted to appropriate further territory for themselves. By the mid-eighteenth century, Scots Irish settler colonials to the west of Philadelphia blamed the colony’s Quakers for checking further conquest. In 1763, a marauding band known as the Paxton Boys massacred the residents of a Susquehannock settlement in Lancaster County that had been on good terms with the colony. Such instances reveal how voluntary European migration across the Atlantic led to the violent expropriation of the region’s Native peoples.

Not all passages across the ocean, though, were voluntary. Indentured servitude and African enslavement—the first a temporary form of unfree labor, the second a permanent one—also crossed the Atlantic. Some European immigrants could pay their fare, but those who could not traded up to seven years of their future labor for passage to the Americas. Conditions indentured servants experienced varied wildly across different times and places, but most did not have easy lives. The German schoolmaster Gottlieb Mittelberger sought to discourage such emigration from his homeland. His Journey to Pennsylvania (1756), based on his voyage from Rotterdam to Philadelphia and his subsequent sojourn in Lancaster County, did not pull any punches about the misery and exploitation that indentured servants and other immigrants often faced.

Trafficked African people, assigned by their captors with the inheritable status of enslavement, also arrived in Philadelphia, sometimes on ships outfitted in the city. In the early years of the colony most came from the Caribbean. However, when that supply became more fraught, as it did during Seven Years’ War, Philadelphian traffickers turned to direct importation from Africa. At the beginning of the American Revolution, Philadelphia contained roughly seven hundred enslaved people, who brought with them elements of African and Caribbean culture like pepper pot soup. Philadelphia and its hinterland—where enslavers held over two thousand more people as property—never developed the export-oriented plantation economy that flourished in Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. That said, enslaved people served in households, craft industries, and aboard ships. Furthermore, Philadelphians who did not enslave people themselves often purchased the products of enslaved labor, invested in slaving voyages, and facilitated the buying and selling of their fellow human beings.

Clashes Abroad Reverberate in Philadelphia

A region scarred by Black enslavement became a cradle of white liberty over the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As the foremost port in British North America, Philadelphia played a critical role during the Seven Years’ War, the Imperial Crisis, and the American Revolution. Each of these upheavals had Atlantic origins and ramifications. The struggle between Great Britain and France in Europe reverberated in the Americas. Similarly, events that occurred in the Americas, like George Washington’s military encounter with Joseph Coulon de Jumonville in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, rippled across the Atlantic as well. For Philadelphians, the backdrop of conflict among great powers intensified existing transatlantic connections and created opportunities for new ones. Benjamin Franklin spent considerable time in Great Britain in the 1760s and 1770s trying to prevent war between Great Britain and the thirteen colonies, as well as securing jobs for his friends and associates. Franklin had long been an Atlantic celebrity and his growing disillusionment with Great Britain represented the fraying political and intellectual links between Parliament and its American possessions.

Over these years Philadelphia and its surrounding region became a key battleground in the age of Atlantic Revolutions. Between 1770 and 1833, violent upheavals transformed France, Haiti, and vast colonized regions of North and South America into republics. In 1776 the Second Continental Congress, composed of delegates who were often born and educated in Europe, met in Philadelphia to sign the foundational document of the new United States. The Declaration of Independence reverberated across the ocean and reflected the influence of transatlantic thought. Its authors presented facts to the candid world and addressed a much broader audience than the residents of the thirteen colonies. The draft of Thomas Jefferson also revealed the western drift of Enlightenment ideas. He adapted, for instance, the claim of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke that men had the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” But the declaration, and the new republic it announced, were also shaped by Atlantic World slavery. As scholars have demonstrated, ideas about white freedom and liberty developed in tandem with racialized ideas about Black enslavement and submissiveness. Jefferson’s initial draft of the declaration placed the onus for slavery solely on Great Britain. From London, it prompted the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson to wonder why the loudest cries for liberty emanated from the mouths of enslavers.

The Imperial Crisis and the American Revolution severed links to Britain. For some in the Delaware Valley the divorce proved hard to imagine. By no means did all residents in the region flock to the Patriot cause, and “Loyalists” who wanted to maintain relations with the mother country could be found among both the economic elite and ordinary people. The Delaware Valley’s Atlantic merchants confronted a difficult dilemma. Ties to the British Empire granted local merchants access to imperial markets, not least in the Caribbean, where food grown in Philadelphia’s fertile hinterland had been exchanged for sugar and cash crops. War cut off such long-established trading routes and led to the questioning of loyalties. Quaker merchants like Henry Drinker often had deep ties to Great Britain. Drinker and his wife Elizabeth faced the challenge of trying to thread the needle between making concessions to revolutionaries while maintaining their Atlantic connections. Revolutionaries eventually arrested him for treason, imprisoning him in Virginia, while Elizabeth navigated life in British-occupied Philadelphia during 1777-78. After regaining control of the city, Patriots held 638 “Tory” collaborators as suspected traitors. The Drinkers, embedded in Atlantic World networks, suffered as they attempted to navigate the complex politics of the Revolutionary era. Other Philadelphian merchants turned their gaze to the west, looking for new markets in China and the Pacific.

Ripples of the American Revolution

The Revolutionary War, like the Seven Years’ War before it, recalibrated Atlantic relations in other ways, too. At Valley Forge in 1777-78 the Prussian officer Baron von Steuben helped to drill George Washington’s army. The British evacuated Philadelphia in June 1778 and retreated to New York. Around three thousand Philadelphian loyalists left the city with the British military forces, joining a wider exodus of Tories and their allies (including enslaved Black Americans who had been promised freedom in exchange for military service) to Canada and Britain. Von Steuben’s work at Valley Forge helped Washington fight the British to a draw at Monmouth. A few months before Patriots retook Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, having been dispatched to Paris, steered the rebel colonies into a crucial alliance with France that helped to determine the outcome of the war. The decision to use Franklin as a diplomat proved a sound one. He fascinated the French, who saw him as the premier example of American genius, and he played his role with aplomb.

In the decades following the American Revolution, Philadelphia remained closely connected to the political currents of the Atlantic World. The ideas of the American Revolution were carried east and south. Revolutions erupted elsewhere—in France, in other parts of Europe, in Haiti, and in Spanish America. The career of Thomas Paine indicates their entangled paths. Paine, who was born in Norfolk, England, had been convinced by Franklin to go to the Americas. Arriving in Philadelphia in late 1774, his influential pamphlet Common Sense made the case for revolution in plain language that appealed to a wide readership. In the doldrums of 1776, Paine’s The American Crisis helped buoy Patriot morale. After the American Revolution ended, Paine traveled to France and served as a member of the National Convention, where he narrowly avoided the guillotine after falling out of favor with leading Jacobins. Paine’s career as an Atlantic revolutionary, with Philadelphia at its center, demonstrates how ideas easily crossed oceans.

As a major port city and an Atlantic World hub, Philadelphia often welcomed revolutionaries like Paine, while selectively supporting revolutions elsewhere. French Minister Edmond-Charles Genêt, also called Citizen Genêt, arrived in Philadelphia to a rapturous welcome in 1793. Genêt angered George Washington by attempting to subvert Washington’s proclamation of U.S. neutrality in the brewing conflict between Great Britain and France. Another figure to become embroiled in partisan battles of the early republic was the Polish nobleman Tadeusz Kościuszko. Having fought with the colonials during the American Revolution and then for Poland against Russia and Prussia, in 1797 he returned as a political exile to the United States, where he lived briefly in Philadelphia until leaving for Europe in 1798. Kościuszko wrote a will that named Thomas Jefferson as the executor, dedicating his estate to purchasing the freedom of enslaved people and providing them with an education.

Exiles Find a Home

Whether as a place of refuge from revolution and reaction or as a source of support for insurgents, the Delaware Valley became enmeshed with tumultuous upheavals across the Atlantic. When revolution erupted in Haiti in 1791, French masters fled the island, forcing many of the people they enslaved to join them. The exiles who arrived in Philadelphia brought firsthand accounts of the hemisphere’s first Black-led revolution, which energized both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist politics. Another Francophone uprooted by revolutionary wars was Joseph Bonaparte, who fled to the United States after his brother Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Following a short sojourn in Philadelphia he moved out to an estate in nearby Bordentown, New Jersey, where he spent most of his remaining years. Supporters of the Greeks in the Greek War for Independence from the Ottoman Empire raised money for the cause and even tried to persuade the United States to intervene. And in 1848, citizens gathered on Independence Square to welcome the proclamation of a new French Republic. People did not always like the direction foreign revolutions took, but Philadelphians, both Black and white, recognized their city’s place in a revolutionary Atlantic World.

Black Philadelphians insisted that those Atlantic revolutions had to reckon with enslavement—the cry of liberty rang hollow if new republics were built on the back of forced labor. Finding allies, however, did not prove easy; abolitionism was never more than a minority sentiment among white people in the eighteenth century. That said, some of the region’s Quakers, African Americans, and other friends of liberty raised their voices in favor of ending enslavement and emancipating enslaved people. Connections to the Caribbean and Europe shaped antislavery activism in the Delaware Valley. An extraordinary individual named Benjamin Lay, a Quaker immigrant, became one of the region’s earliest abolitionists. Born in England the same year as Philadelphia’s founding, Lay spent years traversing the Atlantic as a sailor, left for Barbados, and from there migrated to Philadelphia. Lay’s abolitionism sprang from his ardent Quaker faith, as well as his experiences in Barbados, where he witnessed enslavement’s brutality firsthand. While in Barbados, Lay and his wife Sarah held meetings at their house and served meals to enslaved people, which infuriated white slaveholders. After he and Sarah relocated to Philadelphia, Lay tried to convince fellow Quakers in the region to emancipate enslaved people. While some Friends had rejected enslavement before Lay’s arrival, his activism led to his disownment, and he retreated to a cave he converted into a cottage in Abington, Pennsylvania. From there Lay continued to urge the region’s Friends to acknowledge Atlantic enslavement as apostasy. By the end of his life more Quaker voices in the region had begun to proclaim the abolitionism gospel, including the New Jersey merchant John Woolman, a member of the Chesterfield Friends Meeting, who died in Britain on an antislavery mission, and the French-born religious refugee Anthony Benezet, who played an important role in founding the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in 1775. The first abolition society in the Americas, it was later reorganized as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage (usually referred to as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society) in 1789.

The AME Church Goes Global

In the decades that followed, Black abolitionists in Philadelphia built institutions and cultivated connections that reached across the Atlantic. By doing so they recognized that the struggle against enslavement in the United States was part of a wider battle for rights that extended to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. Richard Allen, building on his efforts in establishing Philadelphia’s Free African Society in 1787 and Mother Bethel Church in 1794, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and became the church’s first bishop. AME churches subsequently sprang up all over the globe. By the end of the nineteenth century they had reached Bermuda, West Africa, and South Africa. An African American institution that began in Philadelphia therefore shaped the global spread of Black Christianity. Bishop Allen supported abolition, as did James Forten, a self-made sailmaker who after an initial flirtation with the idea of “colonizing” formerly enslaved Americans in Africa or Haiti became a fierce opponent of such schemes and an ardent advocate of an immediate end to enslavement. But the Atlantic connections of Philadelphia’s Black abolitionists are perhaps most evident in the career of Robert Purvis. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, to parents of British, Moroccan, and Jewish roots, Purvis migrated to Philadelphia, where he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society. Like many of his fellow abolitionists, Purvis sought to rally support in the United Kingdom, which had put enslavement on the path to extinction in its own colonies, and he traveled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean on fundraising missions while corresponding with prominent British figures in the antislavery movement. When, on August 1, 1842, Black abolitionists marched through the southern wards of the city to mark the eighth anniversary of abolition across the British empire, a rampaging white mob threatened to burn down Purvis’s house.

The Lombard Street Riot of 1842, as it became known, proved just one of a series of riots that pitted rival immigrant and racial groups against one another in the “turbulent era” of the 1830s and 1840s. Tensions over religion, enslavement, and politics that reached across the Atlantic Ocean played out on the streets of Philadelphia. Immigration from Europe continued in the decades after the Revolution, with British, Germans, and Irish (especially after the beginning of the Potato Famine in the 1840s) the most heavily represented. Old World experiences shaped their politics. British Chartists, veterans of the struggle for the vote in the United Kingdom, welcomed the political rights denied to them in their country of origin. Irish Catholics gravitated toward the Democratic Party, in part due to the hostility of prominent Democrats like Andrew Jackson toward Britain. Indeed, the frequency with which Irish Catholics participated in anti-abolitionist violence owed something to their equation of abolitionism with support for the British crown. Germans, on the other hand, often backed the new antislavery Republican Party in the 1850s, and many of them saw the fight against enslavement as a continuation of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Catholic immigration in particular met a nativist backlash. The Philadelphia Nativist Riots of 1844, which saw the county placed under martial law, sprang from rumors that Irish newcomers wanted to replace the Protestant King James Bible in the city’s public schools. Philadelphia became a battleground in a conflict that stretched back to the English colonization of Ireland and break with Rome.

Movement across the ocean brought epidemics as well as people. Diseases rarely remained within the borders of one country; they spread rapidly across an increasingly connected world. Philadelphia’s status as an Atlantic port increased its vulnerability. A yellow fever epidemic in 1793, possibly carried on ships transporting French enslavers fleeing the Haitian Revolution, killed at least five thousand Philadelphians and sent tens of thousands fleeing from the city. Yellow fever recurred on a less destructive scale for decades. After the epidemic in 1793, the city decided to build new waterworks and engaged British-born architect Benjamin Latrobe to design them. Latrobe built the waterworks in a neoclassical style that evoked Athens. Cholera too crossed the Atlantic and caused epidemics in 1832, 1849, and 1866. By the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s sanitarians were learning from the hygiene measures that had begun to control such diseases in Europe.

The Arts and Sciences Flourish

Such exchange of knowledge had long been a feature of the region. The arts and sciences flourished in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram’s establishment of the American Philosophical Society in 1743 marked the first of many efforts for Philadelphians to demonstrate leadership in the arts and sciences. Philadelphia was the first city to lay claim to the mantle of the “Athens of America,” although some people later argued that Boston also deserved the title. The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was founded in 1812, in part to impel the creation and diffusion of knowledge about the sciences and in part to place science in the United States on a par with its status in Europe. While Atlantic World rivalries proved important, the flourishing of the arts and sciences in Philadelphia also sprang from cultural exchange and connection, with leaders in fields as diverse as medicine (Benjamin Rush), botany (John Bartram), and history (Henry Charles Lea) all maintaining close links through either education or correspondence to their European counterparts. The French, in particular, had a powerful influence on the city, not least through the career of the merchant Stephen Girard, an immigrant who became one of the richest men in the United States and left most of his estate to his adopted city. Such figures cultivated and affirmed Atlantic World relationships.

If Philadelphia’s intellectual connections to the Atlantic remained a constant across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the region’s significance to the transoceanic economy eventually started to wane in the 1800s. In contrast to Washington, D.C., which foreign observers and even many people in the U.S. derided as a miasmic swamp or a sleepy, provincial village, Philadelphia remained an Atlantic financial hub well into the 1830s. The Second Bank of the United States, based on Chestnut Street and boasting a federal charter from its foundation in 1816 to 1836, maintained transatlantic financial ties between the U.S. and Europe, particularly Great Britain. Its demise at the hands of President Jackson strained those relations, which suffered further when Pennsylvania defaulted on its debt payments to European creditors in 1842, prompting the English Lake poet (and out of pocket “surly creditor”) William Wordsworth to rail against the commonwealth’s “degenerate Men.” Furthermore, Philadelphia lost ground to New York City as an Atlantic port, as the Erie Canal (among other factors) fueled Manhattan’s ascent as the financial capital of the United States. The source of Greater Philadelphia’s wealth shifted from commerce to manufacturing, as the Athens of America transformed into the workshop of the world, which increased local support for high protective tariffs to protect home industry. These higher tariffs, however, made it harder for the city to cultivate European markets. Some Philadelphians nevertheless found overseas clients. Joseph Harrison Jr., for example, built locomotives for Russia and Czar Nicholas I awarded him a gold medal for completing the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. After his return to Philadelphia, Harrison amassed an impressive art collection, which he displayed at his mansion off Rittenhouse Square. Harrison, like some of his contemporaries, remained connected to the Atlantic World and prioritized connections and cultural exchange.

Philadelphia’s reputation as an Atlantic center of politics, finance, and commerce may have declined over the course of the nineteenth century but its links to its nearest ocean persisted in other respects. Immigration, which had slowed during the Civil War, accelerated again in the decades that followed. These arrivals increasingly came from eastern and southern Europe— especially Italy—rather than the western and northern reaches of the continent. Their children and grandchildren then often made the Atlantic crossing in reverse to fight in that continent’s wars. U.S. intervention in European conflict left a marked impact on the region’s economy and society. World War I and World War II stimulated ship production along the Delaware. During the latter, the Philadelphia Navy Yard employed over fifty thousand workers, whose labor made Philadelphia a vital part of the “Arsenal of Democracy.” Europe and Africa continued to exert an influence in art, design, and politics, too. Jacques-Henri-Auguste Gréber, a French landscape architect, designed and built the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and a proponent of Pan-Africanism, had a following in Philadelphia. Garvey is not the only example of Philadelphia’s connections to Africa. After the loosening of federal restrictions on immigration in the 1960s, Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Liberians, and Nigerians were prominently represented in the new African diaspora of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to Philadelphia.

Bonds of Culture Persist

Philadelphia’s Atlantic connections remained evident in spaces and civic life of the twenty-first century region. The Irish Memorial near Penn’s Landing, dedicated in 2003, sought to remind visitors about the migrants who built the city. The Mummers Parade could trace its roots back to older immigrant traditions from England, Germany, and Sweden. Annual Columbus Day celebrations testified to both the strength of Italian-American pride and the contested legacy of European colonization. Founders of the ODUNDE Festival, held the second Sunday in June, sought to celebrate the history and heritage of African peoples around the globe and created one of the longest-running and largest African American street festivals in the United States. Philadelphia’s historical connections to the Atlantic—forged in cultural exchange, revolutionary conflict, and the movement of peoples and revolutionary ideas—helped make the twenty-first century city a mecca for tourists. Yet such connections have sometimes underpinned a resurgent nativist politics that echoed an earlier era, as some residents used the region’s European cultural heritage to question the place of new immigrants from the Americas and Asia in the city. Philadelphia connections by the twenty-first century were global rather than primarily Atlantic. But the ocean the Delaware River empties into made the city a political and economic hub and the links it enabled remained lodged in civic memory.

Evan C. Rothera is Assistant Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. He is author of Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022) and coeditor, with Brian Matthew Jordan, of The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020). (Author information current at time of publication).

In the 1980s, South Broad Street was in the midst of a long decline. Massive nineteenth-century office buildings that had once housed banks and law firms sat empty, their tenants fleeing to newer skyscrapers and suburban office parks. Few street-level businesses remained. When he was elected, Mayor Edward Rendell (b. 1944) found South Broad Street almost entirely barren. “On a Saturday night in 1991,” he remembered, “you could walk the mile from City Hall to Washington Avenue and you wouldn’t have seen 100 people.” Although a handful of arts-focused institutions persisted—the University of the Arts, the Shubert Theatre, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts—they suffered from the broader decline in Broad Street’s fortunes.

Upon entering office in 1992, Rendell searched for a project that would help to revitalize the city—improving its image, spurring real estate development, and encouraging tourism. South Broad Street, which already had two redevelopment plans in motion, seemed ideal. Since 1977, the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation (OPDC) had tried to revitalize Broad Street by capitalizing on its existing arts facilities. OPDC created the Avenue of the Arts Council (and later, Academy Center Inc.) to direct its activities on Broad Street and raise funds for a new orchestra facility to replace the undersized Academy of Music. And in 1989, the William Penn Foundation had launched the South Broad Street Cultural Corridor plan, which aimed to bring several smaller arts venues to the area.

A Coalition Tries Again

In order to unify renewal efforts, Rendell took control of the nonprofit Avenue of the Arts Inc. (AAI) in 1993. The AAI brought together a coalition of pro-growth forces, including the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), philanthropic foundations, local businesses, and real estate developers. Its board also included Rendell’s wife, Judge Marjorie O. Rendell (b. 1947). The AAI attracted funding from the state, philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg (1908–2002), and dozens of local corporations.

Initially, AAI focused its efforts on the blocks of South Broad Street between City Hall and South Street. It devoted $3.7 million to open the ArtsBank, a venue in a renovated bank building (completed in 1994); $2.4 million towards the Clef Club jazz hall and archive (completed in 1995); $6.1 million to build the 300-seat Wilma Theater (completed in 1996); and $24 million to convert the vacant Ridgeway Library building into the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (completed in 1997). AAI also poured money into streetscape improvements, installing new signage, sidewalks, and lampposts. In its first decade, AAI invested $378 million in the Avenue, with $75 million of that total coming from the state and $30 million from the city.

Meanwhile, negotiations continued over the Philadelphia Orchestra’s new home. In 1998, architect Rafael Viñoly (b. 1944) announced designs for a $203 million, 2,500-seat concert hall on South Broad Street. In 2000, the facility was renamed the Kimmel Center after philanthropist Sidney Kimmel (b. 1928), who donated $15 million towards its construction. The Kimmel Center finally opened to mixed reviews in 2001, $100 million dollars over its initial budget.

Extending to North Broad

In 1995, AAI announced that it planned to extend the Avenue of the Arts onto North Broad Street, promising to devote $60.6 million to the disinvested corridor. The AAI initiative specifically targeted African American cultural institutions, including the Freedom and Uptown Theaters and the historic Blue Horizon boxing gym. While the northern portion of the Avenue received far less investment than South Broad Street, several new residential projects opened in the 2000s, including the AAI-supported Lofts at 640 Broad Street and the Avenue North buildings. In 2011, the Pennsylvania Ballet broke ground on its new rehearsal facility, the Louise Reed Center for Dance, on North Broad Street near Callowhill Street.

By the 2000s, the Avenue of the Arts had proven to be a financial success. In 2012, the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance reported that jobs created by arts and culture institutions in Philadelphia generated over $490 million dollars in wages. The Avenue of the Arts itself, one 2007 study claimed, generated $150 million in earnings for its approximately 6,000 employees. Ex-Mayor Rendell marveled that “when you walk around [the Avenue] on a Thursday night, you see thousands of people on the street. It’s not yet complete, but it’s come a long way.” Those thousands of visitors spent approximately $84 million per year at restaurants and hotels along the avenue. Still, the Avenue was not an unqualified triumph. Tax proceeds from performing arts venues along the Avenue remained modest, totaling only $10 million in 2006, in part due to tax abatements and incentives the city had offered to attract businesses and developers. Once initial subsidies from the William Penn Foundation ended in 1997, the Arts Bank was forced to close. The Kimmel Center’s tenants, including the Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Ballet, struggled to pay rent at the new facility. The Philadelphia Orchestra flirted with bankruptcy due to budget shortfalls and low attendance.

In the 2000s, AAI began to encourage residential construction that capitalized on the Avenue’s arts-related cachet. AAI’s partner, PIDC, held design competitions for several empty lots on Broad Street. Developer Carl Dranoff (b. 1948) won the rights to build Symphony House, a 31-story luxury condominium building at Broad and Pine Streets, in 2002. Its ground floor housed the 365-seat Suzanne Roberts Theatre, the new home for the Philadelphia Theatre Company. PIDC also granted Dranoff permission to build two other mixed-use buildings on South Broad Street, the 777 at Broad and Fitzwater Streets and SouthStar Lofts at Broad and South Streets.

These projects pointed towards the Avenue of the Arts’ future as a mixed-use corridor. As retirees and young people moved back to Center City, the Avenue added businesses to serve them. The historic buildings on South Broad Street never attracted many new offices, but they began to fill with other tenants—hotels, restaurants, retail shops, and apartments. At the same time, the University of the Arts expanded its own footprint along South Broad Street, with classrooms, galleries, and a performing arts theater. Organizations like Wells Fargo and the Union League opened small museums or increased their exhibit spaces, enhancing the appeal of the Avenue of the Arts as a destination area. Drawing tourists and regional visitors for shows, performances, and exhibits, and other entertainment, the Avenue of the Arts initiative sparked widespread residential and commercial development along Broad Street.

Dylan Gottlieb, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, works on recent American urban history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Calls for construction of a north-south expressway through Delaware County, southwest of Philadelphia, first emerged during the late 1920s as a new organization created by municipal reformers, the Regional Planning Federation of the Philadelphia Tri State District, began to work toward a comprehensive plan for the region. Published in 1932, the plan proposed a Delaware County expressway with two route options to alleviate traffic congestion, an outer belt roadway, and a limited access parkway. However, the plans were dropped as the United States became enmeshed in the Great Depression and World War II.

In the immediate postwar years, a large influx of auto-reliant suburbanites further choked Delaware County’s roadways and made it increasingly difficult for manufacturers to efficiently transport goods to and from the Chester area. To remedy these problems, the planning commissions of Delaware and Montgomery Counties submitted a joint application in 1955 for a nineteen-mile expressway, which the Southeastern Pennsylvania Regional Planning Association (a public regional planning agency created by the planning commissions of Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware Counties) quickly approved. Regional planners viewed the project as a core component of a developing highway network that would ease transportation woes, facilitate commerce, help manage sprawl, and keep the Philadelphia region on par with the nation’s other major metropolitan areas, most of which constructed similar freeway systems during the era.

A Boost from Federal Funds

The road’s prospects seemed to increase with passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which promised federal funds for up to ninety percent of its costs. The Highway Act transferred responsibility for the expressway to the Pennsylvania Department of Highways (PDH), which then developed three possible routes, labeled Red, Blue, and Green. The Red Route, later redesignated as the Yellow Route, cut through high-population, predominately working-class communities like Springfield Township in the eastern part of Delaware County. The northern portion of the Blue Route followed the same course but included a separate southern loop that avoided populous areas by cutting westward through the undeveloped Crum Creek Valley and the western edge of Swarthmore College. The Green Route ran farther west than either the Yellow or Blue Routes through mostly undeveloped land.

With most Delaware County residents in favor of a highway but wary of its possible location, the PDH selected the Yellow Route on July 11, 1957, on the grounds that it was the most direct and least expensive course. However, following three months of protests by local residents who feared losing their homes and property tax revenues, the U.S. Department of Public Roads rejected the plan and recommended the PDH move the highway’s path farther west.

Almost three years later, in June 1960, the PDH chose an alternate Blue Route path that bypassed Swarthmore College. Again the announcement drew protests, as this location threatened newly developed parts of Nether Providence Township and appeared to accommodate Swarthmore College at the expense of nearby homeowners. Swarthmore College President Courtney C. Smith (1916-69) downplayed the accusations and refused to endorse the revised route, but many believed it the result of private negotiations between the college and state officials. Lacking public support, the PDH announced an extended delay for selecting a final expressway route.

Fighting the Blue Route

In the intervening years, businesses and residents of Delaware County’s working-class communities supported the alternate Blue Route plan, believing it would aid Chester’s flagging industrial sector. However, many of the county’s middle-class and affluent denizens living near the newly proposed path vehemently opposed it. Recalling some of the earlier criticisms leveled at the Yellow Route, anti-Blue Route protesters claimed the expressway would spur declining property values, rising taxes, increasing crime, and the ruination of the Crum Creek Valley. Angry residents formed civic organizations like the Citizens Council of Delaware County to lead the anti-Blue Route fight and loudly voiced their displeasure at community meetings. Some advocated the PDH revisit the Green Route despite Pennsylvania highway officials’ claims that it was located too far from the county’s population centers to effectively alleviate traffic congestion.

Despite growing opposition, Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton (1917-2013) approved a revised Blue Route plan in May 1963. The plan gained federal approval a month later with four contingencies: that the impact on Swarthmore College be reduced as much as possible, that Swarthmore be aided in acquiring land to offset property lost to the highway, that the highway’s design preserve the area’s natural esthetic, and that portions of the Crum Creek Valley be made available for public use.

Following final federal approval, the PDH broke ground on the Blue Route in 1966, but acquisition delays and conflicts with local municipalities hindered the project from the start. Several ongoing disputes emerged over locations of the interchanges that would control getting traffic on and off the highway. Since the expressway’s initial plans did not include the interchanges, each required separate negotiations and approvals by the state and affected municipalities. By 1970, less than ten percent of the expressway had been built, and its estimated cost had skyrocketed from $30 million in 1956 to $173 million.

Grassroots Activism Elsewhere

Anti-Blue Route activists were not alone in protesting an unwanted expressway during the 1960s and 1970s. Grassroots activists successfully prevented the construction of unwanted roadways in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New York City, and numerous other cities across the nation. In Philadelphia, anti-highway forces successfully prevented the construction of the proposed Crosstown Expressway, a highway project slated to run parallel to the Vine Street Expressway (I-676) near Lombard Street linking I-95, I-76, and I-676, during the 1970s.

As the freeway revolts dragged on, activists increasingly utilized the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which required states to file Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) for all federally funded projects, as a tool for combating construction initiatives they opposed. Anti-Blue Route activists adopted these tactics and quickly secured several court decisions that prevented work on most of the approved expressway route during the early seventies. In 1974, Pennsylvania Transportation Secretary Jacob Kassab (1918-2004) ordered the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDot) to present an EIS for each section of the Blue Route not already under construction. The decision required additional public hearings and raised the possibility that the project could be abandoned. Delaware County’s “Blue Rooters” as well as those opposing the highway turned out en masse for the meetings and ultimately contributed more than 3,900 pages of testimony to PennDot’s final report.

PennDot submitted the revised Blue Route plan to the Federal Highway Authority (FHWA) in 1978, but a state budget crisis prompted the agency to halt its review a year later. In 1980, U.S. Representative Robert Edgar (1943-2013) established a task force to develop a plan for salvaging the project. The subsequent report called for reducing parts of the highway from six to four lanes, shrinking the size of its interchanges, and tying it to mass transit lines. PennDot adopted the task force’s suggestions, and in 1981 the FHWA approved the project. Not to be dissuaded, several local municipalities and citizens groups then filed two lawsuits on the grounds that PennDot had not adequately investigated less-disruptive routes. The court cases again halted construction and resulted in the completion of a supplemental EIS, which anti-Blue Route activists also contested. Finally, in 1986, the Blue Route’s path to completion was cleared by the Supreme Court of the United States, which upheld a Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to allow construction to proceed.

The Blue Route fully opened to traffic on December 19, 1991, thereby completing the network of highways surrounding Philadelphia. At a final cost of $750 million, the Blue Route significantly impacted the western part of the Philadelphia metro area, if not fully in the ways its planners intended. Chester’s industrial areas did not experience the economic boost the Blue Route’s supporters anticipated, and the near thirty years of unpredictable delays prevented Philadelphia-area developers from constructing the sorts of large commercial and retail centers that anchor communities and mitigate sprawl. However, the expressway alleviated traffic congestion on Delaware County’s north-south roadways and made it easier for residents to live, work, and shop in the region’s western and southwestern suburbs without entering Philadelphia. Several communities located in close proximity to the Blue Route, including Conshohocken and West Conshohocken near the highway’s intersection with the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76), experienced rapid development and dramatic economic growth during the 1990s and early twenty-first century. With more than 100,000 motorists using the Blue Route each day in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the highway continued to be critical factor in the economic and physical evolution of Philadelphia’s southwestern suburbs.

James J. Wyatt is the Director of Programs and Research at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education at Shepherd University and President of the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress. He is curator of the forthcoming traveling exhibit “Robert C. Byrd: Senator, Statesman, West Virginian” and co-curator of the collaborative digital exhibit The Great Society Congress, an ACSC project. Wyatt earned a Ph.D. in History at Temple University. He is revising his doctoral dissertation, “Covering Suburbia: Newspapers, Suburbanization, and Social Change in the Postwar Philadelphia Region, 1945-1982,” for publication. (Author information current at time of publication.)

As defined by the EPA, brownfields are a category of sites with real or perceived contamination less severe than those with Superfund designation. Following an assessment process, sites may qualify for federal, state, and/or local funding for cleanup and redevelopment. Because each site is unique, federal and state brownfield programs also assist in selecting the proper remediation method. By 2015, the EPA estimated that nearly 500,000 brownfields existed nationwide, with the majority located in older urban areas.

Remediation addresses environmental hazards. While many brownfields contain crumbling structures, empty fuel tanks, or construction debris, others may harbor dioxins, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos, petroleum, or heavy metal residue, substances to which exposure has been linked to cancer and other ailments. If soil or groundwater contamination is detected, an extensive extraction process, similar to those used for Superfund sites, may be required. Following removal, contaminated materials are transferred to hazardous waste landfills with elaborate capping systems.

Valuable Land for Redevelopment

Many brownfields in Greater Philadelphia lay in close proximity to rail, highway, and mass transit corridors, making them, while defiled, potentially valuable for redevelopment. The area’s highest concentrations appeared in New Castle County, Delaware (an estimated 105 sites); Trenton, New Jersey, (est. seventy); Camden, New Jersey (est. 150); Chester, Pennsylvania (much of its riverfront); and Philadelphia County. Philadelphia, which contained 5,000 acres of brownfields and roughly thirteen sites per square mile, was rated (with additional factors) in 2014 the second-most polluted county in the United States, after St. Louis County, Mo.

Brownfields also appeared in smaller cities, including Bridgeton, New Jersey;  Newark, Delaware; and Bensalem, Pennsylvania. Regardless of location, brownfields involved complicated legal and financial hurdles that in some cases delayed remediation for several years. While the EPA assessed the properties, their purchase, cleanup, and reuse relied on lenders, developers, architects, elected officials, and citizens who at times failed to reach consensus over a site’s expense and future use. Moreover, critics of brownfield programs have stressed that an area’s socioeconomic fortunes can dictate the rate or extent of redevelopment. PPL Park, a major league soccer stadium and concert venue that opened in 2010 on reclaimed brownfields in Chester, was to anchor a new complex of office, retail, and convention space. In 2015, Chester Mayor John A. Linder (b. 1947) complained that in addition to not meeting goals of further redevelopment (nearly twenty-five acres of barren brownfields), PPL Park and its owners failed to improve the impoverished city, one with a long history of environmental injustices.

Even with such obstacles, brownfield remediation since the late 1990s achieved a degree of success, with many projects reflecting the region’s shift from a manufacturing-based to a service-oriented economy. Nowhere was this more visible than in Philadelphia, which by 2015 had received more federal brownfield support than any other area municipality. Notable projects ranged from luxury apartments in Center City (Locust on the Park, once the National Book Publishing Co.) and senior housing in Frankford (Meadow House, formerly underground oil storage) to Temple University’s movieplex (Avenue North AMC Theaters, previously a gas station) and Northern Liberties’ greensward (Liberty Lands Park, site of a former tannery). Perhaps the city’s most anticipated brownfield cleanup was the Reading Viaduct, a rusting, elevated railway trestle that in 2015 received $11 million in federal money for conversion into a park similar to New York City’s High Line.

Justison Landing in Wilmington

On a broader scale, brownfield redevelopment altered riverfronts in many of the region’s cities. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, projects along the Delaware River in Philadelphia such as Waterfront Square and the Dockside (condominium complexes), SugarHouse Casino, Race Street Pier (a landscaped park), Spruce Street Harbor Park (a “pop up” seasonal park), and Pier 70 (a big box retail center) reinvigorated acres long dormant or used for industrial purposes. In Wilmington, the Riverfront Development Corporation of Delaware (RDCD) in the late 1990s purchased thirty-three acres of contaminated land along the Christina River once populated with tanneries and shipyards. By 2005 the site, renamed Justison Landing, was home to apartments, offices, restaurants, and a minor league baseball stadium. Delaware’s largest completed brownfield remediation to date, it also was Wilmington’s largest urban renewal project since the 1940s. Bensalem’s Riverfront South, a mixed-use development, occupied more than forty acres formerly home to aluminum refining and cryolite production. Trenton’s Waterfront Park, also home to minor league baseball, was constructed on reclaimed brownfields.

As important sectors of Greater Philadelphia’s postindustrial economy, sustainable (or “green”) industries and education interests figured prominently in brownfields revitalization. Photovoltaic plants for power generation were built in the 2010s along Christina River brownfields at Swedes Landing and Newport, Delaware. To combat blight and “food deserts” in Philadelphia’s low-income neighborhoods, residents and church groups, from Walnut Hill and Francisville to Kensington’s Greensgrow Farms, reclaimed brownfield lots for community gardens and commercial nurseries. The area’s universities, such as Temple and Delaware, underwent large expansions in the early 2000s, repurposing shuttered factories into dormitories and science campuses, respectively. Atop Camden’s former Harrison Avenue Landfill the Kroc Salvation Army Corps Community Center, a twenty-four-acre complex with a fitness center, athletic fields, waterpark, and a chapel, opened in October 2014, providing city residents with much-needed recreational opportunities.

In addition to improving the environment and creating new amenities for residents and visitors, Greater Philadelphia’s brownfields programs increased property values and tax revenue. In 1998 Newark’s Del Chapel Chemical and Textile Factory, which lay vacant for sixteen years, was sold to a private developer for $5.8 million. After a lengthy remediation process and erection of an apartment complex catering to University of Delaware students, the land’s assessed value in 2008 stood at $42 million. That same year, taxes collected from reused brownfields delivered $2.7 million into New Castle County’s coffers and $950,000 to the city of Wilmington.

Brownfield cataloging and remediation since the mid-1990s breathed new life into dozens of Greater Philadelphia’s abandoned buildings and their contaminated grounds. In 2014, the EPA calculated that one acre of redeveloped brownfield land in the region preserved 4.25 acres of “greenfields” (undeveloped land), helping to curtail metropolitan sprawl. Ranging in size from gas station parcels to swaths of riverfront, and in origin from backyard dumps to factories, the refashioning of brownfields created thousands of jobs (some 1,400 in Philadelphia alone), millions in much-needed revenue, and in urban and suburban neighborhoods alike, civic pride in addressing the toxic legacies of the past.

Stephen Nepa received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University and has appeared in the Emmy Award-winning documentary series Philadelphia: the Great Experiment. He wrote this essay while an associate historian at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers University-Camden in 2015. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Casinos began to open in the region in the late 1970s when, after much debate, New Jersey lawmakers legalized casinos in Atlantic City as a way to revitalize the once-thriving resort known as America’s Playground. Until then, the only other state to allow such gambling was Nevada, which legalized casinos in 1931.

The Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City opened in 1978, the first of twelve neon-lit, high-rise casino hotels. As gamblers flocked to Atlantic City, tourism increased from about 7 million visitors annually to more than 30 million. The casinos also created nearly 43,000 jobs at the industry’s peak in 2006, which also saw a record $5.2 billion in revenue.

Despite such gains, more than thirty years of casinos achieved little for Atlantic City. Many Atlantic City gamblers were day-trippers who arrived on buses, enticed by discounted fares and other incentives. They spent the bulk of their time and money inside the casinos, leaving the surrounding businesses to struggle. The number of independent restaurants decreased during the casino era. The shore resort’s poverty rate increased and its double-digit unemployment rate held steady.

Only Modest Local Benefits

In an effort to meet the promised requirements for investment in Atlantic City, the state government attempted to steer some of the revenues toward local benefit. The 1977 Casino Control Act called on casinos to reinvest 2 percent of gross revenues in Atlantic City, but the casinos failed to live up to that promise and most of  the tax revenues ended up in state coffers. Other revenues went to fund a variety of projects around the state. In 1984, state lawmakers created the Casinos Reinvestment Development Authority, which required casinos to pay 2.5 percent of gambling revenue to the state or reinvest 1.25 percent in community projects. All the casinos chose reinvestment. More than $2 billion went into hundreds of projects, but the spending lacked an overall strategy and many projects were piecemeal and politically connected.

Atlantic City’s grip on gambling began to loosen after lawmakers in Pennsylvania passed a bill in 2004 that legalized slot machines. Then-Governor Edward G. Rendell (b. 1944), had promised to use the proceeds from slots to lower property taxes in Pennsylvania by 30 percent. His push for legalized gambling culminated an effort he began in 1991, when as mayor of Philadelphia he tried but failed to gain state approval to legalize riverboat casinos.

The path to legalizing casinos in Pennsylvania was anything but smooth. In 2004, the state House quietly introduced a one-page bill addressing background checks at horse racetracks. The bill–called Act 71–sat in the House for forty-seven days before it was passed with no fanfare.

As the July 4 holiday approached, the Senate attached a 145-page amendment to the bill that called for legalizing up to 61,000 slot machines–more than any state except Nevada–in fourteen locations across the state, including two in Philadelphia. The bill passed the Senate 30-20 on July 2 at 2 a.m. The House took up the measure the next day and passed it 113-88 just after midnight on July 4. Rendell quickly signed the measure into law.

Approval Process Draws Fire

Critics assailed the hasty process. “What began as a one-page, unrelated bill became 145 pages of legislation. Legislators voted on this substitute amendment within a matter of hours,” the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania said. “There were no public hearings, no committee votes, and no real opportunity for citizens to provide meaningful input into the details of the bill,”

The political sausage-making did not deter gamblers who flocked to the first slots parlor, the Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs, when it opened in November 2006 at a harness-racing complex outside of Wilkes-Barre. Casinos soon opened in other parts of Pennsylvania, including Bensalem, Chester, Bethlehem, and the Poconos. Despite promises of economic revitalization, the casinos have had little impact on surrounding development across the state.

But the casinos have generated billions of dollars in tax revenue for Pennsylvania, in part because the tax rate on slots revenue was set at 55 percent. About half of the revenue was designated for wage tax reduction in Philadelphia and property tax relief in the rest of the state. The rest was directed to support the state budget, local governments, civic development and tourism, volunteer fire departments, and the horse-racing industry.

The slots law called for two casinos in Philadelphia. A number of bidders lined up, and in December 2006 the state gaming board awarded licenses to two politically-connected ownership groups known as SugarHouse and Foxwoods.

Initially, Mayor Michael Nutter (b. 1957) and anti-gambling groups opposed the two winning casino locations on the Delaware River waterfront. But Nutter switched his position after the 2008 financial crisis hit, claiming the city needed the revenue.

2010: City’s First Casino Opens

In September 2010, SugarHouse opened in the shadow of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, making Philadelphia the largest city in the country with a casino. In its first two years, SugarHouse delivered $9.35 million to city schools and $4.34 million to the city’s general fund. Overall, gambling revenues were tiny, given the city’s roughly $4.5 billion budget.

The push for more casinos continued despite setbacks. In 2010, state gambling regulators revoked the casino license for Foxwoods after the group was unable to get the necessary financing approvals and missed several deadlines to open in Philadelphia.

There were other bumps in the gambling road as well. In 2008, Louis DeNaples, the owner of the Mt. Airy Resort in the Poconos, was indicted for lying to state gambling regulators about his alleged ties to mobsters in Scranton. The charges were later dropped after DeNaples agreed to give control of the slots parlor to his daughter.

But state lawmakers were undeterred. In 2010, Pennsylvania amended the slots law to allow table games, like poker and blackjack, paving the way for full-blown casinos as opposed to only slots. Pennsylvania’s gambling revenues continued to grow, largely at the expense of Atlantic City, which saw its revenues drop after the first casino opened in Pennsylvania.

Unlike the visitors to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, many of Pennsylvania’s gamblers are locals who are repeat and problem gamblers. In 2010, Dave Jonas, president of the Parx casino in Bensalem, and other area operators said their customers visited an average of three to five times a week.

Pennsylvania Surpasses Atlantic City

In 2012, Pennsylvania surpassed Atlantic City to become the second-biggest gambling market in the country behind only Las Vegas. Pennsylvania’s success spurred other states–including Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, and New York–to legalize casinos. The increased competition created a crowded market. In the Philadelphia region, by 2014 there were twenty-four casinos within 100 miles. More than a dozen additional gambling halls were planned from Maryland to Massachusetts.

The casino explosion was spurred by lawmakers in many states in need of revenues to fill budget holes. Gambling seemed to be the easiest and quickest way to raise revenues given the anti-tax mood of most voters. But the wave of enthusiasm for casinos in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other states ran counter to cautions expressed in a 2009 study by the Rockefeller Institute, which found that gambling was not a reliable revenue source.

According to the study, gambling revenue tends to grow more slowly than needed to keep up with growing expenses for education and other public programs. As a result, gambling operations may add to budget imbalances rather than solving them. Many other studies have shown that casinos lead to increased economic and social costs, including more bankruptcy, crime, divorce, and suicide.

Another problem emerged as well: The casino revenues began to drop in Pennsylvania as well as in many other states. In Atlantic City, gambling revenues plummeted by 40 percent from their peak in 2006. Four casinos closed in Atlantic City in 2014. A fifth casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, filed for bankruptcy.

Despite the closings, in November 2014 gambling regulators in Pennsylvania awarded a second casino license in Philadelphia to a site near the sports complex in South Philadelphia. To offset the losses in casino revenues, lawmakers in Pennsylvania pushed for new forms of gambling, including Internet gambling and keno in bars and restaurants. Lawmakers in New Jersey legalized Internet and sports gambling. Some lawmakers in New Jersey pushed to build casinos in other parts of the state.

In 1999 the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, a bipartisan group created during the Clinton administration, called for a “pause” in the spread of gambling and suggested that policymakers use the time to learn more about the likely effects of gambling on their communities. But instead of a moratorium, the river of tax revenue generated in Pennsylvania set off a gambling arms race as neighboring states rushed to legalize casinos.

The first casualty of increased competition was Atlantic City, which lost its unique status as the gambling mecca of the East. Most analysts believed the casino market– especially in the Northeast–had reached saturation. The looming addition of casinos in New York and Massachusetts signaled the likelihood of more upheaval ahead.

Paul Davies is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Delaware and a senior research fellow at the Institute for American Values, where he writes about gambling. He spent twenty-five years working for newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Davies is the author of the forthcoming book Casino State: How Pennsylvania Became the East Coast Gambling Capital. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In Philadelphia, John Harrison (1773–1833) built the first chemical plant in the United States in 1793. His plant on Green Street, west of Third, produced sulfuric acid using a lead chamber process, originally developed in Europe. Sulfuric acid was the first chemical produced on an industrial scale, leading to its widespread use. In 1802, the French immigrant family led by Eleuthère Irénée duPont  (1771–1834) founded the DuPont Company, which manufactured gunpowder, a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, on the Brandywine River a few miles northwest of Wilmington, Delaware. Several years later, in 1804, Samuel Wetherill (1736–1816) began to make white lead pigment for paint near Harrison’s plant. When the War of 1812 disrupted trade and cut off European supplies of sulfuric acid, Wetherill began to make his own.

Soap and Sulfuric Acid

The regional chemical industry grew along with the local economy. By the start of the War of 1812, Philadelphia had twenty-eight soap and candle works, eighteen distilleries, fourteen glue factories, ten sugar refineries, seven paper mills, and six drug-making concerns. By 1830 Charles Lennig (1809–91) operated the largest sulfuric acid plant in America, located in Bridesburg. He diversified into other chemicals, and by 1859 his plant was one of the most important chemical operations in the United States. During the Civil War, the DuPont Company prospered by selling gunpowder to the Union. Later, the company diversified into the new high explosive, dynamite, and military smokeless powder. DuPont was one of 105 local chemical manufacturers to mount exhibits at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

In the twentieth century, the DuPont Company and Rohm and Haas emerged as the two most important chemical enterprises in the Philadelphia area. Rohm and Haas became a Philadelphia company in 1909 when Dr. Otto Haas (1872–1960) arrived to sell a leather tanning chemical, Oropon, which had been developed by his partner Otto Rohm (1876–1939) in Germany. After World War I, Rohm and Haas began making chemicals for Philadelphia’s leather and textile industries. In 1920, it acquired the Charles Lennig Company. In the 1930s, company researchers developed a lightweight clear acrylic polymer that was trademarked Plexiglas. Plexiglas was widely used for windows in airplanes during World War II. After the war the company continued to develop important products from acrylic polymers, such as water-based paints. In the postwar decades, Rohm and Haas became a large and profitable manufacturer of specialty chemicals.

DuPont Faces Antitrust Action

By 1912, DuPont had grown so large that the U.S. government had filed an antitrust suit, which forced the company to spin off parts of its explosives business to form two new companies, Hercules and Atlas, named after popular brands of dynamite. These companies later became diversified chemical manufacturers, which were bought by other chemical companies in the second half of the twentieth century. DuPont’s assets grew tremendously during World War I, when the company supplied the Allies and the United States with explosives. DuPont used its newfound wealth to diversify into chemical manufacture, principally by buying other firms, such as the venerable Harrison Brothers Company in 1917, which by this time made chemicals and paints at Gray’s Ferry. During the war, DuPont began a major research initiative to manufacture the dyes that the Germans had supplied before the war. To make dyes, the company built a large plant on the Delaware River at Deepwater Point, New Jersey (just north of the Delaware Memorial Bridge).

After the war DuPont continued to diversify into rayon fibers, cellophane films, and plastics. Having been one of the first American companies to establish research laboratories (early in the twentieth century), DuPont called upon its chemists to improve these products, but they soon began to invent new ones. In the 1930s researchers began a decades-long investigation of polymers (long-chain) molecules that produced, among many iconic products, neoprene synthetic rubber, nylon, Teflon polymers, Lycra spandex, Tyvek spun-bonded fabric, and Kevlar fibers. These inventions helped to make DuPont an extremely prosperous company, a bulwark of the Delaware Valley economy, employing tens of thousands of people in several local plants, but mainly in management, research, and engineering.

The Philadelphia area also was well-represented at midcentury by two industries closely related to chemicals: oil refining and pharmaceuticals. There were five large refineries in the Delaware Valley, making it the second only to Houston, Texas, in output, and the city also hosted four major drug manufacturers.

Late Twentieth-Century Slowdown

Beginning in the 1980s, the chemical industry generally began to experience a decline in innovation, slowing growth, and shrinking profits. Rohm and Haas’s performance, following these trends, deteriorated significantly. In response, it sold off its Plexiglas business and acquired a company that made chemicals for the semiconductor industry. In 2008, the Michigan-based Dow Chemical acquired Rohm and Haas. DuPont survived by shifting its focus to pesticides and seeds. However, competition in this field led the company to a merger effort with Dow Chemical, its longtime competitor, in 2015. By the early decades of the twenty-first century, the chemical industry had been radically reorganized through numerous mergers and acquisitions.

Chemical production began in Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century to serve nearby manufacturers in what soon would become one of America’s major industrial cities. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Delaware Valley companies, notably DuPont, were taking advantage of railroad transportation to serve larger markets. In the twentieth century, the regional chemical industry served national and international markets, expanding to become a significant contributor to the local economy. In the last quarter of the century, however, the chemical industry globally matured, leading to a decline of its importance locally.

John Kenly Smith Jr. teaches history at Lehigh University. He specializes in the history of technology and is coauthor with David A. Hounshell of Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902–1980. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The China trade was a complex system of commercial circuits linking economies in the Atlantic world to those of what early Americans called the East Indies—the wide zone between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, encompassing China, India, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands. The traffic centered on Canton (Guangzhou), the biggest city of the Pearl River Delta and the only Chinese-controlled port open to Western traders. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Canton became the most important market for teas and Chinese manufactured goods. Lacking commodities in demand in Asia, westerners paid for their purchases in silver—usually Spanish dollars minted from New World silver mines—and accepted stringent regulations, including limiting their trading partners to a special guild of merchants, the Cohong, setting a specific season for all business, and confining them to rented factories (buildings that combined warehouses, offices, and living quarters) beyond the city’s walls.

Colonial Philadelphians, like other British subjects, developed a taste for Asian goods. However, access was mediated by the British East India Company, which held a monopoly on East Indies trade. In 1773, Parliament’s preferential treatment of the East India Company’s tea business helped spark widespread protests—most famously in Boston, but also in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s relationship to the China trade changed with the American Revolution. While the war gained Americans political independence, it cost them the markets of the British Empire, including the West Indian ports that Philadelphians depended upon as outlets for the region’s agricultural products. Faced with a dire economic situation, Philadelphians gambled on new trades—including with China. The first American ship to reach Canton, The Empress of China, departed New York harbor on February 22, 1784. It was a joint venture of Philadelphians and New Yorkers, organized by Philadelphian financier Robert Morris (1734-1806) and captained by Philadelphian John Green (1736-96). A financial success, the Empress’s voyage inspired imitators, which helped establish Philadelphia as a major center for U.S. trade with China.

The founding generation of Americans saw their new trade with Asia as a matter of national pride as well as a source of prosperity. Philadelphia politicians used the establishment of a new federal government in 1789 to aid the trade, passing legislation that gave special protections to American merchants shipping East Indies goods. Still, bereft of cheap silver at home, and without all the monopoly protections of their European rivals, Philadelphian merchants like Stephen Girard (1750-1831) had to adapt to compete. They used smaller ships and crews to save on operating costs and more nimbly respond to markets. They also persistently sought new sources of Spanish dollars as well as new commodities that might sell well at Canton, including ginseng, sea otter pelts, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer (sea slugs).

These innovations, along with good timing and a relaxed approach to commercial legality, were crucial to the trade’s early success. The Napoleonic wars provided neutral American shippers with an advantage as suppliers of tea to Europe, but also risked British interference. Philadelphia merchant Benjamin Chew Wilcocks (1776-1845) helped inaugurate an American opium-smuggling trade in 1805, shipping the drug to China from Smyrna (Izmir), Turkey, and later from British India. Well known as a painkiller, opium had become increasingly valuable in Asia as the practice of recreational smoking spread. Seeking to curb this addictive habit, Chinese authorities had long banned opium importation, though with little effect on smugglers’ business (the drug was legal in the United States). While not every Philadelphia merchant was an opium trader—a few, like Quaker Nathan Dunn (1782-1844), refused it on religious grounds—the illicit market for the drug was robust, and by the late 1820s, opium outpaced silver as the main import exchanged for goods in China.

Opium smuggling’s profits proved to be the undoing of the old China trade. The elaborate networks that British and American merchants created to facilitate opium trafficking caused friction with Chinese officials, culminating in Britain’s invasion in 1840 (the First Opium War). Though not belligerents, Americans benefited from Britain’s 1842 victory, as the treaties the Qing Empire made in its aftermath eliminated trading restrictions and opened new ports. Conflict over opium also accelerated consolidation among American China firms, which increasingly shifted their operations to New York. Philadelphia’s participation in overseas trade decreased, as its merchants invested in manufacturing, transportation, and domestic commerce instead.

The China trade had a lasting impact on Philadelphia’s culture and society. Chinese goods were for decades markers of high status and fashion. China merchants were leaders in the commercial community, serving as bank and insurance company directors as well as members of the Philadelphia Board of Trade. Some of them, like Nathan Dunn and Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest (1739-1801), built country estates in the Chinese style, filled with chinoiserie, and occasionally staffed by Chinese servants. Their fortunes also helped fund major charitable and educational institutions, including the American Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania Hospital, and Girard College. The trade also influenced popular perceptions of China and its people among Philadelphians, long before any significant immigration from Asia. Grocers’ advertising for teas commonly featured Chinese people and landscapes, and beginning in 1839, Nathan Dunn’s Chinese Museum gave thousands of visitors an experience of “China in miniature” through dioramas of daily life in the Middle Kingdom. Through the China trade, Philadelphia came to know the world—and it, Philadelphia.

Dael A. Norwood is an Assistant Professor of History at Binghamton University. His book project, Trading in Liberty: How Commerce with China Defined Early America, examines how the lucrative commerce between the United States and China shaped the politics and political economy of the American state in its first century. (Author information current at time of publication.)