Created by composer and lyricist Sherman Edwards (1919-81) with book writer Peter Stone (1930-2003), 1776 depicts historical events from May 8 through July 4, 1776, with a sprinkling of dramatic license. Produced on the eve of the nation’s bicentennial, in the charged political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, 1776 showed how the nation began in conflict. The musical opens in Independence Hall’s Assembly Room with John Adams (1735-1826) complaining that Congress cannot come to an agreement on whether to separate from Great Britain. Frustrated, he states: “I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress!” This sets the tone of fundamental disagreement, which becomes evident as Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee (1732-94) proposes independence. John Dickinson (1732-1808), from Pennsylvania, moves to indefinitely postpone this notion. At first, five colonies vote in favor of debate while five vote against, as New Jersey is absent and New York abstains. Rhode Island’s vote is delayed, but the notion is passed after their vote of “yea” is ultimately heard. Adams then seeks to buy time by calling for postponement until a written Declaration of Independence can be prepared. The president of the Congress, John Hancock (1737-93), agrees and breaks the tie to favor postponing. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) is then nominated to write the Declaration, despite missing his wife and claiming he is unable to concentrate without her. The film version of 1776 shows Jefferson walking up the stairs to his rented rooms at Seventh and High (Market) Streets to write, play the violin, and spend time with his wife, which enabled him to successfully write.

The Slavery Issue

Jefferson’s draft, when completed, triggers additional disagreements, including conflict between North and South over whether the text should denounce King George III’s responsibility for the slave trade—a reminder that the roots of racial tensions run deep in American history. After Jefferson’s words against slavery are removed, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia join northern and middle colonies in voting “yea” on Lee’s resolution for independence on July 2. New York abstains (“courteously”), and Pennsylvania passes at first but ultimately votes in favor. The resolution passes, and the story is depicted as ending on July 4 as the names of delegates from every colony are called and they sign the Declaration of Independence. (In reality, the delegates approved the written declaration on July 4, and signing did not begin until August 2). The bell in the State House, later known as the Liberty Bell, is heard ringing dramatically (a myth invented later, in the nineteenth century).

Throughout, the show calls attention to Philadelphia’s stifling heat. The song “The Egg” playfully refers to hot and humid Philadelphia acting as an incubator for the unborn majestic eagle that will ultimately represent the United States. Philadelphia figures play key roles in the suspenseful vote for independence. Within the Pennsylvania delegation, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) favors independence while Dickinson does not, and James Wilson (1742-98) tends to follow Dickinson’s actions. After all other colonies have voted “yea,” the divided Pennsylvania delegation has the final vote. Wilson’s character, responding to Dickinson’s pressure to vote against independence, states, “If I go with them, I’ll only be one among dozens; no one will ever remember the name of James Wilson. But if I vote with you, I’ll be the man who prevented American independence. I’m sorry, John—I just didn’t bargain for that.” Wilson’s choice assures Pennsylvania’s approval and a unanimous vote in favor of independence. Dickinson is shown leaving Congress, and he did not sign. He did, however, join the Pennsylvania militia.

Breaking the Tie Vote

Similarly, the musical portrays Caesar Rodney (1728-84) as the tiebreaking vote in favor of independence for the Delaware delegation. After riding approximately eighty miles on horseback through a thunderstorm, Rodney arrives in Philadelphia on July 2 still wearing his muddy boots just as the vote for independence is about to take place. New Jersey also plays a role in the show as Benjamin Franklin notes the strain in his relationship with his illegitimate son, William Franklin (c. 1730-1813), a Loyalist who served as Royal Governor of New Jersey from 1763 to 1776.

The Broadway production of 1776, directed by Peter Hunt (1925-2002) and choreographed by Onna White (1922-2005) with musical direction by Peter Howard (1927-2008), received warm reviews. Critics found the book for the show to be well researched and written. Although they commented that musical numbers often sounded alike and acted as filler with large gaps in between, they show was a smash hit with audiences. 1776 won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1969, and it came back to Broadway as a revival in 1997. Numerous professional, regional, community, and school theaters have produced the show nationally, including at least nine regional theater companies during the year of the Bicentennial. In Philadelphia, the Walnut Street Theatre produced the show in 1997.

The director of the 1969 Broadway production also directed the screen version, and many actors from the stage repeated their roles in the movie, including: William Daniels (b. 1927) as John Adams, Howard Da Silva (1909-86) as Benjamin Franklin, and Ken Howard (1944-2016) as Thomas Jefferson. Although set in Philadelphia, filming for the movie of 1776 took place in California at the Columbia Ranch (later known as the Warner Brothers Ranch, or Warner Ranch) in Burbank and Sunset Gower Studios in Los Angeles. A fire at the Warner Ranch in the 1970s destroyed the film’s recreation of a colonial Philadelphia street and other sets. The movie cost an estimated $4 million to make and grossed $6.1 million, but it was not generally admired by critics.

Throughout 1776, Adams’ character repeats the words “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?” These words have continued to resonate and take on new meanings to viewers of all ages. Set in and around Independence Hall, 1776 has helped to sustain recognition of Philadelphia’s role in American history.

Alexandra Jordan Thelin is a Ph.D. student in History and Culture at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and specializes in fashion history, visual culture, and art. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The film features John Travolta (b. 1954) as Jack Terry, a sound technician for a low-budget horror studio who, while attempting to record stock wind audio in Wissahickon Valley Park, inadvertently witnesses and records the assassination of the governor of Pennsylvania, a presidential candidate hopeful, whose car tire is shot out, forcing his car into the Wissahickon Creek. With him in the car is Sally, played by Nancy Allen (b. 1950), whom Jack manages to save. For the remainder of the film, Jack works with Sally to attempt to expose the assassination while they are each hunted down by Burke, played by John Lithgow (b. 1945), who attempts to cover his tracks by murdering women who look similar to Sally and attributing the crime to his alter ego, the Liberty Bell Strangler.

Originally, the film was to be set in Canada and titled Personal Effects. De Palma collaborated with the magazine Take One to organize a screenwriting contest to see who could best take his “dramatic framework and create a political thriller.” Although the contest found a winner, the plan fell through, possibly due to Take One’s bankruptcy. Instead, the film was set in De Palma’s hometown of Philadelphia and no other writers were credited.

Political Allusions

Using a combination of setting and plot, the film alludes to real-life, high-profile political events and artifacts such as the Zapruder film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (1917-63), the Chappaquiddick incident involving Edward Kennedy (1932-2009), the death of Nelson Rockefeller (1908-79), and even Watergate. De Palma attributed much of the film’s creation to his obsession with Kennedy’s assassination. In addition to Blow Up (1966), he credits the film The Conversation (1974), directed by Francis Ford Coppola (b.1939), as inspiration for the plot. Critics have also noted its commentary on the growing fear of the United States government’s clandestine ability to control the public.

Featured in Blow Out are numerous instantly recognizable Philadelphia landmarks, including the Henry Avenue Bridge in Wissahickon Park, 30th Street Station, Reading Terminal Market, and Penn’s Landing. The film captures many locations in Philadelphia that no longer exist or have drastically changed. In one scene, Jack speaks to Sally at the Reading Terminal rail station, which was not an active railroad station beginning in 1976, the year the film is set. Later in the film, during its climax, Jack races down Market Street in his car, cutting through City Hall and driving directly through the Mummers Parade, before crashing his car into the Wanamaker’s Department Store front, which later became Macy’s. Although the film boasts a multitude of Philadelphia landmarks, no lead actors attempt the Philadelphia accent during their performance; Nancy Allen reflected that it was simply too hard for her to adopt.

The climax of the film, which most prominently features Philadelphia landmarks, also proved to be the most difficult sequence to film. On the first day of shooting the film, as Jack runs from his car and into 30th Street Station, John Travolta fell and twisted his ankle, creating an obstacle for both himself and De Palma. Later, after filming had wrapped, negatives for the Wissahickon Park scene and the chase through the Mummers Parade were stolen out of a truck, forcing both the cast and crew to return to Philadelphia to reshoot the parade sequence. The chase scene ends with a large parade at night on the Delaware River waterfront. According to De Palma, it took the crew an entire night just to achieve the correct lighting for this scene.

Later Acclaim

Blow Out garnered renewed admiration in 2011 following its rerelease by the Criterion Collection, a distributor of prestige home video. Critics’ responses at the time of its original release ranged widely between high praise and dismissal as a “cheap genre film.” Roger Ebert (1942-2013), Pauline Kael (1919-2001), and Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963) were among the film’s staunchest defenders, with Tarantino once claiming the film “is one of the greatest movies ever made.”

Audiences were not as kind. The film cost $18 million to make and recouped only $13 million, a box office failure that has been largely attributed—even by De Palma himself— to the grim ending involving a character’s death. The film’s summer release instead of fall, as De Palma and Allen wanted, may have negatively affected its reception by audiences seeking lighter fare. Following suit, the 1982 award season was equally unimpressive. Only Vilmos Zsigmond (1930-2016), the film’s cinematographer, earned a National Society of Film Critics nomination for Best Cinematography. Although critics and audiences alike may not have initially appreciated Blow Out for its artistic merits, the film’s sweeping and recognizable political intrigue and De Palma’s eye for his hometown successfully created one of the most comprehensive visual time capsules the city of Philadelphia has to offer.

Matthew Midgett is a Philadelphia resident, writer, and second-year student in Rutgers-Camden’s English and Media Studies Master’s program. His interests include Gothic literature, Philadelphia film, and Marxist theory. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Lubin Manufacturing Company was founded in 1902 by Siegmund “Pop” Lubin (1851-1923), an eyeglasses salesman-cum-industrialist who got his start shooting homemade movies in his backyard. Between 1896 and his film company’s demise in 1916, Lubin produced more than 3,000 movies, but Philadelphia itself did not play a prominent role in his filmography even though the company’s imprint was an image of the Liberty Bell.

After Lubin’s brief reign at the top of the motion picture industry, Philadelphia receded from its prominent position in cinema. The city and its environs continued to make periodic appearances, however, usually playing one of three very particular roles. In the mid-twentieth century, visions of haughty, manner-bound Main Line society dominated depictions of Philadelphia. As deindustrialization began in earnest in the 1970s, attention began to shift to the city itself, especially its rotting manufacturing infrastructure and working-class row house neighborhoods. Subsequently, Philadelphia served either as a distinctive backdrop for a few recurring directors, notably M. Night Shyamalan (b. 1970) and David O. Russell (b.1958), and more often as an archetypal urban area. Philadelphia played that role before, but the frequency of the city’s anonymous appearances greatly expanded with the multimillion-dollar tax credits that the state of Pennsylvania began offering to film studios in 2004.

Glamour

The Main Line dominates depictions of Philadelphia in many mid-century films, which represent the city—or at least its upper crust—as a bastion of old money and rigid, almost European, class distinctions.

The most famous, and highest quality, of these pictures is The Philadelphia Story (1940), which managed to squeeze three of Hollywood’s most indelible stars onto one screen: Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Cary Grant. The movie is effortlessly classy, the setting all crystalline champagne glasses and book-lined boudoirs. All the action takes place in three estates on the Main Line. There, Hepburn’s heiress, based on real life socialite Helen Hope Montgomery Scott (1904-95), must choose between the affections of three men. The city itself is never seen and is mentioned only in passing when Grant promises to pick up Stewart’s visiting journalist at a train station in North Philadelphia. (This perhaps betrays an ignorance of the city’s transportation geography on the part of the New York-born playwright and the out-of-town screenwriters who adapted his work).

The Philadelphia Story broke box office records and won critical accolades and a few Academy Awards. But Hepburn lost Best Actress to Ginger Rogers, who won for her star turn in another Main Line-focused Philadelphia film. Largely forgotten since, Kitty Foyle, based on a novel by Philadelphia journalist Christopher Morley, tells the story of a working-class girl who dreams of ascending into the city’s ossified elite class. She comes close to succeeding when she falls into a romance with a scion of a prominent banking family, only to be frozen out and nearly destroyed by the massed forces of snobbery and inherited wealth. In her early life, Rogers’ character haunts the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, depicted as the city’s citadel of privilege. Nearly twenty years later, Paul Newman’s The Young Philadelphians (1959) explored similar tropes, again focusing exclusively on the city’s elites depicted as WASP blue bloods obsessed with class distinctions to an almost un-American degree. To drive home the point, the slogan featured on the film’s posters was “When you rip the upper crust off any city, you’ll find raw flesh underneath.”

The Philadelphia Story is much more forgiving of the American aristocracy, depicting Hepburn’s up-by-the-bootstraps fiancé as the heel, not Grant’s absurdly wealthy dilettante. However, depictions of the city’s social hierarchy as stultified and oppressive in Kitty Foyle and The Young Philadelphians proved to have far greater longevity. As the twentieth century wore on, films focusing on the Main Line or Rittenhouse Square set became rarer, although the unflattering depictions of the city’s old school elite as cruel, prejudiced, and capricious appeared again in Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning HIV/AIDS morality film Philadelphia (1993). In a lighter, though similarly damning vein, Eddie Murphy’s comedy Trading Places sends up Philadelphia’s elite. (Dan Aykroyd’s snotty commodities trader is suitably named Louis Winthorpe III.) But that 1983 film unknowingly highlights one of the reasons for the decline of old, glamorous, rigid Philadelphia society: In the 1980s, old money families were being supplanted by those winning fortunes in the newly financialized economy, focused in New York, and leaving little for Philadelphia’s sclerotic stock market.

Grit

Philadelphia’s most indelible cinematic scenes are undoubtedly from the gritty, bleak, and oppressive movies of the 1970s and 1980s. When industrial capital definitively escaped the city in the 1970s, countless abandoned factories and warehouses were left looming over suddenly impoverished working-class neighborhoods. Similar vistas of deindustrialization captured the imaginations of filmmakers in New York and Detroit, but Philadelphia more than held its own in this grim competition.

The most famous film of post-industrial grit was, inarguably, 1976’s Rocky. After the parade of cheerier sequels, each seemingly more motivational than the last, it is easy to forget the darkness—literally and figuratively—of the first film starring the “Italian Stallion.” A pall of soot and ash seems to hang over the entire movie, choking Rocky’s row house neighborhood in Kensington. Sylvester Stallone’s (b.1946) iconic character works as an enforcer for a loan shark and is painfully awkward in his interactions with Adrian (who, in turn, works in a shabby little pet store). Everyone seems angry, alienated, and hopelessly stuck in place.

A similar atmosphere pervades the industrial wasteland of David Lynch’s (b.1946) 1977 movie Eraserhead, although here the existential dread and grotesquery is ramped up to an almost unbearable degree. The story, such as it is, focuses on a bizarrely coiffed factory worker, Henry Spencer, who works, lives, and courts women in a space dominated by factories and ex-factories. The movie cannot be properly said to have a narrative, but is instead obsessed with the products of an impoverished, deindustrializing landscape. Factories are still operative in the movie, as mysterious mechanical sounds, clanking and shrilling, adding to the unease of Lynch’s film. Meanwhile the absurd grotesques who populate the landscape are nightmarish caricatures of the characters the filmmaker met while living in an impoverished, violent, dirty corner of the city in the 1960s and 1970s. While Eraserhead (1977) was filmed in Los Angeles a few years after Lynch had moved away from Philadelphia, the vistas of the film are avowedly formed by his experiences in Philadelphia, where he lived in Callowhill and Fairmount, when both of those neighborhoods were more violent and sootier than they became when they subsequently gentrified.

Other classic movies of the era reflected the rising crime wave that threatened to swamp the city, along with much of urban America, and pervasive paranoiac views of authority. In both 1985’s Witness and 1981’s Blow Out, people are murdered horribly in the bathroom of 30th Street Station by figures of supposed law-and-order (a police officer and a government assassin, respectively). When 1995’s 12 Monkeys is not depicting a post-apocalyptic city ruled by animals released from the zoo, it is flashing back to pre-Armageddon days where the city is shown as a dingy and dangerous streetscape scarred by graffiti and abandonment.

Unlike the glitzier Philadelphia films of earlier years, these gritty masterpieces were definitely anchored in the city itself. Although Center City was spotlighted most often, with its array of distinctive landmarks and monuments, these movies also exposed less-seen aspects of Philadelphia. Blow Out even featured a Mummers troupe marching in a Fourth of July parade, while Rocky and, to a lesser extent, Witness showed the old row house blocks that have long housed such a large portion of the city’s poor and working-class residents.

Anonymity

Recent years also witnessed movies set in Philadelphia, or its immediate suburbs, that offered a new window on the city, with neither old money glitz nor postindustrial grime. Silver Linings Playbook (2012) was largely set in white working-class suburbs of Delaware County, including locations in Ridley Park, Upper Darby, Ridley Township, and Lansdowne. There was even a booth in Upper Darby’s Llanerch Diner where Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper’s characters ate that reported increased trade after the movie’s success. David Russell’s follow-up, American Hustle, focused on the Abscam scandal that took down several prominent Phila-area politicians, but focused on the New Jersey angle instead. M. Night Shyamalan’s movies often took place in the tonier sections of Center City: Rittenhouse Square, Society Hill, Old City, or in the city’s stable northwestern neighborhoods. Like almost all Philadelphia movies, the city’s iconic Center City sights were featured prominently. Neighborhoods like West Philadelphia, Kensington, South Philadelphia, or the Northeast were not featured at all. There were a few exceptions, like 2010’s Night Catches Us, set in 1976 and focusing on an ex-Black Panther’s return to his old neighborhood and the dangers and temptations that awaited him there.

But the city’s distinctive presence in the films of Russell and Shyamalan did not become the norm in the latest era of Philadelphia movies. Instead, the industry increasingly used the city or its environs simply as a stand-in for “Anywhere U.S.A.” That practice dated back at least to 1958 creature feature The Blob, shot in Chester County and Downingtown, but it could have been anywhere. That practice remained the exception, however, until the mid-1980s, with the creation of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office (GPFO). Spearheaded by Sharon Pinkenson, a former wardrobe stylist, the office claimed to have created “$4 billion of economic impact” since its inception, but in the process the city was relegated largely to a secondary film role as backdrop.

Further returns followed Governor Edward Rendell’s (b. 1944) establishment of a $75 million dollar tax credit for filmmakers. In 2009, eleven movies and television shows were shot in Philadelphia resulting in $270 million in direct spending in the region. But few of these movies—Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), The Best and the Brightest (2010), Shooter (2007), Unstoppable (2010), Paranoia (2013)—actually used the city as a setting, instead using it as a stand-in for New York or some other vague metropolis. When The Answer Man (2009) director John Hindman was asked why he filmed in the city, he said, “Because of their wonderful tax incentives.” When the tax credits were reduced under Governor Tom Corbett (b.1949) to $60 million and then $42 million in fiscal year 2009-10, movies that had planned to use Philadelphia moved elsewhere. Brad Pitt’s World War Z (2013) made Glasgow, Scotland, into Philadelphia because the tax credit deal fell through.

Although the tax credits recovered from their post-recession decline and remained stable at $60 million in 2015, their fruits were spread across the state, and Philadelphia was not guaranteed a pride position. Only one major studio picture filmed in Philadelphia in 2015: Ryan Coogler’s (b. 1986) Creed, the seventh sequel to Rocky, focused on the city, a welcome return to the neighborhood-based story telling of the first Rocky. Another major studio production, Clerks III, was shot in Philadelphia, but in this instance Philadelphia stood in, again, for New York. Thus while Philadelphia managed to retain some role in film into the twenty-first century, its position remained a pale shadow of its promising beginnings.

Jake Blumgart is a reporter, editor, and researcher based in Philadelphia. He is a contributing writer at Next City and PhillyVoice. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Primed with forward-looking ideas about equality and shared community resources from Thomas More’s Utopia, and inspired by the Quaker vision of George Fox and Thomas Loe, Penn was convinced that he could construct a “Holy Experiment” with a well-planned settlement and a rational government. He aimed for a social contract that would bind and respect all residents, based not on coercion but on the principle of “what love can do.”

By the time he was 22, Penn understood coercion. He had been exiled from Oxford University for boycotting Anglican services and for taunting fellow students who acceded to Oxford’s religious practices. Returning home, the young Penn – new to Quakerism – was beaten by his father, Admiral William Penn, who sent his son traveling in hopes that he would mature into a more reasonable adult.

But the admiral did not succeed in dampening his son’s religious fervor. Instead, two stints in prison (as a result of unconventional behaviors stemming from his religious zeal) gave the young man time to read, and to contemplate, consolidate, and write down his Quaker ideas.

A man of his times, Penn saw his identity as a member of the British upper classes. He had servants, and he owned slaves. But Penn’s religious faith led him to want to do good in the world.

Practicing What He Preached

He wanted to put into practice his conviction that in an unsullied environment, “that of God in each person” would emerge triumphant. In No Cross, No Crown, written in prison, he had concluded that some suffering (the cross) was a necessary part of reward or salvation (the crown). No Cross, No Crown was also a play on words, suggesting that one aspect of an unsullied environment would be a principled refusal to knuckle under to the false authority of the established church or to the king.

But Quakers were accustomed to persecution for eschewing “worldly” conventions, and Penn had no illusions that it would be easy to create that perfect environment. Hence, in devising his New World utopia, Penn spent many months recruiting men of conscience to populate his new province. He also drafted a “Frame of Government” to provide the scaffolding for community, and secured approval from other Quakers who read the document.

A businessman as well as a man of deep religious faith, Penn also wanted a return on his investment. He dreamed of a “great towne” – a bustling commercial center that would command a place of respect in the Atlantic World. On the other hand, however, Penn wanted a bucolic “greene countrie towne” befitting an English country gentleman. So he hired surveyor Thomas Holme to lay out a grid to accomplish these contradictory goals. Parks would serve for neighborhood gathering places, and a central marketplace would help to cement a community and an economy based upon morality, integrity, and mutual compassion among citizens.

The “Frame of Government,” based upon England’s Magna Carta, also affirmed Enlightenment ideas of equal justice for all who would consent to live within the laws. From this premise flowed the idea of toleration and fair treatment for people of diverse religions and cultures – a principle that extended to offering contractual relationships for acquiring land from the local Indians.

A Worry About Catholic Allegiance

But in these aspects also the wily businessman merged principle with expedience. At first he was leery that Catholics’ allegiance to the pope might compromise their loyalty to local law. But he eventually concluded that religious persecution interfered with the smooth operation of commerce and property, and therefore Catholic residents should be allowed to pursue their religion and community life, as long as they abided by the civil laws.

Penn’s colony early welcomed Jews, as well as Anglicans, Mennonites, and the Lutherans who established “old Swede’s” Church by the end of the seventeenth century. That atmosphere of religious openness also paved the way for the world’s first African American Christian denomination – the African Methodist Episcopal Church – and for myriad religious groups who reflected the city’s continuing diversity.

Through three centuries of growth and change, Philadelphia has retained much of Penn’s vision, and has returned repeatedly to his ideas of community and tolerance. Four of the five community parks remain in Center City as important markers of neighborhood unity. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the city government reaffirmed Penn’s vision by purchasing country estates to create Fairmount Park – a resource used and valued by various residents.

Philadelphia is still known as a “City of Neighborhoods,” but the tensions that were evident in its founding continue. The public city parks have often been sites of contention over who has the “rights” to define their use. And just as Penn was suspicious of Catholics, anxieties among diverse religions – Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and more recently Muslims – have peppered the city’s political, geographic, and economic life, even as some residents continue to celebrate the traditions of diversity and tolerance.

In 2010, after nearly a decade of negotiation among these diverse people, Philadelphians unveiled a memorial to the city’s years as the nation’s capital (1790-1800). This historic site, the President’s House, takes a hard and honest look at the place of slavery in the development of the nation’s early history. Nearby, a new National Museum of American Jewish History also opened its doors. These are but a few of countless examples of the enduring influence of the “Holy Experiment” that invite Philadelphia residents to turn “diversity” into “community.

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William Penn  worked to build his province on two levels—with practical plans for land use and governance, and with prayer for Divine Guidance. His 1684 prayer for his “great towne” captures much of his mood:

“And Thou Philadelphia the virgin settlement of this province named before thou wert born, what care, what service, what travail have there been to bring thee forth and preserve thee from such as would abuse and defile thee. O that thou mayest be kept from the evil that would overwhelm thee, that faithful to the God of thy mercies in the life of righteousness, thou mayest be preserved to the end. My soul prays to God for thee that thou mayest stand in the day of trial, that thy children may be blest of the Lord and thy people saved by His power.”

Emma Lapsansky-Werner is Professor of History Emeritus at Haverford College, where she was Curator of the Quaker Collection. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the early 1980s, Philadelphia, along with New York and Los Angeles, saw the first diagnoses of illnesses later understood to be the AIDS virus. Because of this historical relevance, Sharon Pinkenson (b. 1948) of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office suggested to Jonathan Demme (1944-2017), the film’s director, that he set his production in Philadelphia as a tribute to the people affected by the disease. Originally, Demme was in search of another major city for his film. However, after spending time in Philadelphia and realizing it to be a symbol of independence, exuding at times a culture of tolerance and brotherhood, Demme found it an ideal location to host a story about discrimination and prejudice.

In the film, Tom Hanks (b. 1956) plays the role of Andy Beckett, who contracts AIDS while simultaneously ascending the ranks of a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. Andy is a passionate, knowledgeable, and dedicated lawyer, who in the beginning of the film wins an argument before a judge over the environmental toxicity of building materials used by a company that his firm represents. Despite his initial success, Andy is dismissed from the firm after his colleagues discover that he is infected with AIDS. The plot develops around Andy’s wrongful termination and his exposure of the firm’s true motives for firing him. Andy eventually gains the sympathy of an African American lawyer, Joe Miller, played by Denzel Washington (b. 1954), who decides to represent Andy after identifying with the prejudice he faces as a victim of AIDS.

A number of legal and social initiatives at the time of the filming and release of Philadelphia similarly advocated for those affected by the illness. The federal Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, prohibited termination of an employee solely because of an illness, including AIDS, or other circumstance brought upon them involuntarily. The AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, a nonprofit law firm founded in 1988, specialized in assisting AIDS victims by taking on cases such as workplace discrimination, harassment, and estate settlements. These initiatives sought to challenge employers who asserted probable cause when dismissing a queer or infected individual from a job. As in Andy’s case in the film, victims argued that the illness did not inhibit them from performing their work duties and therefore should not be a basis for firing or otherwise quarantining them from society.

While vested in social issues confronting Philadelphia and beyond, the film also documents a panorama of locations across the city in the early 1990s. Its opening scene and many interludes feature views of the skyline, including buildings such as One Liberty Place and City Hall. In one instance, the film shows the charred remains of One Meridian Plaza, the high-rise on Fifteenth Street across from City Hall that was condemned after a 1991 fire that took the lives of three firefighters. On Market Street, the Mellon Bank Building played the role of headquarters of Beckett’s prestigious law firm, and a building at Nineteenth and Chestnut Streets served as the law office of Joe Miller, the lawyer who represents Andy in his wrongful dismissal suit. The climax of the film takes place in and around City Hall, which served as the site of the court case that is the pivotal moment in Andy’s story.

Philadelphia earned two Academy Awards, one for Hanks as best actor and the other for best original song, “The Streets of Philadelphia,” by Bruce Springsteen. While garnering critical praise and popularity, the film received mixed responses from the gay community. Some questioned Demme’s knowledge of gay sexuality in his representation of the relationship between Andy and Miquel, played by Antonio Banderas (b. 1960). Others, however, praised the production for its advocacy of an issue towards which the rest of society was dismally silent. Philadelphia prevailed at a time when AIDS was both widespread and grossly misunderstood, and by penetrating the social ignorance towards the disease the film taught people to empathize with affected individuals instead of shun them for their malady.

Damiano Consilvio is a Ph.D. student at the University of Rhode Island and studies the ways in which digital technologies can enhance the practice of textual editing. His book project, Ethan Frome: A Digital Scholarly Edition, is forthcoming.

The main protagonist of the play is Tracy Lord, who was inspired by Philadelphia socialite Helen Hope Montgomery Scott (1904-95), whom Barry knew from his acquaintance during college at Harvard with her husband Edgar Scott (1899-1995), heir to the Pennsylvania Railroad fortune. At the Ardrossan estate in Villanova originally built for her parents, Hope Montgomery Scott hosted such notables as the Duke of Windsor and other Main Line millionaires.

Barry wrote The Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) in mind after observing her falling star in Hollywood in the summer of 1938. Before completing the play, Barry met with Hepburn, studied her mannerisms, and obtained her input. With a background similar to the Tracy Lord character—she was brought up in an affluent household in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from Bryn Mawr College on the Main Line—Hepburn was ideal for the play.

1939 Premiere

Produced by the Theatre Guild, the original Broadway show, which premiered at the Shubert Theater in March 1939 and continued until March 1940, had a 417-performance run. The show continued on the road for an additional two years. Besides Hepburn, the original play starred Joseph Cotten (1905-94) as C.K. Dexter Haven, Van Heflin (1908-71) as reporter Macauly (Mike) Connor, Frank Fenton (1903-71) as George Kitteredge, and Shirley Booth (1898-1992) as Elizabeth Imbrie.

Set during preparations for Tracy Lord’s upcoming wedding to George Kittredge, the play centers around Tracy, a rich young Philadelphia divorcee engaged to Kittredge, a self-made millionaire attempting to be accepted into high society, and her family. The Lord family is composed of Seth and Margaret, Tracy’s parents, who are separated because of Seth’s extramarital affairs; Sandy and Dinah, Tracy’s younger brother and sister; and Uncle Willie, who ends up pretending unsuccessfully to be Tracy’s father.

The action of the play occurs when Dinah invites C.K. Dexter Haven, Tracy’s ex-husband who is still in love with Tracy, to the nuptials, and Tracy’s estranged father arrives uninvited. An additional conflict arises as the Lord family discovers that Destiny magazine is in the process of running an article about patriarch Seth Lord’s adultery. The Lord family fears that their privacy will be breached and attempts to resolve the situation. Sandy Lord, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, solves the situation, not wholly to Tracy’s satisfaction, by inviting the Philadelphia-based magazine to cover the wedding instead. Two of the magazine’s staff, Mike Connor, a reporter, and Liz Imbrie, the photographer, arrive to report on the wedding.

Different Worlds

Eventually, Tracy becomes infatuated with Mike, who is also a writer, and he fancies himself in love with her. The two are from different worlds, but connect on a human level as he, unlike Kittredge, sees her as a human being and not as someone to worship or to help raise his position in society. Because of his interest in Tracy, Mike agrees to blackmail Destiny magazine editor Sidney Kidd with Sandy Lord, so that he leaves the Lords alone. Tracy’s infatuation leads to her skinny-dipping with Mike and being discovered in a compromising situation by both her finance, Kittredge, and her ex-husband, Dexter. Ultimately, because of the incident, Tracy and Kittredge break off their engagement and Tracy remarries Dexter.

Tracy is presented as a character full of prejudices. Both her father and ex-husband confront her about her intolerance of others’ weaknesses. Her estranged father blames Tracy for being unforgiving and too critical of people, revealing the roots of the strained father-daughter relationship. Tracy’s confrontation with Dexter reveals the reason behind their divorce. During their marriage, Dexter struggled with alcoholism, and he claims that Tracy did not support him, as she is unable to forgive people’s flaws. Only after Tracy sees her own human weakness through her drunken actions with Mike does she forgive failure in the man she still loves.

Class Tensions

The play also comments on the tension between different social classes, demonstrates cultural distinctions between the city (represented by the character of Mike) and the country (exemplified by the Lords), and provides a dose of negative commentary on social climbers. The Main Line as represented in The Philadelphia Story is synonymous with wealth and old aristocracy, which in turn is associated with fashion, old world manners and morals, debutante balls, cricket clubs, and above all, exclusivity. In the play, the disdain of the upper-crust of society toward the lower classes can be seen in Tracy and her family’s dislike of reporters, whom they view as insensitive and lacking manners. On the other hand, Mike’s initial attitude toward the Lords shows prejudice and dislike on the part of working-class intellectuals, who think of the rich as useless fools and parasites. Although Mike is presented as a good person, he and George are middle-class, working men and as such, they cannot marry Tracy. Tracy, who must marry within her own social class, chooses Dexter, an insider born into wealth. In this, Barry shows the powerful hold of the status quo. Barry also condemns social climbers, as seen in his portrayal of Kittredge and his use of Tracy’s social standing.

Although some critics called the play un-revivable, it has been reproduced a number of times. Two noteworthy theater productions included a successful revival on Broadway at Lincoln Center in 1980 with Blythe Danner (b. 1943), Edward Herrmann (1943-2014), and Frank Converse (b. 1938), and another at the Old Vic Theater in May 2005. The Old Vic production, directed by Jerry Zaks (b. 1946), starred British Tony-winning actress Jennifer Ehle (b. 1969) as Tracy Lord and co-starred Kevin Spacey (b. 1959) as C.K. Dexter Haven.

In addition to theater productions, The Philadelphia Story became a movie, also starring Hepburn. Hepburn owned the rights to the play, and as part of the agreement with MGM, she played the lead and she approved the director and co-stars. Released in 1940, the movie version of The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor (1899-1983), met with great success.  Joining Hepburn on the movie set were Cary Grant (1904-86) as C.K. Dexter Haven, James Stewart (1908-97) as Mike Connor, and John Howard (1913-95) as George Kittredge. Stewart won an Academy Award for his performance, and Donald Ogden Stewart (1894-1980) won the Oscar for his screenplay.

The popular movie led to a second movie adaptation, the 1956 musical High Society. With a setting shifted from Philadelphia to Newport, Rhode Island, High Society featured Grace Kelly (1939-82), an actual Philadelphia socialite, and, thus, a great fit for the role of Tracy Lord. This version of the film was adapted into a Broadway stage musical in 1998 but proved unsuccessful and quickly closed.

Whether in play or film format, the popularity of The Philadelphia Story helped Katharine Hepburn regain her stardom. Additionally, the play cemented Barry’s status as a playwright of note, as a few of his earlier plays were not well received. Ultimately The Philadelphia Story provided audiences with a glimpse into the exclusive and aristocratic world of Philadelphia’s Main Line society, a world that many would never otherwise experience.

Joanna Kolendo is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Services at Chicago State University, where she works as a Reference & Electronic Resources Librarian. She received her M.S. from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and an M.Phil. from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

As a member of the Religious Society of Friends of the Truth (Quakers), a British Christian splinter group, Penn shared in the belief that Christ’s arrival was occurring in his time. In response, it behooved people to live up to Christ’s presence. Though there is no evidence that Penn used the term “The Quaker City” for Philadelphia, he drew inspiration from Quaker founder George Fox, his mentor, as he imagined a communal environment where people would live in a way that “taketh away the need for all wars.”

Penn’s religious faith led him to his conviction that a prudently-designed and carefully-monitored physical environment, governed by a rational and nurturing political and economic leadership, would promote a salubrious community life. To that end, he sent a city planner to lay out the city’s grid and to negotiate with the region’s prior inhabitants before new settlers arrived. In addition Penn’s carefully-crafted Frame of Government for Pennsylvania allowed for a greater religious liberty than had been known in the Old World. Penn’s plan also called for responsible citizen participation in government, and—importantly—a prohibition against a military system.

Having lived through the Great Fire in London in 1666, Penn envisioned that Philadelphia—a “Green Countrie Towne” that would “always be wholesome and never be burnt”–would be the centerpiece of Pennsylvania. Prayerfully, contemplated his project: “And Thou Philadelphia the virgin settlement of this province named before thou wert born, what care, what service, what travail have there been to bring thee forth …. O that thou mayest be kept from the evil that would overwhelm thee…” With careful attention to street layout, architecture, and urban design that emphasized community gathering places and “greene” parks, Penn hoped to engender an atmosphere that would encourage high morality and community responsibility.

The Road to Philadelphia

Penn did not envision his green country town as only an isolated, idyllic outpost for Quakers. Aiming to attract non-Quaker as well as Quaker land-speculators, and others whom he described as “low in the world” (economically, religiously, or politically oppressed), Penn sent representatives to publicize his project widely across northern Europe. Promising economic prosperity and religious freedom, as well as governmental fairness, he broadcast his ambitious plans that Philadelphia would become a “Great Towne,” a leader in the burgeoning Atlantic commercial world. Through careful management of land sales and values, Penn also aimed to have Philadelphia remain the hub of a regional economy.

Penn’s description of the foundations of his Quaker governance worked so well that within a few decades of its founding, non-Quaker residents outnumbered the Quakers in Philadelphia. Despite their minority status, however, the power, influence, legacy, and legend of Quakers’ ideals and values remained an enduring theme in Philadelphia’s development. Though many Philadelphia Quakers withdrew from government service rather than participate in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), they found other ways to advocate for their particular brand of integrity and community responsibility, including active civic engagement (especially in philanthropy and education); innovative entrepreneurship; attention to integrity, philanthropy, and fiscal responsibility (Quakers call it “stewardship”); and religious and social fairness. By the 1760s, the Quaker reputation for integrity was so widespread that Benjamin Franklin (1706-90)–who worked tirelessly and imaginatively to improve urban life, with projects as diverse as news publishing, mail delivery, improved street lighting, volunteer fire companies, and the Franklin stove—allowed people to think he was a Quaker, even though he was not.

The economy of Philadelphia grew vigorously. Shippers and traders from across the Atlantic world made deals with farmers and entrepreneurs from the city’s back country, who hauled their wares to Philadelphia’s ports along the well-planned roads. Indeed, by 1750, Philadelphia’s Quaker-dominated commercial energies had made it the second most important city in the British empire, and by the 1790s, Quaker entrepreneurship had fostered the nation’s first government-backed toll road from Lancaster to Philadelphia. Within a few years, Quakers Josiah White (1781-1850) and Erskine Hazard (1789-1865) made plans to augment this infrastructure with a network of canals. Thus, Quaker entrepreneurship helped to situate Pennsylvania with an economic preeminence that it yielded to New York only in the 1820s–and only grudgingly.

Urban Vision Writ Large

No one knows who originated the quip that “Quakers came to America to do good, and did very well.” But the combination of opportunity and frugality did, for a number of Quakers, bring great wealth. In response, worried that wealth would bring the temptations of moral flabbiness, Quaker leaders encouraged each other to donate the “excess” to worthy community concerns. Thus, beginning in the eighteenth century, Quaker public-good enterprises became ubiquitous. Philadelphia Quaker entrepreneurs were early participants in establishing a lending library (1731); a university (1740); the nation’s first professional medical facility (1751) an anti-slavery network (1770s); canals (1820s); museums and historical societies (1820s); national railroad systems (1830s); investment-banking houses (1830s); and the nation’s first zoo (begun in 1859, and completed fifteen years later). Other nineteenth-century Philadelphia-Quaker initiatives included the nation’s first hospital aimed at offering “tender, sympathetic attention” to the mentally ill (1813); a visionary urban prison system focused on reform, rather than punishment (1829); and a medical college for women (1850s). Beginning with the first Quaker school in the 1680s, the number of Quaker educational institutions mushroomed: as of 2014, more than three dozen Quaker-run schools were operating in the Philadelphia area. Quakers’ “fairness” initiatives also included schools for African Americans (dating from the 1750s) and a number of multi-racial, multi-class cooperative housing ventures (1940s-1960s).

In these and other projects, Quaker investors, architects, and engineers played pivotal roles, often working behind the scenes to consciously echo Penn’s dreams of a responsible citizenry. Eighteenth-century master builder Samuel Rhoads (1711-84) exemplified this posture, serving as a designer of the colony’s state house, as a founding member of the nation’s first lending library and first insurance company, and as a director of Philadelphia’s almshouse and hospital. In 1800, Quaker leadership helped shape the development of America’s second municipal water works, located on the Schuylkill River. In the 1840s, to protect the quality of the water supply, Quakers spearheaded the city’s acquisition of a number of Quaker estates along the banks of the river. This project, which grew into the massive Fairmount Park, also resulted in the establishment of America’s first zoo in 1874.

Throughout the nineteenth-century, the city’s urban design and infrastructure projects were often dominated by Quaker architects and planners, many of whom felt bound by their forebears’ forward-looking vision. Horace Trumbauer (1868-1938), for example, apprenticed with an architectural firm owned by Quakers D.W. and W.D. Hewitt. This firm carried on Quakers’ racial-justice heritage by hiring Julian Abele (1881-1950), Philadelphia’s first African American architect. Quaker Edmund Bacon (1910-2005), who served as director of Philadelphia’s City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, also took inspiration from his heritage as a descendant of one of William Penn’s first purchasers. Lecturing frequently on the importance of attractive public spaces, Bacon remained focused on the goal of keeping the city’s economy and infrastructure vibrant, as well as welcoming to a broad mix of inhabitants. Philadelphia’s iconic “Love Park”—which Bacon envisioned while still a young student in architecture school—followed on the tradition of a “greene countrie towne.”

Bacon also embraced the long tradition of Philadelphia as a “Great Towne.” He was fond of displaying the 1794 “Map of Philadelphia and Environs” (by A.P. Folie), with its roadways radiating out from the city, but labeled “the road to Philadelphia,” which testified to the city’s intention to remain a regional hub. So, too, said Bacon, did the construction of the mid-twentieth-century Schuylkill Expressway, which gave suburban dwellers relatively easy access to the city.

The Enduring “Quaker City”

The origins of the nickname of “The Quaker City” are murky, but a surprising amount of Penn’s vision has stood the test of time. Of course, the “Quaker” legacy could not inoculate Philadelphia against the typical urban stresses—political corruption, budget struggles, inter-group tensions, employer/employee conflicts, infrastructure challenges, and crime. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, when novelist George Lippard chose the title The Quaker City for his tale of urban corruption and debauchery– highlighting the disjunction between Quaker vision and urban reality–most readers understood the irony of the fact that the novel included only one Quaker character: indeed a man of integrity, but a man who makes only a brief appearance, as he is exiting Philadelphia.

Nevertheless, in modern times, many of the city’s institutions, businesses, and citizens continued to be stamped by both the positive and negative imagery attributed to the stereotypical “Quaker,” even when the term “Quaker” has little or no relationship to the Religious Society of Friends. As early as 1859, when entrepreneur the “Quaker State” oil company was established by a non-Quaker to harvest and distribute Pennsylvania’s petroleum products, the advertisers and customers understood the appeal of Quakers’ reputation for honesty and integrity. Nearly two decades later, the image of William Penn found its way to the Quaker Oats box, appropriated by an Ohio cereal-maker who had read about Quakers. Philadelphia became home to the University of Pennsylvania’s football team “the Quakers,” and to the William Penn Foundation, a well-endowed organization providing grants to enrich “cultural expression, strengthen children’s futures, and deepen connections to nature and community.” Established in the 1940s, and long known as the Haas Foundation, the William Penn Foundation renamed itself in 1974, explaining the change as reflecting its desire to commemorate Penn’s “pursuit of an exemplary society and understanding of human possibilities.”

Still, the Philadelphia region has been the site of many Quaker “firsts,” including Haverford College (1833)—the world’s first Quaker college—and dozens of Quaker schools and other institutions for social “improvement.” The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), perhaps the best-known Quaker organization, was born in Philadelphia during World War I and its central office has remained in the city. Widely known for its non-partisan relief projects in war-torn regions of the world, and for its partnership with Amish, Mennonite, and United Brethren denominations in designing alternative, nonviolent service instead of military service (conscientious objection), the AFSC accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends in 1947. When two representatives from “the Quaker City” traveled to Stockholm to accept the award, many Philadelphians took pride in the city’s Quaker heritage.

But there is plenty of negativity in the “Quaker” imagery, too. Philadelphians have struggled to live down a reputation for being boring and resistant to change, as well as insular and self-righteous—characteristics that are often attributed to the socially- and economically-conservative Quaker ethos. For example, conservative alcohol-control laws constrain many Philadelphia-area municipalities, and amidst the modern proliferation of skyscrapers, Philadelphia city planners long clung to the notion that no part of Philadelphia’s skyline should rise higher than the statue of “Billy Penn” that stands atop City Hall.

In the twenty-first century, fewer than 15,000 Quakers live in the Philadelphia area, yet the notion of the “Quaker City” survives. Can the mystique and tradition of “the Quaker City” survive the skyline that finally, in the 1990s, eclipsed Billy Penn’s hat?

Emma Lapsansky-Werner is a Quaker, a Professor of History at Haverford College, and a happy resident of the Philadelphia area for more than a half-century. She began researching and writing about the city in the 1960s, and has since has lectured and published on many aspects of Philadelphia’s history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Rocky premiered in 1976. Written by and starring Sylvester Stallone (b. 1946), the film introduced audiences to Rocky Balboa: a down-and-out boxer and debt collector from Philadelphia who gained confidence as he trained to fight the reigning heavyweight champion. Although nearly everyone in Rocky’s world recognized that he was outmatched and expected him to lose badly, he held his own in a fight that lasted fifteen long rounds.

Fictional heavyweight Rocky Balboa had analogues in several actual boxers who fought during the twentieth century. Balboa shared his first name with Rocky Marciano (1923-69), the undefeated heavyweight champion from the 1950s. Chuck Wepner (b. 1939), who famously endured fifteen rounds in a 1975 match against heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali (b. 1942), was later dubbed “the real Rocky.” Also like Rocky, Philadelphia-based heavyweight champion Joe Frazier (1944-2011) was hailed as a hardworking blue-collar counterpart to his great rival Ali in the early 1970s.

Rocky, a low-budget production, won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Directing, and Film Editing. A franchise emerged. Rocky II (1979), Rocky III (1982), Rocky IV (1985), Rocky V (1990), and Rocky Balboa (2006) tracked the eponymous protagonist as he persevered in the face of professional and personal challenges.

Primarily set in Philadelphia, with many scenes filmed around the city, Rocky and each subsequent installment in the series (except Rocky IV) offered viewers both an imagined and an actual image of Philadelphia.

Spotlight on the City

Local viewers could take pride in seeing their city on screen, while audiences elsewhere could survey Philadelphia as they watched Rocky run past the Navy Yard, along the Schuylkill River, through the Italian Market, and down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.  Other sites that appeared throughout the films, including Laurel Hill Cemetery, Rittenhouse Square, and Broad Street near City Hall, marked the setting as Philadelphia. Even the unglamorous row houses and shops in Rocky’s urban neighborhoods of Kensington and, later, South Philadelphia, represented the residential city. As the cityscape changed over the course of three decades of Rocky films, the movies documented that transformation.

In addition to their role as a backdrop to the film, some sites, like the steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, actively contributed to Rocky’s story.

The climax of Rocky occurred during a training montage when Rocky triumphantly bolted up the seventy-two steps that lead from the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to the neoclassical façade of the Museum of Art. Rocky’s physical ascent demonstrated how his self-esteem had grown throughout the film. When he arrived at the top, he gazed out at the Philadelphia skyline; on his way to becoming a nationally recognized boxing star, Rocky appeared to hold the entire city in his vision.

The scene’s symbolism depended, too, on the museum’s cultural significance. Rocky’s journey from working-class Kensington to a recognizable bastion of high culture foreshadowed the wealth and cultural clout that the boxer earned as his career progressed.

Rocky-Philadelphia Overlap

The narrative of Rocky also overlaps with narratives about Philadelphia, its spirit, and its reputation. Rocky’s ability to beat the odds and transform from an average “bum from the neighborhood” into a nationally and internationally successful boxer corresponded to Philadelphia’s own arc during the late twentieth century. No longer the manufacturing power that it was decades earlier, and suffering from woes related to crime and political corruption, 1970s Philadelphia, like Rocky, was down and out. Rocky’s gritty perseverance became symbolic of the spirit of the city, suggesting that actual Philadelphians could similarly succeed in the face of seemingly overwhelming challenges. Nationally published newspaper articles and locally generated publicity materials promoted this belief. As policy changes, economic shifts, and tourism initiatives began to revive Philadelphia in the 1990s, the city demonstrated that, like Rocky, it could improve its condition and reassert its national and international significance.

Rocky and Philadelphia developed a symbiotic relationship that blurred the lines between the world of the films and actual Philadelphia. Some critics expressed concern that the films’ version of Philadelphia framed the city through the eyes of a white working-class protagonist beginning at a time when racial tensions in the city ran particularly high. Even so, Rocky’s fictional experiences and the image of the city that grew out of the early films resonated across diverse audiences.

Running up the steps of the Museum of Art became a popular tourist activity and a recurring trope in each Rocky movie. By the 1990s, the museum’s steps acquired a widespread vernacular title, “the Rocky Steps.” In addition to reenacting the popular scene from the film, runners understood their behavior as a performance that allowed them to channel Rocky’s perseverance.

In 1980, Stallone commissioned sculptor A. Thomas Schomberg (b. 1943) to create a bronze statue of Rocky. The 8-foot, six-inch piece appeared in Rocky III as the City of Philadelphia’s tribute to its by-then-famous hometown hero. Stallone donated the sculpture to the actual City of Philadelphia and proposed installing it in the same location where it appeared in the film. While critics rejected the sculpture on the ground that it was not worthy of display at the museum, supporters argued that embracing the statue would give deserved recognition to the Hollywood hit that generated valuable publicity and tourism for the city. The sculpture was moved several times over the next twenty-five years, but it spent much of that period on view outside the Spectrum arena in South Philadelphia. In 2006, the statue was permanently installed just north of the base of the Rocky Steps.  There, it commemorates the character, the films, and their important reciprocal relationship with Philadelphia.

Laura Holzman is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Starring Bradley Cooper (b. 1975), the film follows Pat Solitano Jr. as he returns to the Philadelphia suburb of Delaware County to move in with his parents, who are characterized by their dedication to the Philadelphia Eagles professional football team. Pat has to cope with his new life after being released from a mental institution, where he was treated for bipolar disorder. Focused on attending therapy sessions and jogging around his family’s suburban neighborhood to win back his ex-wife’s affections, Pat is surprised when he makes a new friend: a young woman named Tiffany Maxwell, played by Jennifer Lawrence (b. 1990). United by their painful pasts, this unlikely couple finds companionship in and around the City of Brotherly Love.

The film’s plot, characters, and Greater Philadelphia setting are derived from Quick’s 2008 novel of the same name. Although the book takes place in the author’s hometown of Collingswood, the filmmakers decided to set many scenes in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania suburbs. While several elements differ between the book and film versions, the heart of the story and its regional inspiration shine through in its adaptation.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Cooper fit the role of Irish-Italian Eagles fanatic Pat Solitano perfectly. “I’m from Philly,” Cooper said in an interview published in 2012 by the website Deadline Hollywood. “I’m obsessed with the Eagles, I’m Italian Irish, my parents grew up in households very similar to [Pat’s family].”

Learning the Local Lingo

Although Cooper was unfamiliar with his character’s bipolarism and scoured a multitude of documentaries during the weeks prior to filming, his expertise about Philadelphia proved helpful to several members of the cast. For example, Jacki Weaver (b. 1947), the Australian actress who played Pat Jr.’s mother, Dolores Solitano, often listened to the Philadelphia accent of Cooper’s real mother when she came to the set. Cooper’s uncle also visited during filming and offered advice on Philly dialect to Robert De Niro (b. 1943), who played Pat Solitano Sr. Thus, both Cooper and his family helped bring authenticity to the film through their knowledge and love for the city of Philadelphia.

Filming in the Philadelphia area over a thirty-three-day period during fall 2011, Russell sought to capture the essence of a white, middle-class suburban Philadelphia family in a short span of time. To do so, many of Silver Linings’ scenes were shot in close proximity in Delaware County, including in Lansdowne and Ridley Park Boroughs and Upper Darby Township. The center of the film is unquestionably the Solitano household, which is set in a black and white stone home. Many of the jogging scenes in which Cooper memorably wears a trash bag to burn more calories were filmed in the neighborhoods of Delaware County. Another memorable scene takes place at the Llanerch Diner, 95 E. Township Line Road, Upper Darby, where Pat and Tiffany have their first “date,” which Pat asserts is not actually a date.

Although much of the film was shot in the suburbs of Philadelphia, some of the final scenes take place closer to the heart of the city. Toward the end of the film, Pat and his friends are shown pre-gaming on Wells Fargo Center Lot D just outside Lincoln Financial Field, home of the Philadelphia Eagles. Later, the climax of the film takes place in Center City in the ballroom of the Benjamin Franklin House, where Pat and Tiffany’s dance competition decides the fate of Pat Sr.’s dream of opening a restaurant. In the final scene of the film, viewers see Pat and Tiffany kiss on Jewelers Row, near Eighth and Samson Streets.

Silver Linings Playbook garnered acclaim from viewers and critics. During the 2013 awards season, Jennifer Lawrence won Best Actress honors from the Screen Actors Guild, the Golden Globes, and the Academy Awards. Silver Linings also garnered several MTV Movie and Independent Spirit awards, as well as additional Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild nominations. David O. Russell won the Best Director award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the film won Movie of the Year from the American Film Institute. With the help of the region’s distinctive culture and character, Silver Linings Playbook became a bright star showcasing the place many Philadelphians simply call home.

Margaret Poling is a Teaching Assistant and M.A. candidate studying English at Rutgers University-Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)