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.)

First called Bandstand, the program premiered October 6, 1952, hosted by Philadelphia radio DJ Bob Horn (1916-66). It was shot live from Studio B at Forty-Sixth and and Market Streets, where the two-and-a-half-hour show was broadcast regionally on WFIL-TV Channel 6. Via this network, which advertised itself as “WFIL-adelphia,” the show reached almost six million viewers in the Delaware Valley, the nation’s third-largest market at the time.  Pennants from local high schools lined the walls of American Bandstand’s production studio, emphasizing to viewers and advertisers the show’s local orientation.

Dick Clark (1929-2012) replaced Horn as host in 1956, just before the show was renamed American Bandstand, shortened to ninety minutes, and expanded to a national ABC audience on August 5, 1957. The show then aired at 3 p.m., Monday through Friday, corresponding with the typical school day’s end. American Bandstand was an immediate success, with an estimated audience of twenty million viewers.

From its earliest days, the show featured young people dancing to a rock-and-roll soundtrack or other popular genres of the day.  This included dances the Bop, the Twist, the Jitterbug, and the Stroll. The show also incorporated appearances by acts like Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, and Connie Francis, who would lip-sync performances. Being featured on the show all but guaranteed a spike in popularity; even before it moved to a national platform American Bandstand offered a remarkably large audience base for musicians, often generating national popular demand for a new group or single.  Another component of the show was its Rate-a-Record segment—where people evaluated a record on a scale of 35 to 98—which originated the saying, “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.” For this era’s music industry, American Bandstand was arguably the most significant television venue in the country.

Local Teens as National Celebrities

Throughout its Philadelphia years, the show was so popular that it transformed average local-area teens into national celebrities. On each broadcast day the line of teens hoping to appear on the show snaked around the block; some were granted entry and others denied. In order to help establish a clean-cut image for the show, guys were required to wear ties with suit jackets or sweaters, while girls dressed in “good taste,” for example a high-cut blouse with a dress or skirt. Clark felt such conventions helped boost the perception of rock-and-roll, which in the 1950s was a controversial genre often disliked by older generations.

Several teens belonged to a select group of taste-making gatekeepers who helped monitor dress code and admission. Clark and producer Tony Mammorella (1924-1977) dubbed this group “The Committee,” led from 1954 to 1956 by future DJ Jerry Blavat (1940-2023). Such white Philadelphia-area teens (many from South Philadelphia or near the show’s production site in West Philadelphia), among others, regularly appeared on American Bandstand.  Many subsequently became celebrities (albeit temporarily), appearing in other media, receiving fan mail, and starting fashion trends. Many of the show’s female dancers wore Peter Pan collars—a feature of their Catholic school uniforms—and at one point this even sparked a nationwide trend imitating the look.

Racial Influences

Arguably, American Bandstand both contributed to racial integration and supported racial segregation. For instance, the show’s producers allegedly practiced discriminatory policies that excluded or limited appearances by African American teen dancers, presumably to appease advertisers. In the early years of American Bandstand, African Americans were rarely seen on television. However, musicians such as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Sam Cooke all made national appearances on American Bandstand during the late 1950s. Conceivably, this helped promote racial equality and intercultural understanding.

Over the decades, American Bandstand’s location, air days, duration, and content changed. The program moved production in 1964 from Philadelphia to Hollywood, months after it began airing once per week.  In its later years the show was challenged by the diversifying tastes of fragmented audiences.  As music styles evolved, American Bandstand incorporated more emerging genres. Throughout its run the show featured various types of popular music, such as rock-and-roll, R&B, Motown, British rock, psychedelic rock, disco, new wave, and more.

Despite changes over the years, the show continued to embody and represent evolutions in American music, fashion, dance, and other sociocultural norms.  Still, American Bandstand’s Philadelphia years are recalled with particularly impassioned nostalgia. Emphasizing this sentiment, Philadelphian John Oates (of musical duo Hall & Oates) said, “The show had such an impact on the music business, it set the tone and the pace for teenage style and attitude and everything else across America.”

Jordan McClain is Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication at Drexel University. Amanda McClain is Assistant Professor of Communications at Holy Family University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Brown grew up in a Quaker family in revolutionary Philadelphia. His father, Elijah Brown (b. 1740), was among the members of the Society of Friends to be deported from Pennsylvania to Virginia because they would not affirm allegiance to Pennsylvania during the war for independence from Great Britain. At six years old, Brown could hear the firing of cannons and musket shots and feared the persecution of his family. These events helped to spur his imagination and form his literary aesthetic. Especially inspiring to the writing of Arthur Mervyn was Brown’s contracting of yellow fever in New York in September 1798.

Arthur Mervyn began as a serial in Philadelphia’s Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence, but it had to be discontinued due to a lack of enthusiasm among the magazine’s correspondents and the editor’s death from yellow fever. The end of the serialization pushed Brown to issue the book on its own. Arthur Mervyn combines two stories, although it is often read as a single narrative. The first component of Arthur Mervyn was published as a full-length work between March and May 1799. The “sequel,” as Brown understood it, was published in September or early October 1800, as Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. Second Part. The 1800 follow-up became very rare, and few collectors in later years found it possible to obtain both volumes separately.

Challenges of the City

The novel follows the actions of protagonist Arthur Mervyn, a farm boy who leaves a rural area to move to Philadelphia, and the challenges he faces. After being exiled from his father’s farm, Mervyn arrives penniless to a city riddled with yellow fever. He was cheated out of all his money on the trip there. When readers first meet Mervyn it is through the eyes of Dr. Stevens, who finds him ill with yellow fever and takes him in. Mervyn recounts everything that brought him to that desperate position. The novel’s villain, Mr. Welbeck, is a constant adversary for Mervyn, as he is a thief and forger whom Mervyn met when he was begging for money. Mervyn gets wrapped up in Welbeck’s wrongdoings and ultimately escapes back to the country. The first part of the novel is narrated by Dr. Stevens,  the second part is narrated by Mervyn.

The novel’s subplots reflect the author’s experiences growing up in a Philadelphia Quaker merchant family during the era of the American Revolution and Quaker activism against slavery. Arthur Mervyn includes reflections on slavery and dramatizes financial institutions, practices, and legal concerns surrounding the slave trade. Many nameless slaves, bound servants, free Blacks, and laboring-class whites featured in Arthur Mervyn embody the shifting class and racial social organization of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scholar James H. Lustus has linked the physical impact of the yellow fever to the symbolic manifestation of moral “pollution,” a word Mervyn frequently uses in the novel. The term embodies the licentiousness, greed, and deception permeating Philadelphia at the time. Arthur Mervyn ends with the protagonist marrying Achsa Fielding, a rich widowed Jewish woman, an act that illustrates the character’s new approach to social relations.

With novels like Arthur Mervyn, based on historical precedents, Brown attempted to persuade readers that novels could extend beyond imagination to provide communal truth. The critical reception of Arthur Mervyn has been contradictory, with scholars debating whether the Mervyn character is a hero or a scoundrel, or, as one critic argued, lacking “the force of will to be either” hero or villain. Mervyn often has been cited as an unreliable narrator.  Critics also have found the novel’s narrative structure to be confusing, with stories frequently told from several points of view.

Arthur Mervyn inspired other American Gothic authors, including Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who also spent time in Philadelphia and whose “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)  is about a fictitious disease that plagues a fictitious country. For Brown, the novel served as an opportunity to reflect on his childhood and the challenges he and his family faced during the American Revolution. He used the work to free himself from the past and in turn helped to influence a new literary genre, the American Gothic.

Kristi Collemacine is an English M.A. candidate at Rutgers University-Camden, where she is a part-time lecturer. She also teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In Philadelphia, the first all-Black baseball teams surfaced in the 1860s. By far the most prominent was the amateur Pythian Club, which not only scheduled games against several white opponents but also unsuccessfully attempted to affiliate with the National Association of Base Ball Players, the major baseball organization of the era. Although the assassination of Octavius V. Catto (1839-71), the club’s driving force and local Black leader, brought the Pythians’ story to a premature close, other organizations emerged to take their place. The mid-Atlantic-based Cuban Giants, considered to be the first Black professional team, debuted in 1885 and was heavily comprised of Philadelphia amateur players. Initially perceived as a gimmick (the players spoke a sort of mock-Spanish to pass as Cuban), the Cuban Giants soon had fans buzzing about their exceptional talents on the field. To survive, the team took on any and all comers, rambling up and down the East Coast in search of profitable games.

In the years that followed, the Cuban Giants regularly visited Philadelphia, an especially attractive venue thanks to its thriving semiprofessional baseball scene and large Black population. But local African Americans had no hometown professional team to support until the formation of the Philadelphia Giants in 1902. Like other Black clubs, the Giants spent a good deal of time on the road, although they sometimes rented Columbia Park, the Athletics’ home field at Twenty-Ninth and Columbia Streets.

Rise of the Hilldale Club

The Philadelphia Giants were a success on the diamond but not at the box office and finally disbanded in 1911. In the meantime, a group of Black teenagers established the Hilldale Club, an amateur team playing in an “open field” in Darby southwest of the city. With dozens, if not hundreds, of similar squads organizing and folding each season, no one foresaw that Hilldale would one day become a major Black institution.

The man behind the Hilldale miracle was a gentlemanly little postal clerk named Edward Bolden (1881-1950), who began as the team’s scorer but soon took control of the young club. Over the next several years, Bolden heavily publicized the team in the pages of the Black weekly Philadelphia Tribune, rented home grounds at Chester and Cedar Avenue in Darby, and aggressively recruited the best local players. Their following grew so rapidly that Bolden and a group of fellow postal employees incorporated the team in 1916 with plans to move to an all-salaried roster the following season.

As a full-fledged professional team, Hilldale (also known as the Daisies) became one of the most successful Black ballclubs in the country in the 1920s. The thousands of rural Black southerners pouring into the Philadelphia region as part of the Great Migration further expanded Bolden’s already sizable customer base, which eagerly turned out for Hilldale’s regular Saturday home games in Darby (Pennsylvania blue laws prevented Sunday baseball until 1934). Strong white semiprofessional teams, often sponsored by business and industrial concerns such as Lit Brothers, Strawbridge and Clothier, and Fleisher Yarn, provided additional revenue. Flush with cash, Bolden signed nationally known superstars such as catcher Louis Santop, but he always kept his eye out for area talent. Future Baseball Hall of Fame third baseman Judy Johnson was a product of the Wilmington sandlots, while infielder Billy Yancey got his start on the fields of South Philadelphia.

The post-World War I prosperity of Hilldale and other Black teams led to the formation of the first permanent professional leagues: the Midwest-based Negro National League (NNL) in 1920 and the Bolden-backed Eastern Colored League (ECL) in 1922.   Not surprisingly, Hilldale captured the ECL’s first three pennants and participated in the Negro Leagues’ first World Series in 1924. Although beaten by the Kansas City Monarchs five games to four, Hilldale got the better of the rematch in 1925, taking the deciding game at Phillies Park (later known as the Baker Bowl) at Broad and Lehigh Streets.

The Depression Takes a Toll

Bolden had built a tremendous ballclub, good enough to beat a barnstorming group of Philadelphia Athletics in five of six games in 1923. But Hilldale struggled to weather the subsequent economic downturn in Black Philadelphia, culminating with the onset of the Great Depression. By 1930, Bolden had departed, soon to be replaced by John Drew, a wealthy Delaware County politician and bus magnate. After watching attendance shrink to less than 200 fans per game, Drew finally pulled the plug on Hilldale in July 1932.

Although the business of Negro League baseball was at its nadir, Bolden returned in 1933 with a new club, the Philadelphia Stars. This time, Bolden brought in financial backing from Eddie Gottlieb (1898-1979), a veteran promoter and key figure in professional basketball, first with the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association and later with the Philadelphia Warriors. Eager to attract the rapidly growing Black population of West Philadelphia, the Stars obtained home grounds at Passon Field at Forty-Eighth and Spruce Streets before moving to Parkside Field at Forty-Fourth and Parkside. The park’s location, adjacent to a Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse, was hardly ideal for baseball. Trains entering or departing the roundhouse generated heavy smoke, which not only affected visibility but also showered coal dust and soot on unfortunate fans.

In 1934, the Stars joined the now eastern-based Negro National League and won their first and only championship that season. In general, the club was never able to match Hilldale’s dominance of the 1920s, often falling short to the powerhouse Homestead Grays. Still, Black Philadelphians faithfully continued to support the Stars as a vital African American institution, one that provided otherwise unavailable opportunities for a number of elite local athletes. Outfielder Gene Benson attended West Philadelphia High School, infielder Mahlon Duckett and catcher Bill Cash went to Overbrook, while catcher Stanley Glenn starred at John Bartram. But the Stars missed out on the era’s best local Black ballplayer, Nicetown’s Roy Campanella, who eventually signed with the Washington Elite Giants in 1937.

Financially, the Stars reached their peak during the early 1940s, when a booming war economy transformed the previously shaky Negro Leagues into one of the major Black businesses in America. Now able to fill larger venues, Gottlieb and Bolden began to lease Shibe Park, home of the A’s and Phillies, for weekly night games in 1943. Two years later, the Stars drew an impressive 101,818 fans for only nine weeknight dates at Shibe (the Phillies and A’s, meanwhile, drew only 773,020 combined for the entire season).

Integration Dooms the Negro Leagues 

The Stars’ prosperity did not last long. The postwar integration of Major League Baseball dealt a crippling blow to the Negro Leagues, worsened in Philadelphia by the abandonment of Parkside Field after 1947 and death of Bolden in 1950.  Gottlieb and Bolden’s daughter Hilda briefly attempted to keep the team afloat by selling top players to Organized Baseball, but Black Philadelphians were now far more interested in the Brooklyn Dodgers and other integrated teams. The Stars disbanded after the 1952 season, and Negro League baseball itself collapsed by the early 1960s.

Hilldale Park and Parkside Field are long gone, but the proud history of Negro League baseball in Philadelphia has not been forgotten. Historical markers commemorate both of these ballparks where African Americans congregated in the thousands each week to watch the best Black baseball talent in America.

Neil Lanctot is a historian who has written three books, each reflecting his keen interest in sports and race.  His writing has also appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, and several other journals and anthologies. (Author information current at time of publication)

From the time the game was created to its organization into a professional league, and from the first National League game ever played to some of the earliest World Series, the city of Philadelphia has played a prominent role in professional baseball history.

Variations of the game of baseball became popular some three decades prior to the start of the Civil War. Beginning in 1833 and during the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of teams organized to play “town ball” throughout the city of Philadelphia. The popular bat-and-ball game was similar to “rounders,” an English game in which players scored by running around four bases on a square field.

As early as 1831, a Philadelphia club team known as “Olympic” played town ball while another called “Athletic” formed in 1859. Within the city limits, many games were played at Twenty-Fifth and Jefferson streets, often drawing several thousand spectators to the field. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia blue laws prevented clubs from playing games on Sundays, so the teams often traversed the Delaware River to play in New Jersey towns like Camden and Gloucester.

In 1845, town ball evolved into baseball with the formation of the Knickerbocker Club in New York and by 1860, the Athletics reorganized as a baseball club while other amateur teams sprang up all over the Philadelphia area. As baseball’s popularity grew throughout the country and became a form of recreation and civic pride, the sport’s first governing body was formed. The National Association of Base Ball Players grew to include more than 300 clubs — including the Athletics — by 1867. In 1866, Philadelphia hosted a championship series between the Athletics and the Atlantics of Brooklyn, which was played at Columbia Avenue and Fifteenth Street and is said to have attracted 30,000 spectators, many of whom crowded the outfield.

Paid Players

In 1865, the Athletics signed Alfred J. Reach, one of the first men paid to play the game. The emergence of paid players challenged the amateur nature of the national association which, as a result, split teams into amateur and professional groups. In 1871, the top professional teams formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Members included clubs from Boston, Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and each team traveled to and from those cities to compete. A new NAPBBP club based in Philadelphia, also called the Athletics, won the league’s inaugural championship.

Although considered to be the first professional baseball league, the National Association is not recognized as such by Major League Baseball due to various issues with instability and mismanagement during its brief existence. Instead, Major League Baseball acknowledges the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, formed in 1876, as its founding organization. The first game in the new National League occurred in Philadelphia on April 22, 1876, between yet another team called the Athletics and the Boston Red Caps. Boston won the game by a score of 6-5 at the Jefferson Street Grounds in front of 3,000 spectators. The Athletics lasted just one season. They were expelled from the National League for refusing to make their final scheduled road trip of the season after winning only fourteen games.

Thereafter, various Philadelphia teams dissolved as quickly as they were established. Another club carrying the Athletics moniker represented the city in the upstart American Association from 1882 until the league’s collapse in 1891. This team was the first in the American Association to travel west, competing in cities like Louisville and St. Louis while playing home games at Jefferson Park.  Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Quakers of the Players’ League, which lasted only one season, had games at Forepaugh Park at Broad and Dauphin Streets in 1890.

The Game Grows

Despite the failure of many professional Philadelphia baseball clubs to stay afloat at the end of the nineteenth century, the game quickly gained national appeal and its language seeped into the American lexicon. One person who held the game in high regard was Walt Whitman. The American poet played the game in his youth and incorporated some of the first reports on local games in articles for New York newspapers he edited. Later, Whitman referred to the game in his writings, admiring it for something that was wholly American and lauding its camaraderie and the athletic ability of its participants.

In 1883, the National League took a chance with establishing a new team in Philadelphia. Alfred Reach, the professional ballplayer who later made his fortune as a sporting goods magnate, was asked by league president A.G. Mills to start a new team, which Reach named the Phillies to identify it by its host city. The team played its first game on May 1 at Recreation Park on Twenty-Fourth Street and Ridge Avenue and finished its first season with a 17-81 record, which remains one of the worst marks in major league history. The dubious start was a fitting one for the Phillies, the oldest continuous one-name, one-city franchise in all of professional sports. In 2007, the Phillies suffered the 10,000th loss in team history, becoming the first professional team in any sport to achieve such a feat.

By 1895, the team had outgrown Recreation Park, which was later used by local sandlot teams, and moved into Baker Bowl, named for owner William F. Baker, on a city block at North Broad, West Huntingdon, and North Fifteenth streets at West Lehigh Avenue. The stadium was notoriously small. It could only accommodate fewer than 19,000 spectators, and the right field fence sat just 280 feet from home plate (a real advantage for hitters). The team failed to draw fans as the losing seasons piled up. The team managed to win only one league pennant during its first sixty-seven years of existence, reaching the World Series in 1915. Over the next thirty-five years, the Phillies endured one of the worst stretches in team history, finishing in last place sixteen times. While the Phillies redefined futility in the early twentieth century, their American League counterpart flourished.

The Athletics Ascend

Founded in 1901 as a cornerstone franchise of the new American League, the latest Philadelphia Athletics team became a model club, winning eight pennants and five world championships during its fifty-four-year stay in Philadelphia. A former National League player and manager, Connie Mack, was charged with finding financial support, players, and a field for the team. Benjamin Shibe, who had been Al Reach’s partner in the sporting goods business, invested in Mack’s Athletics. In 1909, the A’s moved from Columbia Park to Shibe Park at Twenty-First Street and Lehigh Avenue (some nine blocks from the Phillies’ Baker Bowl), with row houses to the south of Lehigh and commercial and industrial enterprises to the east. Many Athletics players lived within a few blocks of the park, and rookies took up residence on Twentieth Street. The area was predominantly Irish, a boost to team loyalty, especially because of Mack, born Cornelius McGillicuddy to Irish immigrants in Massachusetts in 1862. In 1910, the Athletics won the city’s first World Series championship and claimed two more in 1911 and 1913. Given the team’s success, fans came to Shibe Park in droves, walking up Lehigh Avenue from their homes, crowding streetcars to get to the stadium, and gathering on rooftops that stood tall over right field just to catch a glimpse of Mack’s A’s. The area around the ballpark prospered with businesses and residences while support for the team reached a fever pitch.

While the Athletics brought winning baseball to Philadelphia, baseball became more popular than ever as leagues even sprang up in shipyards during World War I. In 1918, the Delaware River Shipbuilding League included baseball clubs from shipyards in Bristol, Chester, Cornwells, and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania; Camden, N.J.; and Wilmington, Del. Games played in those shipyards were well-attended by fans throughout the summer months. The teams were made up of shipyard workers, including recent or retired big league ballplayers. Charles “Chief” Bender, of the 1909 A’s, pitched for the Hog Island shipyard team and was one of the better-known pros to play in the league. Famously, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson played for the Harlan & Hollingsworth team of Wilmington, which beat Standard Shipbuilding of Staten Island, N.Y., in an Atlantic coast shipyard championship played in Baker Bowl and at New York’s Polo Grounds. The league folded in 1919.

In the professional ranks, the Athletics lost the 1914 World Series to the Boston Braves, causing Mack to sell off his top players. The A’s finished in last place for seven straight seasons, but began to climb from the bottom rungs of the American League in the latter half of the 1920s, when Mack rebuilt the team around players like Jimmie Foxx. The Athletics won back-to-back World Series in 1929 and 1930 and made a World Series appearance in 1931. Over the next twenty years, however, the A’s finished no better than fourth in the standings and were in last place eleven times while attendance waned. While the Athletics scuffled, things weren’t much better for the Phillies, who moved in to share Shibe Park with the A’s in 1938. It had gotten so bad for the Quaker City’s National League franchise that pitcher Hugh Mulcahy earned the nickname “Losing Pitcher” because he ended up on the losing end of so many of the Phillies’ games. The team even tried to change its name in 1942 to the Blue Jays because “Phillies” had become associated with so much losing.

At the same time, World War II impacted major league teams like the Phillies, which watched its players get drafted into military service. In 1941, Mulcahy became the first major league player drafted into war. Due to travel restrictions, teams were not permitted to hold their typical spring training in Florida, so the Phillies prepared for upcoming seasons in Hershey, Pa., while the Athletics practiced in Wilmington. After the war, the Phillies finally began to have some success. In 1950, the team returned to the World Series after a thirty-five-year absence. Led by future Hall of Famers Robin Roberts and Richie Ashburn, the “Whiz Kids” (as they were nicknamed because of their youth) won ninety-one games and clinched the National League pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers on the final day of the season before losing the World Series to the New York Yankees in four games.

Minor League Teams All Over

With two professional teams in Philadelphia, the city began expanding its baseball footprint throughout the U.S. and Canada with minor league affiliations. The A’s were the parent club to minor league teams in Williamsport, Pa.; Elmira, N.Y.; Lincoln, Neb.; Savannah, Ga.; and even Toronto and Ottawa in Canada. The Phillies had players develop in minor league outposts throughout New York, Florida, Arkansas, California, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, among other states. In 1967, the Phillies began a partnership with Reading, Pa., which remains the home of the Double A Reading Fightin’ Phils. The team  currently has farm clubs in Allentown, Pa.; Williamsport, Pa.; Clearwater, Fla.; and Lakewood, N.J., and hosts rookie league teams in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Minor League Baseball’s presence in the region also includes a team in Wilmington, Del. (affiliated with the Kansas City Royals) and the independent Camden Riversharks of the Atlantic League, while various semi-pro leagues compete throughout the region.

The first all-black baseball teams began playing in Philadelphia in the 1860s, and Negro League teams played into the early 1960s, despite the integration of Major League baseball in the late 1940s. Philadelphia teams were among the last to integrate. In 1953, a year before their final season in Philadelphia, the A’s signed the first black player in team history in pitcher Bob Trice. Philadelphian Roy Campanella followed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers a year after he joined the team in 1947. During his first year in Major League Baseball, Robinson was met with racist abuse from other teams, including the Phillies, who did not sign a black player until 1952. It was not until 1957 that a black player, shortstop John Kennedy, would make the Phillies out of spring training.

On September 19, 1954, the once-proud Athletics lost their final game in Philadelphia to the New York Yankees, 4-2. The franchise was sold to businessman Arnold Johnson, who moved the team to Kansas City in 1955. The A’s moved to Oakland in 1968. At the start of the 1960s, after the A’s had been relocated, the Phillies were still floundering. But in 1964, the team was seemingly on its way to recapturing some of the magic the Whiz Kids had enjoyed more than a decade earlier. Under the ownership of Bob Carpenter and the leadership of manager Gene Mauch, the 1964 Phillies raced out to a fast start. Everything was in place for the team’s third World Series appearance, but with twelve games to play in the regular season, the Phillies blew a six-and-one-half-game lead to finish in second place. The collapse haunted the Phillies and thereafter became a byword for baseball futility.

The Veterans Stadium Era

Less than a decade later, the Phillies moved into Veterans Stadium, a 60,000-seat multi-sport venue located off of Interstate 95 in South Philadelphia that they shared with the Eagles of the National Football League. Named in tribute to the veterans of all wars, “the Vet” became known more for its artificial playing surface and the rowdy, vociferous fans who watched games from its upper levels than the teams that played there. Despite the notoriety of the home park, the Phillies enjoyed a stretch of success during which they appeared in three straight National League Championship Series, from 1976 to 1978. In 1980, ninety-seven years after Alfred Reach brought the Phillies to Philadelphia, the franchise finally won a World Series. Following their first championship, the Phillies had sporadic success, returning to the World Series again in 1983 and 1993, but they often remained league basement dwellers. In 2004, the team moved into Citizens Bank Park, a 43,000-seat natural grass stadium situated across from Veterans Stadium, which was later torn down. It was here where the Phillies enjoyed their most successful run, winning five consecutive National League Eastern Division titles from 2007 until 2011 while selling out a National League record 257 consecutive games. The team appeared in back-to-back World Series for the first time ever, defeating the Tampa Bay Rays in 2008.

With roots in America’s birthplace, baseball — America’s great pastime — is more than just a game. In Philadelphia, it became as synonymous with the city as the U.S. Constitution, a symbol of civic pride and passion, connecting the generations of the city’s people who first played early versions of the game on the Jefferson Street Grounds to fans who streamed to ballparks throughout the region every summer.

Ed Moorhouse is an editorial/media specialist at Rutgers–Camden. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the early 1960s, more than a decade in advance of the event, city planning director Edmund Bacon initiated bold plans for a Bicentennial commemoration with an additional element: a world’s fair. He wanted to use the nation’s birthday and the international profile of the world’s fair—and the federal dollars these would bring—to advance the agenda of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Bacon imagined a thorough redevelopment of the waterfronts in Center City, as well as a “midway” concept that would close Chestnut Street to vehicles except for open-side electric streetcars. An overhead tram would move visitors across the Schuylkill to fairgrounds in Fairmount Park, the same location as the Centennial of 1876.

In short order, however, the initial planning group and Bacon’s early vision were pushed aside by a vocal coalition of architects, planners, and reformers billing themselves as the “young professionals.” Including figures like attorney Stanhope Browne (b. 1931), editor Herbert Lipson (b. 1929), and architect Richard Saul Wurman (b. 1935), this group advocated a much grander concept, a model city built on a four-mile “megastructure” to be constructed above the Pennsylvania Railroad yard on the west bank of the Schuylkill. Meanwhile, planning also grew tense around the lack of inclusion of African Americans in the process.  In response, the Bicentennial Corporation appointed Catherine Sue Leslie, a housing reform activist, to lead the “Agenda for Action.”  This initiative aimed to include minority voices in Bicentennial planning, and Leslie developed a low-cost rival vision for the Bicentennial built around a scattered-site concept that would highlight the racial and ethnic diversity of Philadelphia.

At the national level, in 1966 the Lyndon B. Johnson administration created the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), which was charged with making site recommendations as well as content and funding decisions. In Philadelphia, meanwhile, a Bicentennial Corporation was chartered in 1967 and began working to raise funds, gather public support, and elaborate the theme and design elements of the Bicentennial and world’s fair. Philadelphians also sought to gain a competitive edge over Boston, a rival for the celebrations.

100 Million Visitors Anticipated

In 1969 a Philadelphia delegation presented the ARBC with its “Toward a Meaningful Bicentennial” plan, with the megastructure at the center and five different “core” areas in the city to demonstrate innovative ways to solve America’s urban problems.  Anticipating an estimated 100 million visitors, the projected costs totaled more than a billion dollars.  The ARBC rejected the plan, and in Philadelphia a bitter divide developed along racial lines over the thematic focus and the location. By 1972 progress was stalled, and Mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91) canceled the world’s fair bid entirely, leaving only the Bicentennial commemoration to go forward. On the national level, the ARBC encouraged celebrations throughout the nation, not just in Philadelphia.

A year packed with Bicentennial-themed events began on New Year’s Eve, 1976, as thousands came to Philadelphia to witness the Liberty Bell being moved from Independence Hall to a new pavilion on Independence Mall. From January through October daily events included activities such as puppet shows, street theater, and concerts. The city hosted the NCAA Final Four tournament as well as all-star games for professional baseball, basketball, and hockey. The week leading up to July 4 was named Freedom Week and featured even more daily celebrations, street parties, parades, picnics, and concerts.  A 2076 time capsule was buried at Second and Chestnut Streets, a 50,000-pound Sara Lee birthday cake was served at Memorial Hall, and fireworks filled the sky throughout the week.

On July 4, 1976, a ceremony on Independence Mall featured President Gerald Ford, Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp (1912-1994), and Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, with actor Charlton Heston as the master of ceremonies. Following the ceremony a five-hour parade featured floats from every state and 40,000 marchers. An estimated two million visitors came to Philadelphia to attend these events. On July 6, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain visited and, with Prince Philip, presented a Bicentennial Bell made in the same foundry as the original Liberty Bell.

During the year-long celebration, Valley Forge, up to this time a state park,  became Valley Forge National Historical Park. On July 3, the winter campsite of George Washington’s Continental Army served as final destination for a commemoration of the westward wagon treks of the nineteenth century.  Six wagon trains totaling 200 wagons, which had traveled for months from all over the nation, converged in Valley Forge in front of a crowd of nearly a half a million people.

Counter-Demonstrations

Along with the patriotic events came counter-demonstrations. Two groups of Philadelphia citizens, the July 4^th Coalition and Rich Off Our Backs Coalition, staged marches and demonstrations during Freedom Week to oppose the celebration.  Their plans prompted Mayor Rizzo to request 15,000 federal troops to maintain order, a request that was denied.  Despite Mayor Rizzo’s concerns, the demonstrations in Fairmount Park and Norris Square Park were peaceful.

Philadelphia’s Bicentennial celebration concluded to mixed reviews.  The event introduced many thousands of Americans to the urban renewal and historic preservation successes of the postwar period in the city. The three blocks composing Independence Mall were added to Independence National Historical Park in 1973, and historic buildings in the park were refurbished.  The Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, now the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and the Mummers Museum both opened in 1976. The Port of History Museum on Penn’s Landing at Walnut Street was designed as a Bicentennial gift from the state to the city, but it did not open until 1981. The Society Hill neighborhood, Elfreth’s Alley, and Penn’s Landing were all popular sites during the celebration.

While Freedom Week brought large crowds to Philadelphia, attendance at Philadelphia’s historical sites dropped quickly afterward.  The total number of visitors to Philadelphia in 1976 was estimated to be between 14 and 20 million, which fell far short of the planners’ expectations.  Much of the shortfall may be attributed to fear of violence spread by media attention to the protests and the mayor’s reaction to them. During the Bicentennial there was also an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease. Hundreds of members of the American Legion staying at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel contracted an infectious disease through the hotel’s air conditioning system, killing more than thirty of the Legionnaires.

Despite Philadelphians’ initial visions for a transformative event, the planning price tag of more than $50 million may have been too high considering the lack of long-term benefits. Features that were meant to bring lasting value, like a Living History Center or the Chestnut Street Transitway, were considered a thorn in the city’s side just five years later.  It would be hard to imagine a more challenging period of time—with civil rights struggles, the Vietnam War, and Watergate fresh in mind, and the effects of racial strife, white flight, crime, and deindustrialization apparent in American cities—to hold a patriotic celebration. Philadelphia could not alter the calendar or reshape the larger context of the Bicentennial year.

Madison Eggert-Crowe is a graduate of Drexel University (2010) and is pursuing her Master’s in Public Administration at University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government. Scott Gabriel Knowles is associate professor of history at Drexel University. He is the author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (2011) and Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (2009). (Authors’ information current at time of publication.)

The first two-wheeler in Pennsylvania was crafted by a blacksmith in Germantown from the parts of a threshing machine in 1819, at the request of artist and antiquarian Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827). Technically a French-invented “velocipede,” the machine lacked a chain-drive transmission and brakes among other accoutrements. Peale, then nearly eighty years old, encouraged his sons and daughters to ride the 55-pound iron juggernaut and noted how they were able to travel—downhill, at least—“with a swiftness that dazzles the sight.” Not everyone was as enthusiastic. The same year that Peale acquired his velocipede, Philadelphia issued the first citation for riding on the city’s sidewalks, a spoke-stopping $3 fine. Even the museum proprietor soon lost interest in the heavy, ungainly two-wheeler.

This changed, however, with Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Among the varied exhibits was the English-designed “ordinary,” a machine with dissimilar wheel diameters that perched the rider several feet off ground. Spectators gathered to see this mechanical oddity in action, deftly demonstrated by Philadelphian John Keen. This was the high-wheel’s first public unveiling in the United States. As “ordinaries” became more widely available by the end of the decade, well-to-do riders gathered to socialize and formed local clubs, including the Philadelphia Bicycle Club (founded in 1879), the city’s first. The club promoted “the proper use of the bicycle and similar machines [as] a benefit to good health” and fellowship among cycling enthusiasts. Members shared advice on navigating gravel, dirt, or cobblestone roads that were also thronged with horses, carriages, and pedestrians. Members donned dandyish livery consisting of navy-blue flannel shirts trimmed in linen, brown corduroy breeches, and navy-blue knee stockings— – which served to invite even more ridicule by the press and public. Undaunted, similar associations formed in neighborhoods and towns across the region, from Ardmore’s Cycle and Field Club to the Wissahickon Wheelmen.

Safety Issues

While the “ordinary” provided a much more controlled and enjoyable ride than its velocipede forebears, the machine remained extraordinarily unsafe due to the high center of gravity required of its riders. “Taking a header” by vaulting headfirst over the handlebars was a common accident befalling non-helmeted high-wheel operators.

It was not until the early years of the 1890s that, following innovations such as chain-drive transmissions, pneumatic tires, and reduced height, the Philadelphia area shifted into its first bike boom. Like the “ordinary,” these “safety” bicycles were publicly unveiled in the United States for the first time in Philadelphia, in 1891. With a marked decrease in the chances of cracking one’s cranium, a much shallower learning curve for operation, and a smaller price tag, these “safeties” provided a variety of riders— professionals, laborers, men, women— with a democratic means of travel, recreation, and sport.

Although many of the earliest cycling clubs were founded by and for men, the “wheel” of the 1890s became an engine of emancipation for women. “The new means of propulsion has found especial favor with the advanced and progressive femininity of the present age,” wrote Philadelphia historian Julius Friedrich Sachse (1842-1919) in 1896. “No class of persons has taken more readily to the wheel than the new or strong-minded woman.”

In the 1890s, custom confined many women to corsets, long gowns, and other voluminous garments, modes of dress wholly unsuitable for riding. For “New Woman” cyclists, this was far more than a sartorial or safety issue: this was a matter of sovereignty. If women could not determine something as personal as their own clothes, how could they demand public rights, such as getting the vote? Clad in divided skirts, knickerbockers, and bloomers, these “belles of the boulevard” stirred a national controversy. “Thoughtful people … believe that the bicycle will accomplish more for women’s sensible dress than all the reform movements that have ever been waged,” observed an 1895 issue of Demorest’s Family Magazine.

New manufacturing methods, many of which foreshadowed the assembly-line production techniques of the twentieth century, brought the price of bicycles within reach of millions of Americans. Demand sparked the rise (and fall) of several dozen bicycle manufacturers in the greater Philadelphia area alone, including Philadelphia’s Sweeting Cycle Company, Reading’s Packer Cycle Co., and the Haverford Cycle Company. Even the department store magnate John Wanamaker (1838-1922) joined the craze, with his 1897 Falcon model a particular hit. Like any new industry boom, a handful of upstarts flourished while many floundered. Founded in 1892, Philadelphia’s Common Sense Bicycle Manufacturing Company proved to be anything but, as the company folded the following year.

Mapping Routes

For a sense of the popularity of riding, consider that, beginning in 1896, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a series of bicycle routes, complete with a hand-drawn map, a narrative describing road conditions and landmarks of cultural or historical significance riders would encounter, and a coupon offering discounts on hotels and restaurants along the way. Many routes were confined to Philadelphia— such as “Philadelphia, Darby and Chester, A Pleasant 15-Mile Spin”—while others— “Harrisburg to Lewistown, En Route to Pittsburg”— crisscrossed the central and western regions of the state.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, a golden age of bicycle racing captivated millions of Americans, while men, women, and children used their two-wheelers for leisurely jaunts and exercise. Local printers and cartographers, cashing in on the craze, produced guides advising cyclists on the best way to navigate the region’s roughed and rumbled streets. In tandem with electric streetcars, the bicycle also upended business practices from mail delivery to police work. By 1894, only Chicago and New York had more bicycle-bound uniformed patrolmen than Philadelphia. So popular was the machine that, the following year, more than fifty thousand buggy and carriage horses were no longer needed in the City of Brotherly— and Bicycle— Love.

While the “safety” bicycle lived up to its name in many ways, the region’s dilapidated road network posed great challenges to cyclists, whether they were racing or commuting. To smooth out the city’s rutted roads, the Associated Cycling Clubs of Philadelphia (ACCP) published two pamphlets, “Improvement of City Streets” and “Highway Improvement,” in support of bicycle-friendly infrastructure projects, including macadamized surfaces. Petitions in favor of constructing bicycle paths in Fairmount were put to park commissioners as early as 1897. That same year, ACCP president William Tucker (1845-1930) petitioned Philadelphia’s Department of Public Safety to consider a “more careful and systematic use of water upon the highways” to reduce roads’ wheel-choking mud.

During the 1920s, public interest in cycling waned as automobiles— rendered affordable through many of the same manufacturing methods previously applied to bicycle production— emerged as the vehicle of choice for excitement, speed, and convenience. Gasoline rationing during the Second World War sparked a brief renaissance in bicycle-riding, but nothing approximating the near-hysteria of earlier decades. In the post-war period, the bicycle became primarily associated with children’s recreation, popularly conceived of as a vehicular prelude to owning an automobile.

During the environmental activism of the 1970s— marked by an increased concern over pollution produced by gas-guzzling four-wheelers— cyclists formed the Philadelphia Bicycle Coalition (PBC). In an effort to make the city more bicycle-friendly, the PBC campaigned for funding of bicycle infrastructure, sponsored city-wide rides, and produced publications such as 1974’s Commuters’ Bike Map for Philadelphia. The organization scored its first major victory in 1973, working with the Delaware River Port Authority to open the Benjamin Franklin bridge walkways to pedestrians and bicyclists, overturning a prohibition that had been in effect since 1950.

The Push for Bike Lanes

By the 1990s, municipalities began to designate bike lanes on city streets. In 1993, the PBC and Mayor Ed Rendell (b. 1944) planned for a 300-mile network of bike lanes and bicycle-friendly streets. Although the plan was never formally adopted, Philadelphia’s first bike lanes were installed two years later on a half-mile stretch of Delaware Avenue. Also in the 1990s, one of the PBC’s successful programs became a separate non-profit organization, Neighborhood Bike Works, and the citywide Philly Bike Ride began in 2009 and continued annually. Also in 2009, as the use of bicycles for commuting continued to grow in popularity, the PBC— renamed the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia in 2002— worked to install buffered bike lanes on the major east-west arteries of Spruce and Pine Streets. Bicycle paths along Fairmount Avenue and along the Schuylkill Banks followed in 2013 and 2014. Central New Jersey unveiled buffered bike lanes in Cherry Hill in 2013, while Delaware–which the League of American Bicyclists named the third most bicycle-friendly state in the country in 2015–began construction of bike lanes along West and Washington Streets stretching from north Wilmington to the Riverfront in 2017.

In the region around Philadelphia, a consortium of organizations and municipalities created a trail network along the Schuylkill River from former carriage pathways, canal towpaths, and railroad corridors. Alternately called the Philadelphia to Valley Forge Bikeway and the Valley Forge Bikeway, the trail’s first stretch opened in 1979, spanning from Whitemarsh to downtown Philadelphia, following the right-of-way rail trails of the former Schuylkill Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Further extensions of the trail during the 1980s included a 4.3-mile section in Montgomery County and the completed connection between Philadelphia to Valley Forge National Historic Park. Beginning in 2012, the renamed Schuylkill River Trail became integrated into the Circuit Trail project, part of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission’s plan to create a single network of 750 miles of trails across nine counties in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. By 2016, more than 60 miles of the Schuylkill River Trail had been completed, with a planned goal of 130 miles connecting Philadelphia to Pottsville, linking the region’s urban, suburban and rural communities.

In 2009, the Northern Delaware Greenway Trail was completed, linking Wilmington, Alapocas Run, and Bellevue state parks between the Delaware and Brandywine Rivers. The trail network, part of the larger East Coast Greenway project, spanned more than forty miles between Wilmington and the Maryland border. Upon completion, the East Coast Greenway was slated to run from Maine to Florida.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, several cities in the Philadelphia region adopted bike-share programs to promote fuel-conscious travelling. Philadelphia’s Indego, launched in 2015, generated a larger ridership in its first year than similar programs in Boston, Washington D.C., and Denver. By 2016, Camden County and Collingswood instituted bike-share programs. In a 2016 survey conducted by Bicycling, the world’s leading cycling magazine, Philadelphia ranked as the fifteenth-most bike-friendly city in the United States, the culmination of a trend stretching back to the early enthusiasm of Charles Willson Peale and his children for the velocipede in the nineteenth century. The city’s Naked Bike Ride, first staged in 2010, again displayed the machine’s power of liberation. One of the largest such outings in the country, the event promoted positive body image and bicycle advocacy with participants in considerably less rigid attire than their elaborately festooned counterparts in the region’s first cycling clubs.

Vincent Fraley is communications manager for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and writes the Philadelphia Inquirer’s weekly history column, Memory Stream. (Author information current at time of publication.)

By the mid 1800s, the more-affluent members of Philadelphia society were playing billiards in exclusive men’s clubs while working-class men played billiards in taverns and saloons. There was sufficient interest in billiards in Philadelphia by 1858 for the city to be the location of the first informal American billiards championship. Other national championships were held in the city in the first decades of the twentieth century. By the 1930s there were over 200 billiards parlors in the city. All the nationally prominent billiards players of the time played in Philadelphia and some lived in the area, including Willie Mosconi (1913-93), who is considered to be the second-best billiards player of all time.

The location and date of the origin of billiards are not really known. The game is thought to have originated in France or England in the 1400s as an indoor alternative to croquet. King Louis XI of France had a billiards table made in 1470. Shakespeare refers to billiards in Antony and Cleopatra (1606-09), suggesting that by that time billiards was sufficiently popular for the reference to be understood by his audiences.

Billiards was brought to America by both the English and Spaniards. There are references to billiards being played in Virginia as early as 1710 and in New Orleans in 1723. George Washington played billiards with the Marquis de Lafayette in 1777.

Beyond the Quaker City Limits

The earliest reference that has been found for billiards in Philadelphia is a 1793 notice of sale for the Black Bear Tavern in Southwark (Queen Village), which mentions that an adjoining building contained a large space intended to be used for billiards. This suggests that billiards may have been prevalent in taverns outside the city limits (Vine and South Streets), as were other forms of sports and entertainments frowned upon by Quakers and, therefore, not found within the city proper.

By the early 1800s billiards had become popular in Philadelphia and most other major cities. Billiards parlors were respectable places, catering to the emerging urban middle and upper class. However, by the 1840s the association of billiards with gambling and other presumed associated vices led to a class distinction in the way billiards evolved and was experienced. The more elite members of society withdrew from public billiards parlors and either created billiards rooms in their own homes or enjoyed the game at exclusive men’s clubs. On the other hand, billiards continued to be a popular activity among working-class men, played primarily in taverns and saloons, but also in workingmen’s clubs and YMCAs.

The first men’s club in Philadelphia to offer billiards to its members appears to have been the Philadelphia Club, which added a billiards room to its new facility at Thirteenth and Walnut Streets in 1849. Billiards was very popular during the Civil War period. Abraham Lincoln referred to himself as a “billiards addict” (as did Mark Twain). It is, therefore, not surprising that when the Union League opened its new building on Broad Street in 1865 there was a billiards room with four tables. The evolution and eventual decline of billiards at the Union League is a good indication of the rising and waning popularity of billiards among Philadelphia’s business and civic leaders. Initially, billiards was so popular at the Union League that in 1881 an annex was built solely for adding billiards tables. Another annex was built in 1891 for the same purpose. When these were demolished to make way for architect Horace Trumbauer’s 1911 addition, two rooms were provided in the new addition exclusively for billiards, each with twelve tables.

In addition to hosting annual member tournaments, interclub tournaments, and exhibition matches, the Union League hosted the national championship in 1913. Yet by 1954 interest in the game among members had so declined that all of the billiards tables were removed.

Hosting the First Championship

This interest among the elite members of society in Philadelphia and elsewhere led to the establishment of billiards championships. The first informal American championship was held in Philadelphia in 1858 and won by its sponsor, Michael Phelan (1819-71) of New York, who defeated Ralph Benjamin of Philadelphia. Phelan is considered to be the “father of American billiards.” Not only did he sponsor championships but he also wrote the first American book on billiards and was a manufacturer of billiards tables. Further support for championships to popularize the game came from the Brunswick & Balke Co. of Chicago, which began manufacturing billiards tables in 1845. It eventually became the world’s largest manufacturer of tables and was still in business in 2015. Brunswick tables were ornate pieces of furniture often made with exotic woods and of sturdy construction to hold the heavy, green cloth-covered-slate playing surface. So popular were they with men’s clubs that one model was named “the Union League.”

Parallel to the evolution of billiards in exclusive men’s clubs and professional championships was the continuation of billiards as a popular workingman’s game.  Although billiards tables could be found in Philadelphia workingman’s clubs such as  St. Timothy’s in Manayunk in 1877 and in YMCAs, the more popular venues were neighborhood taverns and saloons. These provided places where single men from Philadelphia’s Irish and Italian immigrant communities could congregate for both social and recreational purposes. Billiards was popular because it provided an opportunity to show skill, to be with friends, and to earn a little money through gambling. By the 1920s billiards tables were as essential to a successful tavern as the bar itself.

For many of the same reasons, billiards also was popular in Philadelphia’s black community, even in the late nineteenth century. W.E.B. Dubois promoted billiards as a respectable game for the black community, and when black YMCAs began to emerge in the 1920s, most included billiards tables. Segregation prevented black players from playing in championships, which led to the creation of the Colored Billiards Players Association in 1914, although little is known of its history. However, as with other minority communities, the primary places for Philadelphia’s black residents to play billiards were taverns and saloons.

Billiard Players

From the 1880s to the 1930s, the most popular form of billiards was played with three or four ivory balls on a pocketless table. Now this is called carom billiards and is still popular in Europe and Asia, although much less so in the United States. Willie Hoppe (1887-1959) of New York is considered to have been the best carom billiards player in history and the best billiards player of all time. Between 1906 and 1952 he won 51 championship titles. Hoppe played an exhibition match at the Union League in 1933.

Carom billiards was still the form of the game initially played by Ralph Greenleaf (1899-1950), considered to be the third-best all-time billiards player and its first real celebrity. Greenleaf dominated the game from 1919 to 1937, winning 20 championships. He played exhibition matches all over the Philadelphia area for $50 a performance. Greenleaf married a vaudeville star, Princess Nai Tai, who often appeared with him at his exhibition performances, contributing to his celebrity. In his day Greenleaf was as prominent a sports figure as baseball’s Babe Ruth and boxing’s Jack Dempsey.

Billiards was initially limited to a game with three balls because ivory balls were expensive to produce. When synthetic balls were developed in England in the 1880s, the game changed to one played with fifteen balls on a table with six pockets. The championship form of the game became “straight pool,” and the dominant straight pool player was Willie Mosconi (1913-93) of Philadelphia, considered to be the second-best pool player of all time and the best straight pool player. Mosconi began playing at a very young age at his father’s billiards parlor in South Philadelphia. Between 1941 and 1957 he won fifteen consecutive championships. Straight pool matches were played until one player reached a certain number of points, one point being given for each ball pocketed. Matches were usually played over several days to scores of several hundred points. Mosconi holds the all-time documented record for balls continuously pocketed without a miss—526, achieved in an exhibition match in Springfield, Ohio, in 1954.

Under the sponsorship of Brunswick, Mosconi toured the country promoting what he always called pocket billiards. He was the technical advisor for the film The Hustler (1961), with Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman (and was said to have made Newman’s trick shots), which increased the popularity of billiards in the United States. For a time, Mosconi owned a billiards parlor in the Logan section of Philadelphia, although he seldom played there himself.

One of the notable black Philadelphia billiards players was Edward “Chick” Davis (1907-2006). Born in South Philadelphia, Davis learned to play billiards at the Christian Street YMCA, the first black YMCA in Philadelphia. Having experienced discrimination when he toured the country playing billiards, Davis opened a billiards parlor at Broad and Bainbridge Streets that was welcoming to players regardless of race or gender. He subsequently owned two other billiards parlors, one on Broad Street and one on South Street. Davis is commemorated as a billiards player and businessman by a mural located in the 1400 block of South Street. Created in 2006 by artist John Lewis, the mural depicts Davis and Willie Mosconi, whom he played in 1940

Places to Play

By the 1930s billiards was so popular in Philadelphia that there were a great many billiards parlors (as distinct from taverns or bars with a single billiards table) throughout the city. The 1920 City Directory has 230 listings under billiards and pocket billiards. Although many were located in downtown Philadelphia, there were also well-known billiards parlors in Kensington, along Roosevelt Boulevard, in Germantown, and in South Philadelphia. The best-known billiards parlor was Allinger’s, founded around 1889 and located at Thirteenth and Market Streets from 1911 to the 1971. It initially contained three floors with over 100 tables. One floor had a special glass-enclosed area for top players so they could be seen performing without being bothered. “Rack girls” were available to rack your pool balls for a small tip. All the top national players played at Allinger’s at some point in their careers.

Other well-known downtown billiard parlors were Frankie Mason’s at Seventeenth and South Streets, one owned by world champion Jimmy Caras on Chestnut Street, Harry Robbin’s at Fifteenth and Market Streets, and the Fox, at Sixteenth and Market Streets. In his autobiography, Rudolf Wanderone Jr. (1913-96), popularly known as Minnesota Fats, lists many pool halls around City Hall where he played and, in a deposition for a lawsuit in the 1940s, Ralph Greenleaf listed nine places in Philadelphia where he regularly played or gave exhibitions. Later venues included the Cue and Cushion at Fifteenth and Walnut Streets and Newby’s at Eleventh and Chestnut Streets, owned by Earl Newby, a former Philadelphia police detective who started the first billiards magazine, Billiards News, in 1960.

Longo’s Society Hill Billiards, which opened at Fifth and South Streets in 1932, was as prominent a billiards venue as Allinger’s. Phil Longo (1902-88) and his wife Mamie (1901-84) were both excellent players who won state and city championships. All the national champions played at Longo’s. Mosconi won a regional tournament there in 1933 that qualified him for the world championships. Local Philadelphians also frequented Longo’s, including George Kelly (a relative of Grace Kelly and a champion billiards player), mob boss Angel Bruno, and police sergeant (later police commissioner and mayor of Philadelphia) Frank Rizzo.

In an interview in 1974, Phil Longo lamented the decline of billiards over the course of his life, noting that of the 200 billiard parlors that existed in Philadelphia in the 1930s, only 70 remained. Using the definition of billiards parlor Longo would have used, there were virtually none remaining in the city in 2015. The last true billiards parlor, Tacony Billiards, closed in 2013. Many of the top Filipino players of the late twentieth century practiced there each August for many years, including Efren Reyes (b. 1954), considered to be the greatest contemporary billiards player.  Several traditional billiards parlors remain in the suburbs, including Drexeline Billiards in Drexel Hill, started by Bob Maidof, and Fusco’s The Spot in Trevose, owned by Pete Fusco—a fine billiards player in his own right and cousin of Jimmy Fusco (b. 1948) of Philadelphia. Known as “the Philadelphia Flash,” Jimmy Fusco is considered to be one of the great one-pocket billiards players.

Billiards in the Movies

The combination of the popularity generated by the movie The Hustler and the introduction of coin-operated tables in the 1960s created a temporary boom in public interest. The popular form of billiards—by this time more commonly called pool—became 8 ball, first begun around 1900 but not really popular until the 1950s, partially as a result of the distribution of 15,000 billiards tables by the Army in the 1940s. While Newman’s second pool film, The Color of Money (1986), with Tom Cruise, gave a boost to upscale billiards parlors, bar pool remained the most popular and most prevalent form of the game.

The longtime association of billiards and pool halls with gambling and as places for young men to hang out has often given billiards and pool a poor reputation. This was humorously presented in Meredith Wilson’s 1957 musical, The Music Man. One of its most popular songs, We Got Trouble, is about the dangers of playing pool and includes the line, “That game with the fifteen numbered balls is a devil’s tool.”  This impression led to zoning laws restricting the location of pool halls. Even in 2015, Philadelphia’s zoning code classifies pool halls with multiple tables in the same category as adult bookstores and adult movie theaters and precludes their location within 500 feet of a residential property, unlike bars with one pool table that can be almost anywhere.

In recognition of both the interest in and the primary location of billiards tables, the American Poolplayers Association was formed in 1979 and grew to 270,000 members in the United States, Canada, and Japan. The Philadelphia Chapter was founded in 1990 and in 2015 boasted 1,500 members playing on over 175 teams in bars throughout the Philadelphia area, testifying to the continuing attraction of billiards in the twenty-first century.

John Andrew Gallery is an avid billiards player. He is a member of the American Poolplayers Association, plays on an APA team in Philadelphia, and has participated in Las Vegas, Chicago, Cleveland, and Cologne, Germany. He was the first director of the City’s Office of Housing and Community Development and executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia from 2002 to 2013. He is the author of several guidebooks on Philadelphia architecture, including Philadelphia Architecture,  A Guide to the City (Third Edition, 2009). (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 blues is a musical genre created by African Americans in the southern United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Its roots are in work songs, field hollers, spiritual songs, and ballads that Blacks sang on plantations and in rural areas of the South, during and after the period of slavery. In the early years of the twentieth century these musical expressions coalesced into a distinct blues style, with African-derived melodic and tonal qualities and standardized lyric structures and chord progressions. At its heart, the blues is a personal commentary or lament by a singer on his or her situation—their love life, relationships, work, finances, or other circumstances. Vocal blues stylings were adapted to instrumental music, and both vocal and instrumental blues exerted a major influence on American music in the twentieth century.

While originally a folk music practiced by and for Blacks, the blues came into widespread popularity in the “blues craze” of the 1910s, when the music industry produced numerous commercialized blues songs and recordings. African American bandleader and composer W. C. Handy (1873-1958) was one of the key figures in the popularization of the blues at this time. An Alabama native who played throughout the South around the turn of the twentieth century, Handy adapted blues elements he heard in his travels into popular songs such as “The Memphis Blues” and “St. Louis Blues,” published in sheet music form in 1912 and 1914, respectively.

The Victor Military Band, a white ensemble sponsored by Victor Records, made the first commercial recording of “The Memphis Blues” at Victor’s studios in Camden, New Jersey, in 1914. One of the three major early-twentieth-century American record companies, along with Columbia and Edison, Victor recorded several popular blues numbers by white artists in the 1910s. Thus, while the blues continued to evolve as a vernacular folk music in the largely insulated rural African American communities in which it originated, a commercialized version became part of the mainstream of American popular music.

Rise of the “City” Blues

The Great Migration, the mass movement of African Americans out of the rural South to urban areas of the North and West in the early twentieth century, gave rise to the “city” blues. Where the rural or “country” blues was folk music—largely improvised songs performed by artists with no formal training, played primarily on acoustic string instruments, and transmitted orally—city blues was more formalized, played by professionals in bands often featuring piano, wind and brass instruments, and rhythm sections, and incorporating popular music styles. City blues had a major impact on jazz, a new genre that became widely popular in the late 1910s through a blending of blues, ragtime, and popular music. The lines between jazz, city blues, and country blues were often blurred, with jazz and city blues artists moving freely between the two closely related genres and country blues artists often performing city blues songs that had become popular.

In 1920 Mamie Smith (1891-1946), a blues singer based in New York City, recorded “Crazy Blues,” the first commercial recording by an African American blues artist. The recording was a big hit, reputedly a million seller, and gave rise to “race records,” recordings targeted specifically to African American audiences. Numerous blues recordings by Black artists followed in the 1920s as record companies sought to exploit this previously untapped market. “Crazy Blues” also initiated the era of the classic female blues recording artist, with African American female blues vocalists assuming an especially high-profile role in the recording industry. 

It was against this backdrop that the blues took hold in Philadelphia in the early twentieth century. The city’s African American population increased dramatically in this period, from 63,000 in 1900 to 220,000 in 1930, and the migrants brought their southern musical traditions with them. No doubt country blues was played in private homes and other places where rural transplants gathered, but it was the more polished city blues style that predominated in Philadelphia. The area around Broad and South Streets in South Philadelphia was the city’s primary African American entertainment district at this time, home to numerous clubs and bars and to larger Black venues such as the Standard, Royal, and Dunbar theaters that featured well-known blues singers such as Mamie Smith, Ethel Waters (1896-1977), and Bessie Smith (1894-1937), as well as jazz ensembles that played blues.

Ethel Waters was born in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania, and by the early 1910s was singing professionally in Philadelphia before going on tour and eventually becoming one of the most successful jazz and blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s. Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and sang throughout the South before settling in Philadelphia in 1922, just as her very successful recording career was about to begin. Dubbed the “Empress of the Blues,” Smith was the highest-paid African American entertainer of the 1920s and one of the most influential blues singers of all time. Although she toured often, South Philadelphia remained Smith’s home and she performed in the city often until her death at age forty-three in an automobile accident. Accompanying Smith on some of her early recordings was clarinetist George Baquet (1881-1949), a New Orleans native who settled in Philadelphia in 1923 and spent the rest of his career in the city. Baquet also played with New Orleans pianist, composer, and bandleader Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941, real name Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe), when Morton and his Orchestra recorded jazz and blues numbers for Victor Records in Camden in 1929.

White Musicians and the Blues

While blues was created and developed primarily by African Americans, white musicians adopted and popularized the genre as well. South Philadelphia jazz guitar virtuoso Eddie Lang (1902-1933, real name Salvatore Massaro), the son of Italian immigrants, made a series of blues recordings in the late 1920s with influential African American guitarist Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson (1899-1970), a New Orleans native who was known primarily as a blues musician but who was also adept at jazz. Since interracial musical groupings were unacceptable in this period, Lang was listed on the recordings as “Blind Willie Dunn,” a play on typical names of blues artists of the time.

As popular music styles changed over the years, the blues continued to be an important influence. The post-World War II era saw the rise of a new type of blues—jump blues, later called rhythm and blues. Usually played in small combos featuring a few horns, a rhythm section, and a vocalist, jump blues fused basic blues-based harmonies and melodies and swing jazz rhythms into good-time dance and party music. Popular Philadelphia-based jump bands of the late 1940s and 1950s included Jimmy Preston (1913–84) and His Prestonians, Chris Powell (1921–70) and His Five Blue Flames, and various ensembles led by Bill Doggett (1916-1996). Preston and Powell had minor and regional hits with some of their recordings and Doggett had a big national hit in 1956 with “Honky Tonk,” a mid-tempo blues instrumental.

These were all African American groups, but white musicians began to adapt the jump blues style, including country and western musician Bill Haley (1925–81), from Boothwyn, Delaware County, whose blending of jump blues and country-and-western styles in the early 1950s helped give rise to rock and roll. Haley’s massive 1955 hit “Rock Around the Clock,” featuring a simple blues-based melody and chord progression, ushered in the mid-1950s rock and roll craze. An important foundational music to rock and roll, the blues has remained a major influence on the genre ever since.

Local Blues Recordings

Jimmy Preston recorded for Gotham Records, which was based in Philadelphia from 1948 to 1956. Specializing in rhythm and blues and gospel, Gotham also recorded blues singers, primarily out-of-town artists but some local bluesmen as well. The latter included Doug Quattlebaum (1929-1996), who was born in South Carolina and moved to Philadelphia as a teenager. Quattlebaum’s 1953 Gotham recordings did not sell well and his recording career stalled until he was rediscovered in the early 1960s while driving a Mister Softee ice cream truck in Philadelphia and playing his music through the loudspeaker. Philadelphia native Pete J. Welding (1935-1995), a music historian and record producer, heard Quattlebaum and arranged for him to record the album, Softee Man Blues, released in 1963 on another label. Welding also facilitated the recording career of Blind Connie Williams (c. 1915-1974), who was born in Florida and in the 1930s settled in Philadelphia, where he was active as a street musician, mixing blues and spirituals. A compilation album of Williams’ recordings was issued in 1995 as Philadelphia Street Singer Blind Connie Williams: Traditional Blues, Spirituals, and Folk Songs. Harmonica player Charlie Sayles (b. 1948), a Massachusetts native who fought in Vietnam, also played on the streets of Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s and eventually had a recording and touring career as well.

Blues Links to Other Genres

Blind Connie Williams’ repertoire illustrates the close links between blues, rhythm and blues, and Black religious music, all of which were part of the larger body of twentieth-century vernacular African American music. There were many notable Philadelphia singers in the mid-century who moved across these genres, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973), an Arkansas native who settled in Philadelphia in the 1950s towards the end of her very successful career in gospel and rhythm and blues; Solomon Burke (1940-2010), the “King of Rock & Soul,” who was a boy preacher and singer in Philadelphia before becoming a pioneer of soul music in the early 1960s; Howard Tate (1939-2011), born in Georgia and raised in Philadelphia, who was active in gospel and rhythm and blues before he had several soul hits in the 1960s; and Lloyd “Fatman” Smith (c. 1922-1989), an entertainer and rhythm and blues and jazz singer and instrumentalist who was also a popular DJ on Philadelphia Black radio station WHAT.

Original country blues made a comeback as part of the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Along with white folk music of the British Isles and rural America, folk aficionados embraced Black “folk blues” as part of the revival, which helped rejuvenate the careers of many older African American bluesmen. Area folk clubs such as the Gilded Cage and 2nd Fret, both located near Rittenhouse Square in Center City Philadelphia, and the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, often featured folk blues artists. The folk blues harmonica-guitar duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (real names Saunders Terrell, 1911-1986, and Walter Brown McGhee, 1915-1996), from Georgia and Tennessee, respectively, recorded the album At the 2nd Fret in 1962. The Philadelphia Folksong Society, founded in 1957, also sponsored performances by blues musicians, both in local clubs and coffeehouses and at its annual Philadelphia Folk Festival, which began in 1962. Folklorist Kenneth Goldstein (1927-1995), co-founder and early program director of the Philadelphia Folk Festival and chair of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, was a prime mover in the 1960s folk music revival. He produced a number of albums by folk blues musicians, including Terry and McGhee’s At the 2nd Fret.

Gerald Lawrence “Philadelphia Jerry” Ricks (1940-2007), an African American singer and guitarist who was born and raised in the city, was a booking agent at the 2nd Fret from 1960 to 1966, where he came to know and learn from older country blues masters. Ricks subsequently carved out a career in folk blues, performing and recording in both America and Europe into the early 2000s.

In particular, Ricks learned from two older southern bluesmen who settled in Philadelphia and resurrected their careers during the 1960s folk revival: Lonnie Johnson and Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James (1902-1969). Johnson, after a varied career following his late 1920s duets with Eddie Lang, including some successful mid-1940s rhythm and blues recordings, had given up music and was working as a janitor in Philadelphia when local disc jockey Christiern Gunnar “Chris” Albertson (1931-2019) arranged for him to record the 1960 album, Blues by Lonnie Johnson. This marked Johnson’s return to performing and recording. (Albertson later wrote the definitive biography of Bessie Smith.) Mississippi-born Skip James was rediscovered in 1964, came into prominence at the Newport Folk Festival that year, moved to Philadelphia shortly thereafter, and spent his final years in the city, where one of his local appearances was recorded in 1966 and released years later as Skip James Live at the 2nd Fret, Philadelphia. (English rock and blues guitarist Eric Clapton (b. 1945), whose band Cream had recorded James’ song “I’m So Glad” in 1966, paid for James’ West Philadelphia house.)

Bonnie Raitt, David Bromberg, and Others

Local white musicians had notable careers fusing rock, folk, and blues styles as well. Singer/guitarist Bonnie Raitt (b. 1949), a California native, moved to Philadelphia in 1969 and began her career playing folk blues at the 2nd Fret, Main Point, and other area venues, often performing with and learning from older African American blues musicians. The blues was a major part of the repertoire of multi-instrumentalist David Bromberg (b. 1945), who was born in Philadelphia and raised in Tarrytown, New York. Working in a variety of vernacular roots music styles since the mid-1960s, Bromberg moved in 2002 to Wilmington, Delaware, where he was still active in the early 2020s. Also still active in the greater Philadelphia area in this period were Wilmington native George Thorogood (b. 1950), a guitarist and vocalist who had a successful career in blues-based rock and roll beginning in the 1970s; harmonica player Steve Guyger (b. 1952), who was born in Philadelphia and spent many years playing with Chicago blues greats; and the Dukes of Destiny, an interracial band founded in 1985 that played local clubs and parties.

Radio disc jockeys did much to keep the blues alive in Philadelphia over the years. DJ, record label owner, and producer Ulysses Kae Williams (1921-1987) played primarily blues during his long tenure as “Kae Williams” on Black radio station WDAS in the 1950s and 1960s. Longtime Philadelphia folk music DJ Gene Shay (real name Ivan Shaner, 1935-2020), co-founder, early producer, and emcee of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, championed many blues musicians on his Philadelphia radio shows from the early 1960s to late 2010s. The Blues Show, hosted by Jonny Meister (b. 1949), a Saturday night staple on WXPN that began in 1977 and was still on the air in the early 2020s, featured both historic and contemporary blues while also highlighting local artists and serving as a clearinghouse for area blues shows and activities. Many of these events were sponsored by non-profit organizations such as the Philadelphia Folksong Society, Bucks County Blues Society, and Philadelphia Blues Machine, the latter two founded in 1977 and 1986, respectively. In the commercial realm, Warmdaddy’s, a blues club that opened in 1995 in the Old City section of Center City and moved several times thereafter, was Philadelphia’s most prominent blues-focused venue in the late twentieth/early twenty-first -century, while local rock, folk, and jazz clubs sometimes featured blues artists.

Through all its stylistic developments and adaptions, the blues remained a popular musical genre in Philadelphia from the early twentieth to early twenty-first century, and the region served as home to a number of important blues artists and organizations.

Jack McCarthyis a longtime Philadelphia archivist and historian who has held leadership positions at several area historical institutions and directed a number of major archives and public history projects. He specializes in Philadelphia music history and regularly writes, lectures, and gives tours on the subject and has curated exhibits and consulted on documentaries on Philadelphia music. He serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Mann Music Center and directed the first phase and currently serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Jazz Legacy project. The author wishes to thank Jonny Meister for providing much useful information and insight for this essay. (Author information current at time of publication.)