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

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

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

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

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

Changing City, Changing Boulevard

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

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

The Gateway Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Coalition Tries Again

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

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

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

Extending to North Broad

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

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

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

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

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

Created in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway connected the heart of Philadelphia’s downtown to its premier park and over time became a district of cultural institutions and a commons for civic celebrations. The broad boulevard and its monumental structures reflected the European-inspired, nationwide City Beautiful Movement embraced by the emerging city planning profession.

Before the Parkway, Philadelphia’s congested downtown lacked any convenient or ceremonial road to give urban dwellers access to Fairmount Park, its bucolic setting beside the Schuylkill River, and the inspiration of the beautiful classical architecture of the Fairmount Water Works. As the park extended to some three thousand acres along both banks of the Schuylkill shortly after the Civil War, suggestions arose for connecting the park directly to Broad Street. In 1871, an anonymously published pamphlet advocated two “grand avenues” extending from north Broad Street, one leading to the east park entrance and the other to a west entrance. Several years later, the construction of City Hall at Centre (Penn) Square made that the more obvious terminus for a single boulevard leading to Fairmount. Following a preliminary proposal in 1884, City Councils authorized the idea with an ordinance signed into law on April 12, 1892. The planned route was then inscribed on official city maps.

Although immediate execution of the plan faltered, in part due to the financial panic of 1893, it harmonized with trends evident in 1893 at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the temporary “White City” energized planners to embrace a new City Beautiful Movement. The fair’s design of clustered civic structures bound by a broad thoroughfare demonstrated an alternative to prevailing urban conditions of dark, unhealthy neighborhoods. In contrast, City Beautiful principles would open built-up portions of the city to sunlight and allow greater ease of movement.

In Philadelphia, such visions inspired the 1902 formation of the Philadelphia Parkway Association, an organization made of the city’s most prominent and wealthy residents. They released a new grand plan for a Parkway in March 1903, but debates over location and costs delayed its execution. For the next several years, planners fiddled with the route, some breaking its axis at the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul on Logan Square and continuing the road at a slightly different angle to the Green Street entrance to the park. A more costly option, ultimately adopted, cut straight from the northwest corner of City Hall across Logan Square to the foot of Fairmount. With the exact route still unresolved, work began with the demolition of a little row house on north Twenty-First Street on February 22, 1907.

Museum on a Hill

Weeks later, Republican Mayor John E. Reyburn (1845-1914) took office. Within days, he received an invitation to the mansion of one of the city’s most influential Republicans and a leader in the parkway project, the immensely rich streetcar baron and art collector, P.A.B. Widener (1834-1915). For years, Widener had been arguing for a new art museum to replace the distant and crowded facility at Memorial Hall. He informed Reyburn that he would personally pay construction costs for a new museum if the mayor agreed to build it atop Fairmount, where, both men understood, the Water Works’ reservoirs, like the rest of the facility, should soon be closed because of the Schuylkill’s pollution. Accepting Widener’s offer, Reyburn was persuaded that the new boulevard should terminate at the foot of Fairmount. The Fairmount Park Art Association commissioned a new architectural plan to represent for the first time a vision of a Parkway complete with proposed grand new civic buildings. The architects named were the French-born Paul P. Cret (1876-1945), Clarence Zantzinger (1872-1954) and partners, and Horace Trumbauer (1868-1938). By late summer 1907, Cret produced a bird’s-eye view of the plan. It showed a grand rectangular plaza at the foot of Fairmount, a classical art museum at the summit, and a smaller semicircular plaza at the northeast corner of the larger one, where a second avenue would run north parallel to the main Parkway before curving toward the river at Boathouse Row.

The project would be very expensive—some two million dollars more than if the roadway had been shifted slightly away from the foot of Fairmount. Reyburn campaigned for more than a year to win support for it. In 1908, voters approved a loan for the project, and in June 1909, the updated plan returned to official city maps. By the time Reyburn left office at the end of 1911, he was hailed for his leadership of the Parkway project and for making Fairmount the site of the new art museum. High costs and seemingly endless delays postponed completion of the art museum for nearly two decades, however, by which time Widener was long dead and his son had angrily withdrawn his earlier offer to give the family’s vast art collection to Philadelphia.

Adding to the delays were disputes between Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg (1843-1918), a reform Republican who succeeded Reyburn in 1912, and the Republican machine that controlled City Councils. After the Pennsylvania legislature in 1915 gave Pennsylvania cities the right to control construction within two hundred feet of parkland, City Councils voted to annex the Parkway to Fairmount Park, which would give control to the Fairmount Park Commission (FPC), then a bastion of Republicanism. Blankenburg vetoed the legislation, only to have the Councils override him. The commission waited to exercise its authority until 1916, when Republicans restored their rule over City Hall with the election of Mayor Thomas B. Smith (1869-1949). But then things moved quickly. By the time the nation entered World War I in April 1917, the Parkway was nearly complete. The Fairmount Parkway, as it was initially named, was declared fully open on October 25, 1918. More than 1,300 properties had been demolished at a cost of $35 million.

Parkway Plan Gets a Second Look

Seeking to put its own stamp on the Parkway, the Fairmount Park Commission in 1917 hired its own consultant to reexamine the Cret-Zantzinger-Trumbauer plan created nearly a decade earlier. The commission selected French landscape architect Jacques Gréber (1882-1962), the favorite of commission president Edward T. Stotesbury (1849-1938), and early in 1918 approved and published his revised plan. While retaining the basic design of Paul Cret’s 1907 plan, Gréber replaced the monumental plaza that Cret had drawn at the foot of Fairmount with a smaller oval and created a green wedge of largely open space extending down into the city. He also created a traffic circle within Logan Square, which was extended to Twentieth Street. He intended that enlarged space, rather than the plaza at Fairmount, to become the main locus of new public buildings, similar to the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

The 1907 plan in which Paul Cret had played such an important role reflected the influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he had trained, and the Avenue des Champs-Elysées and other great Parisian boulevards built during the reign of Napoleon III. Gréber built upon those references, particularly in shifting the allusion to the Place de la Concorde from the foot of Fairmount to Logan Square. Between 1927 and 1941, the Free Library by Julian Abele (1881-1950) and Municipal Court building by John T. Windrim (1866-1934) were completed on the square’s north side, an obvious homage to comparable buildings at Concorde. Cret, who had been away from Philadelphia serving in the French army during World War I, was at first unhappy when he heard of the changes made by his countryman. But after he returned at the close of the war, he and Gréber reconciled and went on to collaborate on the Rodin Museum in 1929.

During the decades while the Parkway was on the drawing boards and under construction, a number of buildings were proposed for it but never constructed. Of those eventually built, most were completed between 1918, when the Parkway opened, and December 1941, when the United States entered World War II. These included the Insurance Company of North America (1925) at Sixteenth Street, the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company (1928) at Twenty-Fifth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, the Philadelphia Council of the Boy Scouts of America (1930) at Twenty-Second and Winter Streets, the School Administration Building (1932) at Twenty-First and Winter, and the Franklin Institute (1934) at Twentieth and the Parkway. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the vast temple crowning the acropolis of Fairmount, officially opened in 1928, although much of its interior remained unfinished.

Monuments on the Parkway

Outdoor monuments also adorned the Parkway. In 1924, the sprawling Fountain of the Three Rivers (Swann Memorial Fountain) by Alexander S. Calder (1870-1945) was unveiled in the center of Logan Circle, the approximate midpoint of the long view from City Hall to the Museum of Art. In 1928, the Washington Monument designed in 1897 by Rudolf Siemering (1835-1905) was moved from its original home at the Green Street entrance of Fairmount Park to the foot of Fairmount and the terminus of the Parkway.

The Great Depression, then World War II, brought a halt to new projects for the Parkway, which was renamed the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1937, a year of festivities marking the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Little was added during the second half of the twentieth century apart from a juvenile incarceration facility, the Youth Study Center, at Twentieth Street in 1952. But the 1953 demolition of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station, which had long abutted City Hall at its northwestern corner, made way for the creation of John F. Kennedy Plaza in the 1960s at the Parkway’s southeastern terminus in the block bounded by Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Arch Streets, and JFK Boulevard. That plaza atop a municipal parking garage opened a broader vista from City Hall to the Art Museum than ever before. It later became known as “Love Park” following the installation of the iconic LOVE sculpture by Robert Indiana (b. 1928). In 1959, the Parkway also gained the Moore Institute of Art (later Moore College of Art) on the south side of Logan Square at Twentieth and Race Streets. Ten years later, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, the Friends Select School replaced its buildings dating from 1848 with a new school and office building. At the other end of the Parkway, also in the 1960s, to accommodate ever-increasing automotive traffic Gréber’s small oval at the foot of Fairmount was enlarged into the egg-shaped Eakins 0val, named for artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916).

By the start of the twenty-first century, new Parkway projects came to life with prodding from a 1999 report by the private-sector Central Philadelphia Development Corporation, which laid out proposals for “completing” the Parkway in keeping with the visions of Cret and Gréber. New and renovated park space filled the once-empty corners of Logan Square; new benches, sidewalks and crossings created a better experience for pedestrians; a new Dilworth Park replaced the hard-surface Dilworth Plaza on the west side of City Hall; and new cafés opened at Sixteenth Street and on Eighteenth Street on Logan Square. Paine’s Park for skateboarders arose in the lawn between the roadway and the new Schuylkill Banks park along the riverbank, and Eakins Oval also became a temporary park in the summertime. At Twenty-Fifth Street, the Philadelphia Museum of Art annexed and enlarged the Fidelity Mutual Life building as its Perelman Building with galleries, archives, and office space for the museum. Most importantly, in 2012 the Barnes Foundation opened a new Philadelphia campus on the site of the demolished Youth Study Center on the Parkway’s north side between Twentieth and Twenty-First Streets. With the renovation of the Rodin Museum next door, this at last realized much of the century-old dream of making the Parkway an art-lover’s destination.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway remained one of the greatest achievements of city planning in Philadelphia’s history. The long process that brought it to fruition marked the start of a century in which professionals united with civic leaders and officials to create a bold vision for the heart of the downtown. The result has been both a prime cultural destination for the region and a distinguished civic space for area residents to gather for holidays and other special occasions.

Lynn Miller is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Temple University. He is the author of, among other works, Global Order: Values and Power in International Politics, Crossing the Line (a novel), and the co-author (with James McClelland) of City in a Park: A History of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System. (Author information current at time of publication.)

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

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

A Boost from Federal Funds

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

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

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

Fighting the Blue Route

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

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

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

Grassroots Activism Elsewhere

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

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

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

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

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

The pace of bridge construction was initially slow compared to that in New England and the South.  This was partly because the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers were themselves useful as highways, and so the need to cross them remained limited throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The Lenni Lenape who first lived in the area marked good crossing locations along rivers, particularly the Delaware and Schuylkill.  These later became sites of ferry crossings, which would eventually foster bridge spans.

In 1660 King Charles II (1630-85) ordered a road, referred to as the King’s Highway, to be built stretching from Boston, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina.  By 1683, however, progress in Pennsylvania had stalled.  Consequently, and at the request of William Penn, that same year the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly passed a law requiring bridges to be built by local inhabitants across all streams and rivers that intersected the highway.  Due to technological limitations, which were just starting to be overcome in New England, these first bridges were not able to span major waterways like the Delaware River.  Instead, they typically kept to tributaries and smaller rivers.  The earliest surviving bridge built along the King’s Highway in the Delaware watershed area, the Pennypack Creek Bridge, was just such a structure.  Completed in 1697, it was stone arch in construction and spanned the Pennypack Creek, located north of Philadelphia where it empties into the Delaware River. Due to the way they facilitated travel, these bridges served as early milestones in the delineation of the region.

Bridges spanning the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in Philadelphia were first constructed in the early nineteenth century, and, almost invariably, these river crossings originated as ferry points.  Swedish colonists operated the earliest ferries in the 1660s and by the 1730s a significant number of modern-day bridge sites had ferries in operation.  On the Schuylkill River these included Gray’s Ferry, the Middle Ferry at Market Street, and the Upper Ferry at Spring Garden Street (all in Philadelphia).  On the Delaware these included ferries at Trenton, New Jersey, and upriver at New Hope-Lambertville and Easton-Phillipsburg. 

Drawbacks of Ferries

Several factors drove the conversion of ferries to bridges.  As early as 1764 timber rafters using the Delaware for transport proved dangerous to ferry passengers.  As late as 1914 there was a collision between a raft and a ferry that caused the deaths of four passengers.  Also, ferries had to stop operation during flooding and freezing.  The greatest impetus, though, was when a ferry could no longer handle the amount of traffic queuing up to cross.  At this point a corporation, typically local residents of the towns on either side of the river, would petition the states for a charter to build a bridge.  They would then finance construction by selling stock in the company, and dividends (and repairs) would be paid from collected tolls.  Thus, privately owned ferries were converted into privately owned toll bridges.

The most heavily trafficked ferries on the Delaware were at Trenton and Easton, which consequently led to the first bridge construction over the river.  The Delaware River Bridge Company commissioned the Easton-Phillipsburg Bridge in 1795.  However, the Lower Trenton Bridge, though commissioned later, was completed nine months before the Easton bridge in January 1806.  New England had achieved greater technical feats in bridge building at the time, and as a result both of these bridges were designed by men whose earlier works were constructed in New York and Massachusetts: the Trenton bridge by Theodore Burr (1771-1822), designer of the first bridge to span the Hudson River, and the Easton bridge by Timothy Palmer (1751-1821), who designed and built the first timber-truss bridge in the United States over the Merrimack River in Massachusetts.  Trenton was an ascending manufacturing center and its bridge helped solidify its importance along the route between New York and Philadelphia.  Easton-Phillipsburg was initially a small agricultural area, but, through influences such as its bridge, it would become a transportation hub for the steel industry and funnel large quantities of anthracite coal to Philadelphia.

At the same time that these Delaware River bridges were enhancing the route between Philadelphia and New York, bridge construction across the Schuylkill was laying the potential for the expansion of Philadelphia’s suburbs, particularly West Philadelphia.  The Schuylkill bridges also generally started as ferry crossings.  Technically, the first span across the river was a floating bridge at Gray’s Ferry, built shortly after the Revolutionary War.  However, the first significant bridge (that did not need to be pulled aside for passing ships) was finished in 1805 and designed by Timothy Palmer (who would then go on to build the Trenton crossing).  It was known as Palmer’s Permanent Bridge at Market Street.  A bridge at Spring Street was completed in 1812 in anticipation of traffic from the growing neighborhood of Mantua.  At its completion, this Wernwag Bridge was the longest single-span bridge in the world at 343 feet.  The ease of access that these bridges provided to neighborhoods that were initially outside the city would be a justification for their inclusion within the city limits set with the 1854 Act of Consolidation.

Railways Played a Role

The need for railway bridges spurred further bridge construction across the Schuylkill River, both in Philadelphia and further upriver.  In 1838 Gray’s Ferry finally got a proper bridge.  Called the Newkirk Viaduct, this was a railway bridge that provided the first direct rail access from Philadelphia to Baltimore.  The Philadelphia and Reading Railway opened in 1842 and its multiple crossings as it stretched from Philadelphia to Reading and into northwest Pennsylvania’s coal region (including a major crossing at Norristown) allowed it to compete with the Schuylkill Navigation Company.  Its terminus was at Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad on the west side of the Schuylkill River from which point cargo would be transported to Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal via the Columbia Railway Bridge in Fairmount Park.

The bridges over these two major waterways would become more technologically advanced with time.  The Pennypack Bridge was a stone arch bridge suitable for modest length bridges over rivers that did not have much down-river traffic.  Bridges built in the area, starting with the Permanent and Lower Trenton Bridges, were wooden covered bridges, the Permanent Bridge being the first completely covered bridge in the United States.  For wide points in a river these bridges could require many spans (the Lower Trenton Bridge had five), which was a hazard during floods and freshets (spring ice thaws), and for timber rafts.  An 1841 flood damaged or destroyed many Delaware River bridges.  By some accounts only the Easton and Trenton bridges remained.

Beginning in the 1870s covered bridges were abandoned for steel bridges.  These were typically suspension bridges but sometimes truss or cantilever bridges.  The last wooden bridge built on the river was the Columbia-Portland bridge (upriver at Knowlton township New Jersey) completed in 1869.  After a particularly bad Delaware River flood in 1903, most of the covered bridges were damaged or destroyed and their respective companies repaired or replaced them with steel constructions.  Steel was typically required for a bridge to be able to handle railroad traffic for any length of time and was consequently used at Trenton (after an initial attempt at modifying the wooden bridge with track).  Other bridges farther upriver on the Delaware were also modified to permit rail traffic, which enhanced access to markets in the northeast, including New York City.

Camden Commuters

Just as development in West Philadelphia required bridges in order to handle the increase in traffic, higher levels of commuter traffic across the Delaware drove plans to connect the city directly to Camden.  To this end, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures created commissions that coalesced as the Delaware River Joint Commission in 1919 (later renamed the Delaware River Port Authority in 1931).  Its purpose was the building and maintaining of links between the two states.  This initially included a single bridge, which was completed in 1926 and named the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge).  This would expand to include three more bridges: the Walt Whitman Bridge in 1955, the Commodore Barry Bridge in 1974, and the Betsy Ross Bridge in 1976; the PATCO Speedline in 1969, a mass transit rail line running between Philadelphia and Camden over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge; and a ferry.  The Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman Bridges are steel suspension bridges, the Commodore Barry Bridge a steel cantilever bridge, and the Betsy Ross a steel truss bridge.

The initial reports conducted by the Delaware River Joint Commission in preparation for the Delaware River Bridge showed that most trans-Delaware traffic crossed using the ferry that ran between Market Street, Camden, and Market Street, Philadelphia.  Furthermore, they stressed that nearly two-thirds of this traffic originated locally in Camden, numbering 24.6 million passengers per year.  Also, a summary of these reports in 1920 showed that the trend was towards an increasing percentage of traffic across the river that was not local.  Therefore, a central conclusion was that, at the time of the construction of the first bridge, it was not economical for the commission to construct an elevated rapid transit system, but that it would be a plan with “attractive features” as traffic patterns shifted in the following decades to higher numbers of long-distance commuters.  The bridge itself would act as a catalyst for these trends.

After the completion of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, demand grew for a connection across the Delaware River between New Jersey and Delaware.  A ferry service started in 1926 to meet this demand almost immediately generated a traffic bottleneck with reported automobile lines of up to four miles long on both sides of the river.  Despite this, it was not until 1940 that the Delaware General Assembly studied the possibility of a bridge.  The project lagged due to World War II, but in 1947 the Delaware River Crossing Division formed and began construction of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.  It was completed in 1951, making it the second bridge across the Delaware in the Philadelphia area.

Washington-New York Corridor

From the Delaware Memorial Bridge’s inception, actual usage far exceeded the estimated projections of traffic (in 1960 it was calculated that traffic was increasing at a 5.7 percent compound growth rate). This was due in part to its strategic location on the north-south route between New York and Washington, as well as its connection to major highways running west.  While the Benjamin Franklin Bridge had made it possible for automobile travelers to reach New York without having to use a ferry, now it was possible to avoid traveling through Philadelphia altogether.  In 1962 the Delaware River and Bay Authority was created to enhance the first span and build a second, making it a twin suspension bridge, which was completed in 1968.

Further development south of Philadelphia was spurred with the opening of the Walt Whitman Bridge in 1957.  It was initially conceived by the Delaware River Port Authority as a way to reduce traffic on the Ben Franklin Bridge and provide an alternative route to South Jersey shore communities.  However, at the thirtieth anniversary ceremony of the bridge’s opening commenters noted that while originally many viewed the bridge as just another route to the shore, its larger consequence was to stimulate growth in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey.  Migrant workers had easier transport between South Philadelphia and southern New Jersey farms, and many ultimately relocated outside of the Philadelphia area.  Furthermore, after its construction, the bridge was connected to the Schuylkill Expressway, opening a major route west of the Delaware.  The bridge also helped spur the establishment of the Food Distribution Center, the South Philadelphia sports complex, and the expanded use of Philadelphia International Airport.

The Delaware River Port Authority and the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC) assumed responsibility for the majority of bridges crossing the Delaware between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Launched as the Commission for Elimination of Toll Bridges, the DRJTBC was created for two reasons.  It would purchase toll bridges along the Delaware River and convert them to free bridge crossings and use equal annual subsidies from both states to maintain the bridges.  From 1920 to 1934 the commission purchased, repaired, and consolidated many bridge crossings on the river.  In 1934 it was replaced with the DRJTBC, with responsibility to maintain a total of twelve toll-free bridges out of joint tax subsidies and maintain eight toll bridges including the Easton-Phillipsburg (U.S. Route 22) Bridge and Trenton-Morrisville (U.S. Route 1) Bridge (Lower Trenton Bridge).  Although many of these and the Schuylkill’s bridges were prompted by need, once completed they had a profound impact in altering patterns of travel and commerce, thus helping establish the distinct character of the region. 

Andrew Slemmon is a graduate student in the Department of History at West Chester University. (Author information current at the time of publication.)

Bridge Construction Types

Arch – A bridge whose substructure is composed of arches.
Truss – The load-bearing structure (truss) is composed of a series of connected elements, typically triangles.
Suspension – The roadway is hung below suspension cables (via vertical supporting cables), which transport tension to towers at either end of the bridge.
Cantilever – Each half of the bridge is a rigid structural element supported at one end only (a cantilever), which extends out over the river.

Bridges

Abbreviations of proprietors:
DRPA – Delaware River Port Authority.
DRJTBC – Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission.
PennDOT – Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Benjamin Franklin Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden, suspension bridge, DRPA, opened 1926.
Walt Whitman Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Gloucester, suspension bridge, DRPA, opened 1957.
Commodore Barry Bridge: Delaware River between Chester and Bridgeport, cantilever bridge, DRPA, opened 1974.
Betsy Ross Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Pennsauken, truss bridge, DRPA, opened 1976.
Delaware Memorial Bridge: Delaware River between New Castle and Deepwater, twin suspension bridge, Delaware River and Bay Authority, opened 1951.
Tacony-Palmyra Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Palmyra, tied-arch bridge, Burlington County Bridge Commission, opened 1929.
Burlington-Bristol Bridge: Delaware River between Bristol Township and Burlington, truss bridge, Burlington County Bridge Commission, opened 1931.
Milford-Montague Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Milford and Montague Township, truss birdge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Delaware Watergap Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Delaware Water Gap and Hardwick Township, steel plate beam bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Portland-Columbia Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Portland and Columbia, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Easton-Phillipsburg Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Easton and Phillipsburg, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1938.
I-78 Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Williams Township and Phillipsburg, twin girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1989.
New Hope-Lambertville Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Solebury Township and Delaware Township, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1971.
Scudder Falls Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Lower Makefield Township and Ewing Township, plate girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1961.
Trenton-Morrisville Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1952.
Portland Columbia Bridge: Delaware River between Portland and Columbia, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1957.
Riverton-Belvidere Bridge: Delaware River between Riverton and Belvidere, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Northampton Street Bridge: Delaware River between Easton and Phillipsburg, cantilever bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1896.
Riegelsville Bridge: Delaware River between Riegelsville and Pohatcong Township, suspension bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Upper Black Eddy-Milford Bridge: Delaware River between Upper Black Eddy and Milford, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1933.
Uhlerstown-Frenchtown Bridge: Delaware River between Uhlerstown and Frenchtown, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1931.
Lumberville-Raven Rock Bridge: Delaware River between Lumberville and Raven Rock, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Center Bridge-Stockton Bridge: Delaware River between Center Bridge and Stockton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1927.
New Hope-Lambertville Bridge: Delaware River between New Hope and Lambertville, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Washington Crossing Bridge: Delaware River between Upper Makesfield Township and Hopewell Township, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Calhoun Street Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1884.
Lower Trenton Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1928.
Market Street Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1932.
Walnut Street Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, truss bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1893.
Spring Garden Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1965.
Gray’s Ferry Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, State Highway Agency, opened 1976.
Girard Avenue Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1972.
Strawberry Mansion Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch truss bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1897.
Vine Street Expressway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, PennDOT, opened 1959.
Schuylkill Expressway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, PennDOT, opened 1956.
Columbia Railway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1920.
Schuylkill River Bridge: Schuylkill River between Swedesburg and Black Horse, girder bridge, Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, opened 1954.

Broad Street is, as its name implies, the city’s broadest north-south street. At one hundred feet in width, the north-south arterial is indeed wide, but its length is more remarkable. From the extreme limits of South Philadelphia, it shoots north into Center City and beyond to North Philadelphia, right to the edge of Montgomery County. It is the longest straight urban boulevard in the United States and the longest straight street in Philadelphia (although traffic must circle City Hall in the middle). An old Philly aphorism is: “They say Broad Street is the straightest street, but when you get to City Hall, it gets real crooked.” Also, an old local joke is to send someone to Fourteenth Street. There is no Fourteenth Street, as Broad Street is where that street would be.

Broad Street is the north-south counterpart to Market (formerly High) Street. When surveyor Thomas Holme (1624-95) prepared the first plan of the city of Philadelphia for William Penn (1644-1718), only Broad and High Streets were named. Twelfth Street was designated as Broad Street, and this rough road bisected the town almost exactly at its middle in what was then wilderness. The plan also designated a public square in the vicinity of this intersection, supposedly the center of the city, because Holme believed it to be the watershed dividing the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. The plot was therefore called Center Square. Penn intended that the Public Buildings (City Hall) of Philadelphia would one day go there.

Broad Street was moved to Fourteenth Street by the 1730s, as that was closer to the actual midpoint between the two rivers. Surveyors also corrected Holme’s error regarding Center Square and placed the commons where it is today—the location of City Hall. Troops drilled in and around Center Square during the War of Independence, and the French army under Rochambeau camped there on the way to Yorktown. Later, Center Square became the site for Philadelphia’s first waterworks.

Broad Grows North and South

After the Revolution, Broad Street grew, first to the north: The road was extended from Vine Street to Ridge Road (Avenue) in 1811. It continued north through the nineteenth century, and its northernmost extensions were created between 1903 and 1923. The street was also lengthened to the south:  In 1819, the road reached from South (formerly Cedar) Street to Dickinson Street. With the city-county consolidation of 1854, a rudimentary version of Broad Street extended as far south as the later site of the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Broad Street began to fill in by the first third of the nineteenth century. As the city’s population grew westward from its original concentration near the Delaware River, South Broad Street became distinguished by elite residences, hotels, and cultural institutions. Wealthy Philadelphians who wished to escape the crowded conditions of old Philadelphia built fine mansions along South Broad. Several expensive hotels also opened on South Broad by the 1850s, including the LaPierre House at Broad and Sansom, which was touted as the most luxurious hotel in America. These hotels also housed clubrooms and rathskellars for the many social organizations based along both South and North Broad well into the twentieth century.

Closest to Center Square, Broad Street also became home to cultural institutions. On South Broad, the Academy of Music opened at Broad and Locust Streets in 1857, and it was joined by the Union League eight years later. To the north, during the second half of the nineteenth century Broad Street from City Hall to Race Street became lined with businesses and institutions including the Masonic Temple, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Offenbach’s Garden (replaced in 1892 by an Odd Fellows Temple), and the Adelphi Theater (demolished in 1881). Farther north, the street had an industrial character, created by Matthias Baldwin (1795-1866), who founded his great locomotive factory in the 1830s at the corner of Broad and Spring Garden (outside the city limits at that time). This industrial site grew to encompass several blocks between Callowhill and Spring Garden Streets as other manufactures joined the Baldwin Works in this gritty manufacturing area along North Broad Street.

After the Civil War, North Broad Street became one of Philadelphia’s leading elite addresses. Many mansions were built in the Gothic and Victorian styles, mostly to house the families of wealthy industrialists and middle managers, such as those who owned and worked at Baldwin Locomotive Works and associated factories. Other fabulous homes were erected for the owners and operators of traction companies who laid down trolley tracks in most of the streets of Philadelphia (and other cities too). These men—William L. Elkins (1832-1903) and Peter A. Widener (1834-1915)—and their enormous Victorian homes represented the peak of North Broad’s development.

Sidewalks Grow, Too

Reflecting the evolution of the street, Broad Street’s sidewalks were broadened and large granite blocks were used to pave the roadway in the 1870s. In 1894, Broad was the first street in Philadelphia surfaced with asphalt—the latest in paving technology at the time—for primitive automobiles. This work, instigated by Mayor Edwin S. Stuart (1853–1937), cost the city half a million dollars. The blocks of stone (Belgian blocks) that had previously lined Broad Street were used to replace the cobbles in nearby small streets. And, like Market Street, Broad Street subsequently became the route of a subway line, initially opened in 1928 with additions made in 1936, 1956, and 1970.

By far the biggest change for Broad Street occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when City Hall was constructed on Center Square, encompassing the entire block and interrupting travel on both Broad and Market Streets. The completion of the “Public Buildings” encouraged the development of office and financial headquarters along the thoroughfare close to the new seat of government, and under the watchful eye of the statue of William Penn high atop the building’s tower. Philadelphia’s City Hall was designed to be huge in every way so as to make a statement about the city’s wealth and industrial might.

With the relocation of city government to Broad and Market, residential and office skyscrapers replaced many of the mansions and hotels along South Broad (although several fine hotels, such as the Bellevue Stratford, remained). The Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station, opened in 1881 directly across from City Hall, added to the mix and helped transform Broad Street from a quiet institutional and residential roadway into a bustling commercial thoroughfare.

Broad Street also experienced a major building boom farther south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of this was due to the Vare Brothers—William Scott (1867-1934), George (1859-1908) and Edwin (1862-1922). They were construction contractors and politicians who ran a corrupt South Philadelphia political machine and reaped most of their construction and waste-handling business through municipal contracts. Besides building projects throughout South Philadelphia, the Vare brothers were responsible for the modern grading of Broad Street south of Oregon Avenue.

Cultural Magnet

North and south, Broad Street remained a cultural magnet into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Philadelphia’s famous New Year’s Day Mummer’s Parade has strutted and strummed along two miles of South Broad for over a hundred years. In the late 1990s, the crux of theaters, galleries, and performance spaces on Broad Street between City Hall and Washington Avenue was designated the “Avenue of the Arts.” Similar plans have been envisioned for North Broad Street as well.

In addition to such longstanding musical landmarks as the Academy of Music, Broad Street around the area of South Street became known in the early twentieth century as a center for jazz and gospel music. These developments were an outgrowth of the Great Migration, the northward movement of African Americans that occurred during and after the First World War. When labor demand created by World War II precipitated another African American migration to Philadelphia, North Broad Street also became an important cultural center for Black Philadelphians with such venues as the Uptown Theater, which opened in the 1920s as a movie theater but became a destination for soul and rhythm and blues performers from the 1950s to the 1970s.

North Broad Street played a role in the nation’s transportation history as a link in the Lincoln Highway, and it became Philadelphia’s Automobile Row with showrooms for the latest models. However, by the mid-twentieth century, North Broad experienced a severe decline. The well-heeled property owners of North Broad Street moved to suburban estates north and west of Philadelphia by the 1940s. Many of their mansions were subdivided into apartment buildings, while others were demolished and replaced by retail establishments, automobile dealerships, and gas stations.

Redevelopment initiatives included those of civil rights leader Leon Sullivan (1922-2001). A Baptist minister, he moved to Philadelphia in 1950 and became the pastor of Zion Baptist Church, 3600 N. Broad Street. In 1964, Sullivan formed the Opportunities Industrialization Center along North Broad to provide job training for African Americans. He also established the Zion Investment Association, which invested in new businesses in Philadelphia. As a result, the first Black-owned and developed shopping center in the world, Progress Plaza, was built in 1968 on North Broad. Other grassroots organizations, such as North Philadelphia Block Development Corporation (founded in 1976), lobbied for increased community development funding for the downtrodden neighborhoods flanking North Broad Street.

Broad Street grew from a rural lane in the countryside into a dense urban boulevard, as well as perhaps the most important street in Philadelphia. The central axis of nineteenth century industrial tycoons became a main artery for Philadelphians of all backgrounds, extending from Center City north and south through the entire city and its diverse neighborhoods.

Harry Kyriakodis is the author of Philadelphia’s Lost Waterfront (The History Press, 2011) and Northern Liberties: The Story of a Philadelphia River Ward (The History Press, 2012). He is a founding/certified member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Under the direction of Philadelphia planning director Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), the route of the Crosstown Expressway figured prominently in the 1947 Better Philadelphia Exhibition, where it marked the boundary of Center City redevelopment. Bacon contended that the artery would reduce traffic on city streets–a prerequisite for successful redevelopment of Center City, particularly Society Hill. A swath of land running from the Schuylkill to the Delaware Rivers along South Street was found to be “blighted” and ripe for demolition, providing space for a such a major traffic artery. In promoting the necessity of urban redevelopment, the Better Philadelphia Exhibition was closely tied to the political agenda of the emerging reform movement. When reform-mayor Joseph Clark (1901-90) came to power in 1951, the Crosstown became integral to plans to redevelop Center City.

In 1955, the city’s Urban Traffic and Transportation Board officially proposed a limited-access highway. It reasoned that the Crosstown Expressway would enhance the functioning of the regional freeway network as the southern segment of an inner loop connecting the Schuylkill Expressway and Delaware Expressway (I-95). For the same reasons the Greater Philadelphia Movement, a coalition of civic organization leaders, pressed to include the envisioned Crosstown in the Interstate system in 1957. Further planning was to be coordinated with the neighboring counties, a responsibility later assumed by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

By 1963, the proposed Crosstown Expressway became the focus of public debate. Citizens’ groups, most notably the Queen Village Neighbors Association, complained that the prospect of a highway was thwarting efforts to revive the neighborhood. Additionally, critics objected to dividing South Philadelphia from Center City and organizations such as the Philadelphia Housing Association and United Neighbors Association raised concerns about the relocation of residents. Confronted with these objections, planning for the expressway stalled.

Appraisals Trigger Further Resistance

Consequently, it came as a surprise to many when the Pennsylvania Department of Highways began conducting appraisals to acquire property along South Street early in 1967. A public meeting organized by the Hawthorne Community Council and the Society Hill Civic Association condemned the department’s action as lacking adequate provisions for relocation. A group led by Hawthorne activist Alice Lipscomb (c.1916-2003), George Dukes (1931-2008) of the Rittenhouse Community Council, and lawyer Robert Sugarman (c.1938-2008) of Society Hill formed the Citizens’ Committee to Preserve and Develop the Crosstown Community (CCPDCC). In response to the emerging opposition, Mayor James Tate (1910-83) publicly criticized the Department of Highways for starting appraisals and warned that more time was needed to resolve the many problems related to the construction of the expressway. However, he did not question the necessity of the Crosstown.

While the unresolved problem of relocation initially sparked the conflict, the argument that the Crosstown would separate South Philadelphia from Center City increasingly gained attention for its racial implications. Opponents dubbed the Crosstown the “Mason-Dixon Line,” describing it as a mechanism to divide white Philadelphians north of the highway from African Americans to the south. In addition, the CCPDCC began to focus on the issue of deteriorating property in the proposed route and turned toward a new strategy of pushing for renewal in the area as a means to prevent construction of the expressway. In 1968, the CCPDCC formed the Crosstown Development Corporation to elaborate a counterproposal for the South Street area and promote renewal projects as the nucleus of redevelopment in place of the proposed expressway. The citizens committee contracted with architect Denise Scott Brown (b. 1931), who suggested returning South Street to its earlier functions as a commercial strip and hub of adjoining communities. This aim was bolstered by the “South Street Renaissance,” a movement of countercultural entrepreneurs to reinvigorate South Street’s commercial and cultural life.

While the resistance mounted, the expressway retained the support of the Pennsylvania Department of Highways, the Chamber of Commerce, and some members of City Council who viewed a limited-access highway on the southern edge of Center City as essential. Mayor James Tate aimed at reconciliation: He appointed a committee to publicly discuss the issue and mandated a comprehensive traffic study. While the committee attempted unsuccessfully to reach a final decision, both Tate and his successor, Mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91), failed to take a clear position on the Crosstown.

Meanwhile, Bacon and the City Planning Commission changed their minds. Increasingly, the proposed expressway was seen as an obstacle to expanding the kind of redevelopment that had been successful in adjacent Society Hill. The CCPDCC’s preliminary work helped to convince the City Planning Commission to submit a proposal to the federal Neighborhood Development Program for small-scale redevelopment in the South Street area, similar to Society Hill.  Such a project also was incompatible with construction of an interstate highway, so when the federal government funded the redevelopment plan in 1971, it effectively ended prospects for an expressway. The Crosstown Expressway was formally deleted from the plans in 1974.

The Crosstown Expressway was by no means the only controversial proposal that came under attack in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, its defeat marked a turning point in the history of urban planning in Philadelphia. The successful opposition against the expressway became a precedent for the rising resistance against large-scale projects. The opposition’s alternative proposals for the South Street area highlighted the potential of the kind of small-scale neighborhood development that gained support during the 1970s.

Sebastian Haumann is Assistant Professor of History at Darmstadt University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. In his dissertation he compared protest movements against urban redevelopment in Philadelphia and Cologne. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Delaware Avenue originated in the late eighteenth century as an irregular footpath built atop filled-up docks and wharves that had outlived their usefulness. It became a more formal thoroughfare as a result of $500,000 left to the city of Philadelphia by wealthy merchant Stephen Girard (1750-1831). Much of the Port of Philadelphia’s rise to importance is traceable to this bequest.

Girard lived very close to Philadelphia’s busy waterfront, at his mansion and counting house on Water Street near Market Street. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sailing ships and then steamships bound for England, the West Indies, China, India, and other remote destinations routinely left from the city’s waterfront. Ferries and other boats on the Delaware River also linked Philadelphia to Camden and communities on the river and along the East Coast.

Bequest Funds the Avenue

Girard was familiar and unhappy with the congested state of Philadelphia’s waterside pathway as it had developed by the early nineteenth century. He knew that trade had suffered without a capable waterfront roadway. In his will, he specified that a wide boulevard should be constructed beside the river and specified that this street be named “Delaware Avenue.” His bequest allowed for extending the street eastward into the Delaware River, incorporating existing docks, and using landfill to create the roadbed.

Taking place between 1834 and 1845, the construction of Delaware Avenue produced a proper street twenty-five feet wide, paved with Belgian blocks, between Vine and South Streets. Girard’s money also initiated the construction of bulkheads and the first lighting by the river—first with gas lamps, later with arc lamps. The City of Philadelphia expended $249,696 of Girard’s legacy.

Commerce increased rapidly, as Girard had envisioned. But Delaware Avenue became a victim of its own success, as traffic tie-ups and other problems grew each year. In response, between 1857 and 1867 the city widened the avenue to fifty feet, and expended $313,726 from the Delaware Avenue Fund. The thoroughfare also was extended north of Vine Street and south of South Street in the 1870s and farther thereafter. Between 1897 and 1900, the avenue was broadened again, to 150 feet. This work was the most expensive civic improvement project in Philadelphia up to that time.

As it developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Delaware Avenue became the main transportation corridor for the shipping and handling of food and general cargo for all of Philadelphia. Early photographs show hordes of horse-drawn wagons jamming the street, most loaded with perishable goods. Dock Street near Delaware Avenue was the city’s primary food distribution center for more than a century.

Belt Line Railroad

Beginning in the 1890s two sets of railroad tracks also ran on Delaware Avenue to meet the freight hauling needs of docks and industries alongside the river. Known as the Philadelphia Belt Line Railroad, these tracks extended about eighteen miles from Port Richmond to South Philadelphia. Also, the Delaware Avenue Elevated operated atop the southbound lanes of the avenue from Arch Street (where it connected with the Market Street Subway at Front Street) to South Street, where it stub-ended. Also known as the “Ferry Branch” or “Ferry Line,” its stations served the many ferries to New Jersey. The transit line lost passengers as ferry traffic diminished after the Delaware River (Benjamin Franklin) Bridge opened in 1926. Most ferries ceased operating by 1938, and the Ferry Branch stopped running the following year. The elevated structure was then dismantled; not a trace remains.

The Belt Line Railroad’s tracks and Delaware Avenue’s crumbling Belgian-block surface made automobile travel on the street perilous for decades. The bumpy street was joked about as a road that could induce a pregnant woman into labor. In 1990, a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial declared: “The roadway is so damn ugly, decrepit and dangerous, no one would want to be anywhere near it.”

Two years later, the Italian community of South Philadelphia persuaded City Council to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus sailing to America by renaming Delaware Avenue after the explorer. Citizens in the northern precincts of the city, aided by members of the local Lenni-Lenape tribe, fought the name change. Although a compromise was reached in which the avenue was renamed only south of Spring Garden Street, street signs reading “C Columbus Blvd” were defaced for years after.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania paved and landscaped Delaware Avenue in the 1990s. Instead of a rough stone roadway filled with ruts and railroad tracks, the street is now smooth and ornamented with greenery. Columbus Boulevard is, indeed, a fulfillment of Stephen Girard’s desire for a wide, tree-lined thoroughfare along the Delaware.

Harry Kyriakodis is the author of Philadelphia’s Lost Waterfront (The History Press, 2011) and Northern Liberties: The Story of a Philadelphia River Ward (The History Press, 2012). He is a founding/certified member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides and has lived at Pier 3 Condominium since 1997, when and where his fascination with Philadelphia’s waterfront district began. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Nestled between Second Street and the Delaware River, thirty-two Federal and Georgian residences stand as reminders of the early days of Philadelphia. Elfreth’s Alley survived in the twenty-first century as a residential street, historic landmark, and interpreted site labeled the “Nation’s Oldest Residential Street.” The heroic efforts of residents and local historians from the 1930s to 1960s preserved the Alley as a typical colonial street, but it took decades of new scholarship for the Elfreth’s Alley Association to create an interpretation encompassing the everyday lives of all generations who lived on this street.

Elfreth’s Alley, which has existed for three centuries as a residential enclave, was not included in William Penn’s original plans for Philadelphia. Demand for land in proximity to the Delaware River erased Penn’s dream of a bucolic country town composed of wide streets. As Philadelphia became a bustling city, artisans and merchants purchased or rented the in-demand property close to the ports where goods and materials arrived  daily. By 1700, most of the population of Philadelphia settled within four blocks of the Delaware River. This led to overcrowding, and landowners recognized that tradesmen needed alternate routes to the river through the crowded streets Penn had laid out decades earlier. Landowners Arthur Wells and John Gilbert combined their properties between Front and Second Streets to open Elfreth’s Alley, named after silversmith Jeremiah Elfreth, as a cart path in 1706.

Taking advantage of trading on the waterfront, artisans soon created a small community of people living and working on the Alley. The homes they inhabited ranged between two and four stories, and residents often used the front room on the first floor as workplaces and shops, while the kitchen and upper levels served as private space for the family. Residence #112 alone was home to a carver, boat builder, baker, and joiner throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Several Alley residents also earned income by renting rooms to sailors, and others engaged in work on the waterfront. Census records suggest that Widow Esther Meyer in #119 and Sarah Melton in #124 rented rooms to sailors, and Ann Taylor, the widow of bricklayer Enoch Taylor, ran a boarding house from half of her home in #116.

Factories Surrounded the Alley

The move of manufacturing from the home to the factory during the Industrial Revolution transformed the Alley and surrounding neighborhood in the mid-nineteenth century. Factories lined Second Street, with no fewer than four surrounding the homes on the Alley. As the years passed, immigrants flocked to the street to take advantage of the many factory jobs in the area, first Irish and Italians and later Russians. In 1900, the Freemans, a Russian family, lived in #125 with another family, and some of the residents worked in local button factory. With the increase in demand for housing near the factories, several Alley residents built tenements in the courtyards and rented them for extra income.  A typical tenement, like the one behind #126, consisted of two to three floors with one room on each floor, and families used side alleys to access them.  Each home no longer housed an artisan and his small family or a widow with two tenants. According to census records, between 1870 and 1930 no fewer than two families lived in #123, twenty-six people resided at #124-126, and more than three hundred people lived in the homes and tenement buildings by 1880.

By the 1930s, decades of overcrowded homes and encroaching industrial buildings had taken their toll on the street. While the houses on the Alley were in high demand when Philadelphia was a leading colonial port city and manufacturing hub, these eras had passed. Many factories left the neighborhood, and residents moved away as the jobs did. Condemned homes and abandoned tenements plagued the Alley, and the area was considered a slum. Conditions only worsened after World War II as the city witnessed a population exodus to newly developing suburbs. Real estate values plummeted in the area around Elfreth’s Alley.

Touched by the Colonial Revival movement that looked to the birth of the nation as a simpler, romantic time, Alley residents attempted to reverse the decline of their neighborhood. The city condemned #126, and Wetherill Paint Company rented the run-down #124 to tenants. Inspired by the preservation efforts of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks at the Powel House, Alley resident Dolly Ottey drew on Colonial Revivalist themes to combat the Alley’s deterioration. The Elfreth’s Alley Association, established in 1934, raised funds to purchase and restore #126 by 1937 through house tours, fund-raising events, and an annual summer street festival filled with colonial costumes and eighteenth-century games. The Association established a house museum in #126. After saving #124 from demolition by Wetherill Paint Company in the 1940s, the Association used the house as a rental property until turning it into its headquarters in the late 1990s.

Officially Historic

Facing another challenge to the survival of the residences in the 1950s, the Elfreth’s Alley Association secured National Historic Landmark status to ensure that Interstate 95 construction did not erase the homes on the street. They restored the Georgian and Federal architecture, demolished tenements, and placed telephone wiring under new stone street pavement. Except for a few factories that survived on Second Street, most of the vestiges of nineteenth and early twentieth century life and industry on the Alley and in the surrounding neighborhood disappeared, and the neighborhood seemed frozen in time.

In the early 1960s, the Association hired an architectural historian to create a house museum on the Alley celebrating the colonial period. The Association acquired furniture from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to recreate the residence of an eighteenth-century artisan in #126, further helping establish the Alley as a showcase for colonial Philadelphia. That remained the main story told to visitors for several decades. The rise of social history and developments in the field of public history in the following decade led the Association to take steps toward transforming the colonial interpretation of the Alley. As a result, the Association broadened its story to include the full range of alley occupants and the urban developments that affected their lives. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the present-day, relationships with local scholars, new research methods, and an emphasis on the identity of the street as continuously residential helped the Association expand the scope of the Alley’s story and define this urban space so rich with associations over several centuries.

Joanne Danifo holds a master’s degree in history from Rutgers University with a focus in administration and programming at historic sites. She has worked for the Elfreth’s Alley Association, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and in freelance research positions. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Great Wagon Road saw its most intensive activity in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, prior to the American Revolution. During this period, the increasing population of Pennsylvania made land more scarce and costly, not only for new arrivals but for settled farmers seeking to secure livelihoods for future generations. At the same time, governors in Maryland and Virginia were promoting backcountry settlement by Europeans as a means of securing their frontiers. A flow of settlers began by the 1720s, a decade of high immigration of Germans and Scots Irish into Pennsylvania, then increased dramatically after the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster settled Iroquois Nation claims in the Shenandoah Valley. A German migrant through Philadelphia, Jonathan Hager (1714-75), bought land in Maryland in 1739 and subsequently founded Hagerstown. The colonial governors of Maryland and Virginia sped settlement by awarding large land grants to individuals on the condition that they recruit specified numbers of migrants. For example, New Jersey speculator Benjamin Borden (1675-1743), born in Monmouth County, moved to the northern Shenandoah Valley by 1734 and received a grant of 100,000 acres on the James River for his pledge to recruit settlers from Ireland. Jost Hite (1685-1761), a German immigrant living on the Perkiomen Creek northwest of Philadelphia, received a grant of 140,000 acres and agreed to recruit 140 families. Their settlement in Virginia, together with Quakers who migrated to a similar grant made to Alexander Ross (1682-1748) from Chester County, led to the founding of the new town of Winchester.

Barely a Road

In its earliest days, the Great Wagon Road could hardly be termed a “road.” The Indian trails that it traced for much of its length originated as pathways for individuals walking in single file. The subsequent road developed from the traffic of more individuals, people on horseback, herds of cattle, carts pulled by animals, and eventually the heavy-duty Conestoga wagons that became the freight-haulers of the road. In places, the route consisted of not a single road but of variations created by travelers to avoid hazards or reach new destinations. The journey required fording or ferrying across rivers along the way. The Pennsylvania portion of the Great Wagon Road roughly followed the Great Minquas Trail used by Lenni Lenape, Susquehannocks (Minquas), and European traders. During the middle eighteenth century, travelers on this route between Philadelphia and Lancaster (founded in 1729) found a stump-punctuated dirt road despite its designation as a “King’s Road.” As the road turned south after Lancaster and York (founded 1741), it approximated the route known to Europeans as the Great Warriors’ Path, created and still valued by Native Americans for passage through the Shenandoah Valley west of the Blue Ridge. Past the Shenandoah Valley into western Virginia and the Carolinas, additional branches of the road often consisted of little more than tromped grass, mud, and the wagon ruts of previous travelers.

Despite its rugged conditions, “the Great Waggon Road to Philadelphia” appeared designated as such in 1753, on A Map of the Inhabited Part of Virginia containing the whole Province of Maryland, with Part of Pensilvania, New Jersey and North Carolina. By that time, the road had enabled a multiethnic ribbon of back-country settlement reaching from Pennsylvania south to the Yadkin River of North Carolina. In addition to the dominant Germans and Scots Irish, the settlers of the backcountry included Quakers who clustered around Winchester, Virginia (which sheltered exiled Philadelphia Quakers during the American Revolution). German-speaking Moravians from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, founded the community of Wachovia in western North Carolina in 1753. By 1780, the southern backcountry had an estimated population of about 380,000, including the Pennsylvania migrants as well as English, French Huguenot, German, and Highland Scot settlers who moved inland from coastal Virginia and the Carolinas. The Great Wagon Road also enabled journeys through the region, for example by socially elite travelers seeking the resort springs of western Virginia.

Towns Spaced a Day’s Journey Apart

While most migrants came to establish farms in the broad valley between the backcountry’s mountain ranges, towns also developed at intervals along the Great Wagon Road in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Spaced approximately one day’s journey apart, often founded by former Pennsylvanians and at times with street grids and center squares reminiscent of Philadelphia, towns anchored the backcountry as a market area for Philadelphia trade. They usually developed where the Great Wagon Road intersected with east-west roads from coastal regions. The resulting network of roads made it possible for wheat farmers in the backcountry to take harvests east to market in Alexandria or Richmond, Virginia, but bring back the profits to spend on finished goods imported by local merchants from Philadelphia via the Great Wagon Road. Towns along the Wagon Road served as points of transfer for crops bound for market in Philadelphia, including wheat and flour further exported from Philadelphia to Europe. Peddlers plied their trade along the road, and drovers moved herds of cattle to Philadelphia butchers. Philadelphia merchants and banks extended credit to backcountry businesses and land investors.

The Great Wagon Road became a pathway of settlement deeper into the western frontier after 1769, when Pennsylvania-born Daniel Boone (1734-1820) opened the Wilderness Road from North Carolina west into the territory that became Tennessee and Kentucky. Born in the rural reaches of Philadelphia County that later became Berks County, Boone migrated to North Carolina with his Quaker family at the age of 15. He gained fame as the trailblazer of the pass through the Cumberland Gap, thereby connecting the Great Wagon Road to points west.

The Great Wagon Road declined in importance with the development of additional improved roads and then railroads in the early nineteenth century. With some variations in route, it became the Lancaster Turnpike (incorporated 1792) in Pennsylvania and the Valley Turnpike (incorporated 1834) in Virginia. In the twentieth century, U.S. 30 in Pennsylvania and U.S. 11 and Interstate 81 through the Shenandoah Valley approximated the route of the Great Wagon Road. Testaments to connections with the Philadelphia region persisted in the form of surviving eighteenth-century houses, roadside historical markers, Pennsylvania-style bank barns, and towns with Presbyterian and Lutheran churches founded by Scots Irish and German settlers. The old road remained a subject of interest for scholars and a source of heritage tourism, and knowledgeable locals could still point out ruts and trenches believed to be remnants of the original road that linked Philadelphia to the settlement of the backcountry South.

Charlene Mires is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden and Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)