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.)

In the colonial era, people congregated in public squares, meetinghouses and churches, taverns, and residences. When thousands attended the sermons of evangelist George Whitefield (1714-70) in 1739-40, his admirers erected Philadelphia’s largest building at Fourth and Arch Streets; in 1751, it was purchased by the new College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania). In 1774, the First Continental Congress convened in Carpenter’s Hall (built 1770). The State House (later Independence Hall, built beginning in 1732) served the Second Congress and later the Constitutional Convention.

In the nineteenth century, Philadelphia built halls specifically for large meetings, notably Pennsylvania Hall, erected by abolitionists at Sixth and Arch Streets in 1838 but promptly burned down by a violent mob. The city’s churches and performance halls also hosted conventions. The first National Negro Convention met at Bethel Church in 1830. Sansom Street Hall (later demolished) welcomed the 1854 National Women’s Rights Convention. The Philadelphia Museum (or “Chinese Museum,” Ninth and Sansom) hosted the 1848 Whig Party convention. The Republican Party held nominating conventions in Musical Fund Hall in 1856 and the Academy of Music in 1872. When Philadelphia hosted the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, new buildings in Fairmount Park met the need for massive exhibition spaces for goods ranging from art and cuisine to machinery and fashion. Most were temporary, but after the fair Memorial Hall served as Philadelphia’s art museum until 1928, and Horticultural Hall showcased botanical exhibits until it suffered hurricane damage in the 1950s and was later demolished.

Following World War I, as growing industries and trades sought convention venues, the region’s cities invested in modern facilities to capture their business while promoting development and tourism. These emerged in the form of new municipal halls, which hosted both professional conventions and popular entertainment. Atlantic City, one of America’s premier resorts in the 1920s, built Convention Hall on the boardwalk in 1929. With 130-foot ceilings, a 33,000-pipe organ, and seating for nearly 11,000 patrons, the hall hosted not only a variety of trade shows but also America’s first indoor college football game (1940), Air Force training exercises during World War II, the city’s first and only national political convention (the Democratic Party in 1964), a Beatles concert the same year, an indoor helicopter flight in 1971, and most famously from 1940 to 2006, the Miss America pageant (which returned to Atlantic City in 2013 and thereafter). Camden saw its first dedicated convention hall open following WWI. Lost to fire in the early 1950s, its replacement, a former armory, in 1967 hosted a speech by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) president H. Rap Brown (b. 1943).

In 1931, two years after Atlantic City debuted its Convention Hall, Philadelphia’s Municipal Hall, designed by Philip H. Johnson (1868-1933), opened on Thirty-Fourth Street near the University of Pennsylvania to “coordinate trade promotion efforts of all kinds.” Complementing buildings used during the 1899 National Export Exhibition, the hall hosted the 1936 Democratic National Convention, at which Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) received his second nomination, and the 1940 Republican National Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie (1892-1944), who was ultimately defeated.

To further promote Philadelphia’s convention potential, the nonprofit Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau (PCVB) was founded in 1941. New names for Municipal Hall also reflected its increasing importance. In 1948, when the building hosted the presidential nominating conventions for both the Republicans and Democrats, city officials renamed it Philadelphia Convention Hall. In 1952, the facility was renamed the Philadelphia Civic Center and activities expanded to include sporting events, concerts, and appearances by such famous personalities as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68) in 1965, Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) in 1979, and Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) in 1993. However, after the Spectrum opened as a sports and concert venue in South Philadelphia in 1967, the 15,000-seat Civic Center became obsolete.

By the 1980s, particularly after Philadelphia lost the chance to host the 1984 Democratic National Convention to San Francisco, politicians and business leaders viewed a new, centrally located convention center as essential for the region’s competitiveness and economy. Philadelphia faced increasing suburban competition, as the 100,000-square-foot Valley Forge Convention Center (opened in 1985) profited from small conventions, easy auto access, and proximity to the King of Prussia shopping mall and later the Valley Forge Casino. Officials hoped the envisioned Pennsylvania Convention Center in Center City would spur construction of hotels, restaurants, and retail, while also solving problems of panhandling and homelessness between Broad and Tenth Streets. Nearby residents of Chinatown, already hemmed in by the Gallery shopping mall and fighting extension of the Vine Street Expressway, feared increased crime and congestion. Despite their objections, in 1986 the Pennsylvania General Assembly approved funding for the new facility and in April 1991 construction began on the site just behind the old Reading Railroad Terminal.

Within three months of the start of construction, the PCVB confirmed twenty-three conventions with 160,000 attendees and estimated revenues of $76 million. The $522 million center debuted in 1993, on time and under budget, with then-Vice President Al Gore (b. 1948) cutting the ribbon. Yet parking remained a concern for the center, and the 2000 Republican National Convention met instead at the First Union Center in South Philadelphia. A taxpayer-funded expansion in the 2010s increased the Pennsylvania Convention Center from 435,000 to nearly 1 million square feet, making it the largest convention center on the East Coast. However, bookings dropped due to attendees’ complaints about union labor costs and workers’ intransigence. In spring 2014, Convention Center management banned the Carpenters and Teamsters Local 107 from the facility after the union failed to sign a customer satisfaction agreement. By April 2015, the Convention Center rebounded as nearly thirty new conventions with estimated revenues of $872 million were confirmed.

By the 2000s, convention centers became articles of faith for future growth in a number of U.S. cities. In 2015, the Pennsylvania Convention Center’s competition included not only other convention destinations such as Las Vegas but also regional centers including Atlantic City’s 500,000-square-foot Convention Center, which opened in 1997; Wilmington’s Chase Center (87,000 square feet, est. 1998); the Wildwood, New Jersey, Convention Center (260,000 square feet, est. 2001); and the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center at Oaks in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (240,000 square feet, est. 2009). Nevertheless, strengthened by hundreds of new hotel rooms and restaurants opened since the mid-1990s, Philadelphia won its bid to host the 2016 Democratic National Convention with the Wells Fargo Center (formerly the CoreStates Center) as the main venue and the Pennsylvania Convention Center hosting the convention’s smaller events.

Over time, Greater Philadelphia’s gathering places and convention centers attracted visitors and generated revenue. Their maturation from intimate spaces and temporary structures to the amenities-rich, multipurpose buildings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reflected not only the cultural appeal of cities but also the region’s change from manufacturing to an economy reliant on tourism and hospitality.

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

Eastern State emerged from the concerns of prison reformers in Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century, when prisons held accused criminals only until their trials. If convicted, prisoners faced public and corporal punishment. Following the American Revolution, reformers including Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) argued for a more humane and systematic approach to treating criminality and began advocating for a system of incarceration as the primary form of punishment. Isolation, he argued, would provide the criminal with an appropriate environment to repent, reflect, and ultimately reform. In this spirit, in 1787 advocates for reforming Philadelphia’s prisons formed the Pennsylvania Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons under the direction of Bishop William White (1748-1836), though Rush provided the driving force. Many modern accounts attribute Eastern State’s early approach to Quaker inspiration, but considerable evidence suggests that the penitentiary’s strategies were grounded in Enlightenment thought in England that made its way across the Atlantic and took hold in the prison society.

Experiments with prisoner isolation began in the 1790s at the Walnut Street Jail, located between Fifth and Sixth Streets behind the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall). Opened in 1775, the Walnut Street Jail housed accused men, women, and children together in common rooms until they went to trial. In the aftermath of the Revolution, critics of this “den of debauchery” and “school of crime” successfully petitioned the state to eliminate harsh public punishments such as whippings, brandings, and beatings in favor of a new experiment in isolation and labor. All prisoners were sentenced to labor within the walls of the prison, thereby moving punishment from the public to the private—an important shift in penological theory.

In 1789 and 1790 Pennsylvania passed legislation to convert a portion of the Walnut Street Jail into a penitentiary house, where more serious offenders would serve their sentences in complete isolation. Advocates of isolation, who argued for the humanity of silent reflection over the barbaric punishments of the past, initially viewed the experiment positively. However, by the late 1790s the system began to break down due to severe overcrowding and mismanagement.

Total Isolation on a Large Scale

In response to prison society reformers’ agitation for a new penitentiary based on the concept of total isolation, in 1821 the Pennsylvania Legislature appropriated $250,000 for Eastern State.  Reformers chose a site northwest of the city (later Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood), where they believed the high elevation would promote good air flow and contribute to healthy prisoners. In the competition to determine who would design the new penitentiary, prominent Philadelphia architect William Strickland (1788-1854) and British-trained architect John Haviland (1792-1852) both submitted plans. The state awarded Haviland the project and a $100 prize.

Haviland faced the formidable task of designing an institution based entirely on prisoner separation. To meet each prisoner’s needs in isolation, each cell needed to be equipped with a rudimentary toilet and central heat. Haviland chose a “hub and spoke” design or a radial plan, which would facilitate the observation of prisoners as well as properly ventilate the building. Prisoner health and the avoidance of miasmas (bad air) were among the concerns of reformers,  who remembered all too well the deadly epidemics of the Walnut Street Jail. The penitentiary’s interior earned Haviland high praise, and Eastern’s imposing gothic facade made it one of the most recognizable buildings in nineteenth-century America.

Opened in 1829, Eastern State’s unique system of solitary confinement and labor became known as the “Pennsylvania System” or “separate system.” This new system effectively merged the best qualities of the Walnut Street Prison: solitary confinement and labor. To preserve isolation and anonymity at all times, prison policy required inmates to wear hoods whenever overseers moved them around the penitentiary. To help offset the cost of incarceration, the state required prisoners to do work in their cells, including shoemaking, weaving, and chair caning. They ate three meals a day in their cells and exercised one to two times daily in small exterior exercise yards. On Sundays local ministers offered sermons in the corridors. The only other visitors allowed were members of the prison society or a local minister employed by the penitentiary known as the “moral instructor.” The Philadelphia Bible Society provided prisoners with Bibles, and when the number of German prisoners began to rise in the 1840s, the German Society provided German Bibles. Reformers no doubt believed a Bible could be a source of consolation for lonely prisoners, but many prisoners struggled with illiteracy and the Bible remained inaccessible to them.

Population Reflected Immigration

Early intake records reveal a diverse prisoner population. African Americans were always disproportionately represented, and changing immigration patterns brought Irish and German inmates in the 1840s and 1850s and Italians and Eastern Europeans between the 1880s and 1920s. Until 1923, the prisoners included women. The number of women committed to Eastern State was always small compared to the number of men, but their presence prompted officials to hire a “matron” to oversee them. Women served similar sentences to men and committed the same crimes. In the nineteenth century, the vast majority of prisoners had committed property crimes including theft (predominantly horse theft), burglary, and robbery. Most served two-year sentences though many served longer terms for more serious offenses such as murder.

From the outset, prison administrators struggled to maintain control. Many prisoners refused to work, sabotaging their tools and equipment or using their tools to fashion knives to attack overseers. Prisoners (especially Irish Catholics) frequently refused visits from the Protestant moral instructor or pretended to accept religion to gain shorter sentences. Still others found ways to subvert the system of silence by sending notes through plumbing lines or tapping code on walls of adjoining cells.

In 1833, just four years after Eastern State opened, a fiery public scandal erupted when prisoner Mathias Maccumsey died after prison officials subjected him to a torturous instrument known as the “iron gag” to prevent him from talking. The gag fit over the prisoner’s tongue (like the bit of a horse bridle) and attached to his arms pinned behind his back. The penitentiary physician declared the cause of death to be “apoplexy.” Although Eastern State’s administrators were exonerated in an exhaustive investigation, they tried to cover up the death and the institution’s reputation suffered a serious blow.

Despite problems with prisoner management, Eastern State’s supporters touted the Pennsylvania System as the solution to crime and punishment. Financially, however, Eastern State was less successful than the “Auburn Plan” for penitentiaries developed in New York. There, prisoners labored in large factory-like conditions by day and returned to isolation at night.  The factory labor system made Auburn-style prisons largely self-sufficient.  Eastern State, meanwhile, struggled with costs because the craft goods like shoes, chairs, and weaving produced by prisoners in isolation could not financially sustain the institution.

Charles Dickens Among Critics

Supporters of Eastern praised its humane approach to prisoner treatment while critics claimed that isolation led to insanity and even death. A heated pamphlet war broke out between supporters of the Pennsylvania and Auburn systems. Charles Dickens (1812-70), perhaps the Pennsylvania system’s most damning critic, visited in 1842 and in his American Notes argued that while reformer’s intentions remained humane, the system itself amounted to torture. Eastern’s physicians acknowledged instances of insanity but attributed them largely to African American prisoners, whom they viewed as predisposed to mental illness because of their “unique” nature. Officials also argued that overstimulation in the form of masturbation contributed to cases of insanity.

By the 1850s problems with prisoner management, overcrowding, and mental health led Eastern’s officials to slowly relax the rules of isolation. Overcrowding prompted construction of even more cells and, beginning in the 1860s, officials frequently housed more than one prisoner per cell.  While the Auburn Plan had been adopted by many states, those who had adopted the Pennsylvania System quickly abandoned it because of problems with profitability and prisoners’ health. Nevertheless, many new penitentiaries adopted Haviland’s hub-and-spoke design as the best method for surveillance of prisoners. Examples of Haviland’s hub- and- spoke design can be found throughout the world including Japan, Russia, and Brazil.

In 1913, Eastern State officially declared the Pennsylvania System dead though it had not been closely followed for decades. In a struggle to catch up with congregate-style prisons of the day, Eastern converted many of the useless individual exercise yards into congregate workshops. Space between cellblocks became used for sports and recreation, including a baseball field and football field. Italian prisoners added bocce ball to the prison’s many activities.

During the twentieth century Eastern continued to be rocked by scandals. In 1929, while serving an eight-month sentence, Al Capone (1899-1947) enjoyed luxuries denied to other prisoners such as an oriental rug and radio. In 1933, prisoners rioted and set fire to their cells to protest overcrowding and a lack of recreation facilities. In 1945, Eastern experienced perhaps the most sensational escape in its history when notorious bank robber “Slick Willie Sutton” (1901-80) escaped with eleven other men through a tunnel under the wall. In 1961, after the largest riot in the Eastern’s history, Pennsylvania began serious discussions about closing the penitentiary. While initially isolated from the city, the prison had become surrounded by the neighborhood of Fairmount, which grew quickly from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth. Baldwin Locomotive (at Broad and Spring Garden) and many local breweries spurred the development of housing, and by the 1960s Fairmount had become a diverse working class and middle class neighborhood. Neighbors as well as state officials were increasingly nervous about public safety and the ability of the aging institution to properly manage the prison population.

Eastern State as Tourist Attraction

Eastern State finally closed its doors in 1971, and the remaining prisoners transferred to Graterford State Prison. The Philadelphia Streets Department briefly used the site for storage but performed no maintenance on the building, which quickly decayed and became the target of vandals. In 1984 the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority considered proposals to convert the site into commercial uses, including plans for a shopping center and condominiums. Concerned that a significant piece of Philadelphia’s history would be lost if development proceeded, a group of preservationists, neighbors, historians, and architects created the Eastern State Penitentiary Task Force with the goal of saving Eastern State as a historic site. Limited hard-hat tours began in the late 1980s, and in 1991 the site received its first funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts to perform necessary stabilization and preservation. Continuing as an independent nonprofit organization, Eastern State Penitentiary became committed to interpreting the institution’s complex past while raising important questions about the contemporary justice system.

By the first decades of the twenty-first century, Eastern State Penitentiary had become one of Philadelphia’s most popular tourist destinations. Audio and guided tours and other interpretative programs highlighted the significant role Eastern State played in penitentiary reform while art installations and public programs addressed contemporary issues in incarceration. While remaining the site of several very popular annual events including a Bastille Day celebration and Terror Behind the Walls, a haunted house fund-raiser, Eastern State also became actively involved with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Striving to make connections between the past and the present in order to effect social change, Eastern State added programs and exhibits such as “The Big Graph,”: a 16-foot-tall, 3,500-pound plate steel sculpture depicting current rates of incarceration around the world.

Once among the most recognized buildings in the United States, Eastern State Penitentiary encapsulated the hopes and anxieties of a generation of reformers. Its formula of isolation and labor seemed to provide the logical solution to crime and punishment, yet the crumbling cells and cavernous cellblocks became vivid reminders of failure. As a historic site, Eastern State became a site for exploring this complex history while inviting the public to engage in discussion of the future of incarceration.

Jennifer Lawrence Janofsky, Ph.D., is the Giordano Fellow in Public History at Rowan University and curator of the Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield. She has served as a historical consultant for Eastern State Penitentiary, which was the subject of her doctoral dissertation at Temple University. (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.)

Historic districts emerged in the United States in the 1930s when Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana, passed local ordinances designating large areas of those cities as places of historical and architectural significance. On the federal level, historic districts first gained recognition under the National Historic Landmarks (NHL) program, authorized by the Historic Sites Act of 1935. Beginning in the early 1960s, a number of districts in the Philadelphia region received NHL status, including Elfreth’s Alley (1960), Brandywine Battlefield (1960), Colonial Germantown (1965), Washington’s Crossing (1961), Princeton Battlefield (1960), and the New Castle Historic District (1967). Some of these districts were initiated by historians at the National Park Service, while others were the result of community organizations seeking recognition for places that were at risk from disinvestment and increasing suburban development. These districts also earned listing in the National Register of Historic Places when it was created in 1966, because the Register included districts as one of the eligible property types. Over time the National Park Service developed guidelines for how to recognize, define, and document historic districts, and eventually dozens of districts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware encompassing several thousand buildings and significant cultural landscapes joined the National Register.

Listing in the National Register or as an NHL served to raise awareness and generate pride in the history of these communities at a time when the United States was changing rapidly. National Register listing did not restrict private property owners from altering or demolishing properties in the districts, but did help to protect places such as Elfreth’s Alley from destruction related to construction of I-95. Over time, some of the Philadelphia’s most significant and iconic neighborhoods including Society Hill and Old City, Chestnut Hill, and Spruce Hill, became National Register Historic Districts as a result of efforts by community organizations. Many National Register districts in the city, especially in Center City and West Philadelphia, were initiated by the city and developers in an effort to make rehabilitation projects for historic buildings eligible for federal historic preservation tax credits.  Beyond the city’s oldest and grandest residential neighborhoods, commercial areas such the South Broad Street corridor, landscapes such as FDR Park and Fairmount Park, and midcentury modern architecture such as Greenbelt Knoll in Northeast Philadelphia have been listed in the National Register. The Yorktown Historic District in North Philadelphia, significant as a mid-twentieth-century example of community planning to provide quality housing opportunities for African Americans, became a National Register Historic District in 2012.

Cooper Grant and South Camden Districts

In southern New Jersey, many of Camden’s neighborhoods, including Cooper Grant in 1989, and South Camden in 1990, were listed in the National Register. These distinct neighborhoods illustrated a variety of housing types, from early twentieth-century middle-class residences to intact worker homes that housed the backbone of industrial New Jersey. Commercial corridors and residential neighborhoods in Collingswood, Haddonfield, Berlin, Burlington, Bridgeton, and many other communities throughout the state were designated historic districts, as were more rural neighborhoods, such as South Tuckahoe in Cape May County and Recklesstown (Village of Chesterfield) Historic District in Burlington County. In Delaware, historic districts listed on the National Register included the duPont-era industrial resources and landscapes along the Brandywine River in New Castle County, small towns such as Odessa, Smyrna, and Delaware City, and a number of historic neighborhoods in Wilmington.

Cities and municipalities have also designated historic districts through local ordinances. Unlike the National Register, local designations generally have required some form of review of alterations and demolition to buildings in the districts. While Philadelphia’s historic preservation ordinance was enacted in 1955 under the Home Rule Charter, it did not include the authority to designated historic districts. Main Street in Manayunk was the first city historic district, but it was designated under special legislation intended to preserve the textile mills and commercial corridor around them during a time when the textile industry was struggling and the community was organizing to help revitalize the neighborhood.  When the city’s preservation ordinance was overhauled in 1986 it included provisions for creating historic districts, and numerous neighborhoods, including Rittenhouse-Fitler Square, Old City, Girard Estates, Spring Garden, Awbury Arboretum, Diamond Street, and Parkside, among others, subsequently became designated as historic. These designations put in place certain restrictions on how buildings could be altered or demolished in an effort to preserve the setting and context created by the concentration of older buildings. This was a conscious move away from prior preservation practice, which tended to focus only on individual buildings, especially the oldest and grandest properties or places associated with prominent individuals or events.

In 1961 the Pennsylvania legislature passed the Historic Districts Act, which gave cities, boroughs, and townships outside of Philadelphia the authority to designate historic districts in their communities. This law did not apply to Philadelphia because the home rule charter gave the city wide latitude to develop its own laws and policies related to land use and historic preservation. In the ensuing decades, Cheltenham Township, Doylestown, East Bradford Township, Lower Merion Township, Ridley Park, Wester Chester, and numerous other municipalities in Greater Philadelphia took advantage of this power. In New Jersey, the Municipal Land Use Law was amended in the 1980s to include specific authorization for local historic preservation ordinances, including districts, and municipalities throughout the southern part of the state, including Cape May, Haddonfield, Burlington City, Camden, Evesham Township, and Salem City, created local preservation programs and designated historic districts. In Delaware, counties and independent municipalities have created locally designated historic districts in Wilmington, New Castle, Centreville, Christiana, and other smaller communities throughout New Castle County.

Communities throughout Greater Philadelphia have designated historic districts to recognize and protect both urban neighborhoods and rural communities where the individual buildings and landscapes may not be individually unique, but when taken together reflect important aspects of the region’s historical and architectural heritage. These districts not only exemplify the region’s historical and architectural significance, but also encompass many of the area’s vital business centers and desirable residential neighborhoods.

Cory Kegerise is the Community Preservation Coordinator for Eastern Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office.  A native of Berks County, he lives in Philadelphia and holds a master’s degree in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The earliest hotels in Philadelphia were influenced by the well-established practices of colonial-era tavern hospitality. However, while taverns provided basic lodging, hotels elevated standards of extravagance and cleanliness and catered to a variety of travelers, from single businessmen to couples and families. Although luxury accommodations began to emerge in the 1820s, more modest hotels continued to serve travelers and were frequently affiliated with the industries that built them, for example Philadelphia’s coffeehouses and oil cloth manufactories. Early hotels that accommodated working-class visitors shared buildings with at times several other businesses, including stage and boat offices. Lower-class establishments were typically owned and operated by a middle-class family and included a bar room, parlor, kitchen, and bedrooms shared by multiple visitors. In Philadelphia, these simple hotels clustered closest to the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers.

Hotels catering to middle-class guests offered more refined accommodations for lengthier stays and included a lobby, dining rooms, and possibly private, but more likely communal, bathrooms. Improving upon the middle-class model, upper-class hotels offered luxury rooms for writing, smoking, playing billiards, and enjoying nature on rooftop gardens. Luxury hotels also provided entertainment in the form of shopping for the most up-to-date technologies and extravagant merchandise. Middle- and upper-class establishments typically offered two accommodation arrangements: the American and the European plans. While the former charged a fixed rate per day that paid for everything, the latter charged only for lodging.

Perhaps the most renowned early luxury hotel in Philadelphia was the United States Hotel (1828) on Chestnut Street. Although popular and well-visited by celebrities such as Charles Dickens (1812–70), the hotel was quickly surpassed by more technologically updated establishments. The structure was sold to the Bank of Pennsylvania and demolished only thirty years after opening. Nonetheless, Chestnut and Market Streets became popular locations for the majority of middle- and upper-class hotels, with the most elite establishments concentrating around the 700 and 800 blocks of Chestnut. Luxury hotels commonly had important businesses and institutions, such as banks and city offices, as neighbors, confirming the establishments’ centrality not only spatially but also economically and politically.

Nineteenth Century Luxury Hotels

During the middle of the nineteenth century, many of Philadelphia’s luxury hotels, such as the Girard House (1852) and La Pierre (1853), were designed to compete with equivalent establishments in New York City. The Continental Hotel (1860, demolished 1923–24) on Chestnut Street, built on the site of a former museum and circus, was the most revolutionary. Designed by John McArthur, Jr. (1823-90), who later became the architect of Philadelphia’s city hall, the “monster”–scale establishment had six floors with seven hundred rooms that could accommodate up to twelve hundred guests. The elaborate and richly ornamented entrance, completed by Frank Furness (1839–1913) in 1876 in palazzo style, made the hotel one of the most significant architectural sites in the city. The establishment was also notable for its new technologies, such as bell wires and speaking tubes, and steam powered special-purpose machinery, such as a passenger elevator, kitchen equipment, and laundry service. Systems of gas lighting, central heating, air ventilation, and interior plumbing were equally impressive and set a  standard for other comparable establishments.

The Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, held in 1876 at Fairmount Park, further spurred the construction of hotels to accommodate large groups of visitors. Six hotels were built at or near the Centennial Grounds: Grand Exposition Hotel, Trans-Continental, United States, Atlas Hotel, Elm Avenue Hotel, and the Globe. The Globe, constructed opposite the entrance to the grounds, contained one thousand rooms to house three to five thousand guests for five dollars a day, up to two dollars more than comparative alternatives. All hotels built for the exposition were demolished soon after its conclusion, except for the United States Hotel, which survived until the 1970s on the west side of Forty-Second Street.

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1875 declared that African Americans were entitled to equal treatment in public accommodations, they were commonly discriminated against and refused service together with other ostracized groups, including Jews. Several of Philadelphia’s hotels were involved in legal cases for violating the law. The Bingham House Hotel (1812) at Eleventh and Market Streets received attention as the first violator when Reverend Fields Cook (1817-97) was denied a room on the basis of his skin color in 1876. Cook took the hotel to court and won, setting a historic precedent. Although African Americans were not always allowed to stay in hotels as guests, their presence was nonetheless continuous as they filled service positions, especially during the white labor shortage brought on by World War I.  Their treatment as guests finally improved after World War II as the United States sought to enhance its international reputation by better honoring its claims to the ideals of freedom and equality.

Early Twentieth Century Grand Hotels

The turn of the twentieth century brought important advancements such as iron and later steel construction, innovations in lighting, ventilation, and efficient elevators, all of which made tall hotel buildings feasible. The Divine Lorraine Hotel (1892-03) on North Broad Street was designed by Willis G. Hale (1848-1907), a prominent local architect of luxurious Victorian mansions in Northwest Philadelphia, as a luxury apartment complex but became a hotel after its purchase in 1900 by the Metropolitan Hotel Company. The ten-story building was constructed using a steel frame, hollow brick floors, and brick, stone, and terra cotta exterior walls. Father Divine (1877–1965) acquired the hotel in 1948 and turned it into the first mixed-race hotel in the nation. As North Philadelphia shifted from a prosperous to poverty-stricken area, Divine used his prominence in the area to preach on behalf of equality, desegregation, and anti-lynching legislation.

The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel (1904) at 200 S. Broad Street similarly employed the most advanced construction techniques, using a steel frame for its nineteen stories. Designed by G.W. and W.D. Hewitt (1878–1907), a successful Philadelphia firm specializing in ecclesiastic and residential design, the structure showcased a French Renaissance style. The establishment featured 1,090 guest rooms, an elaborate ballroom, lighting fixtures designed by Thomas Edison (1847-1931), roof gardens open year-round, and even “flush toilets,” among other amenities. The hotel was widely considered to be the most extravagant in the country if not the world, a status reflected in the hotel’s nickname, the Grand Dame of Broad Street. Like other luxury establishments, the hotel also hosted conventions, including prominent social organizations such as the Clover and the Five-O’Clock clubs and other dining groups. Later, the hotel gained notoriety in association with the 1976 convention of the American Legion, during which an outbreak that became known as Legionnaires’ Disease killed twenty-nine convention guests and sickened another 182. The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel was owned and managed by the Capitol Hotel Company of Washington, D.C., which also possessed a chain of luxury hotels connecting Washington, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and New York. This form of nationally coordinated management set a new standard for hotels.

Regional and Resort Hotels

Other parts of the region also attracted substantial hotel investment throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Camden, New Jersey, became a particularly attractive enclave for those aspiring to escape Philadelphia’s religious Blue Laws of 1794, which restricted myriad activities, from sports to the selling of alcohol. Throughout the nineteenth century, Camden’s hotels were intimately connected to the ferry business and thus located close to the Delaware River. For example, the West Jersey Hotel (1850) at Delaware Avenue and Market Street, funded by the West Jersey Ferry Company and designed by Stephen Decatur Button (1813–97) and Joseph C. Hoxie (1814–70), featured metal-frame masonry construction, porches, and a cupola. The establishment closed in 1953 with the discontinuation of ferry service between Camden and Philadelphia.

Hotels also became fixtures in resort towns on the New Jersey shore, which developed rapidly with the construction of ports, roads, and later the Camden-Atlantic City Railway (1852–54), which brought scores of visitors from Philadelphia, Trenton, and Camden. At Cape Island (Cape May), the nation’s first seaside resort town, investors from Philadelphia and New Jersey built the area’s first grand hotel, the Mount Vernon Hotel (1853), near Cape Island Creek. Although never fully completed, the U-shaped structure with raised towers accommodated twenty-one hundred guests in palatial quarters, offering fountains, gardens, stables and carriage houses, tenpin alleys, and pistol galleries. The hotel’s immense dining hall featured more than forty gas-burning chandeliers, which illuminated over 750 people enjoying fanciful meals at any given time. Advertisements for the hotel in local and international newspapers also noted its 125 miles of gas and water pipes, which would have been sufficient to power a moderately sized town. Two fires destroyed the first generation of hotel buildings and only one example survived, the Baltimore Hotel (1867) built on Hughes Street.

In Atlantic City, which formally opened in 1880 and quickly grew to become a major resort destination for celebrities and wealthy Philadelphia residents, one of the most impressive  “signature” Atlantic City hotels was the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel (1902-06, demolished in 1978) at 1900 Pacific Avenue. The structure, the first in the city to be built using reinforced concrete, was designed by Will Price (1861-1916) in the Queen Anne style with Moorish detailing, a stark contrast to other classically-inspired hotels, and featured detailed sculptures of sea horses, seashells, crabs, and seaweed. The architecture suggested that the hotel was a place of sensual pleasure, adventure, extravagance, and fantasy based on pervasive stereotypes of the East and the Orient. Atlantic City suffered a decline in tourism in the mid-twentieth century as a result of increased access to air travel to other vacation destinations and changing leisure patterns. However, with the passing of the 1976 Casino Gambling Referendum, Atlantic City successfully rebranded itself as a tourist site for many different types of entertainment, including gambling.

Hotels in the Post-War Period

Although the Great Depression destroyed much of the hotel business, the outbreak of World War II revitalized the economy and also changed patterns of leisure. Rather than individual luxury hotels, chain establishments and budget hotels came to dominate the hospitality landscape. Chain hotels, the earliest of which were Howard Johnson and Marriott with roots in the restaurant business, offered stability to potential owners fearful of competition. Indeed, chain headquarters equipped their branches with already existing business expertise, technology, equipment, and marketing, while guests enjoyed the consistency of their experience. Budget hotels, which allowed guests to pay only for lodging without additional amenities such as food, television, or telephone, also became a popular option. A number of hotel chains, such as Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn, and others located in Philadelphia, and many came to be viewed by city officials as effective instruments for economic redevelopment and urban renewal. For example, the twenty-seven-story Sheraton at Penn Center (1957, demolished in the late 1980s), designed by Perry, Shaw, Hepburn and Dean, was built to include one thousand luxury rooms in the cause of redeveloping the area west of City Hall. Other chain establishments soon followed, including Hilton’s Doubletree in Center City. Midcentury chain hotels shared many visual qualities, including angular form, exposed concrete exteriors, and expansive glass walls.

Midcentury Motels of Greater Philadelphia

Motels emerged in the early twentieth century as an affordable accommodation for a growing middle class with access to automobiles. The new lodging type usually included two twin beds (to better accommodate families), a parking lot, independent access to the room, and a pool. Motels proliferated as a result of the national system of interstate and defense highways begun in 1956, which provided easy access to travel and exploration of America’s cultural and national heritage. Numerous motels were founded near highway exits, thus providing convenient and quick rest stops. The Philadelphia area, as a popular destination for many tourists seeking its attractions related to colonial and American Revolutionary history, served as a hub for many independent and chain motel establishments.

One of the most popular motel chains in the area was the George Washington Lodge, established in 1940 by Philadelphia’s Hankin family. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Hankins built motels along the newly opened Delaware River Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike (1955). Located next to turnpike exits, the lodges offered modern amenities, including indoor and outdoor pools, individually controlled heating and air conditioning, television, and cocktail lounges. The Willow Grove lodge (1963) also included a convention center. Perhaps one of the most visited motels in Philadelphia was the Airport Motel at the Philadelphia International Airport, opened in the 1950s as part of a broader modernization effort. Although rather modest in size with only sixty-seven units before expanding to 150, it included a swimming pool, free television and radios in every room, and access to a “courtesy wagon” shuttle connecting passengers to airport terminals, dining, and other services.

A few motels also opened within Philadelphia’s city limits, although the majority were demolished to make way for denser high-end development. Philadelphia Marriott Motor Hotel (1960s), a 750-room resort complex on City Avenue off the Schuylkill Expressway, featured conference space, indoor-outdoor pools, ten restaurants and lounges, an ice-skating rink, and mini-golf courses. In the Fairmount neighborhood, the Franklin Motor Inn (1959), later Best Western Hotel, was built on land previously occupied by a warehouse complex. The Y-shaped structure was constructed on concrete pillars and included a pool parallel to the parking lot. Due to its central location, many performers from the famous Uptown Theater stayed at the inn after their shows, and according to a 1994 article in the Philadelphia Tribune, Martin Luther King resided at this favored motel on his final visit to the city. The Best Western was demolished in 2014 and replaced by an upscale mixed-use development.

Motels also proliferated in resort towns. In particular, the Wildwoods on the New Jersey shore was a critical region for motel development, remaining into the twenty-first century one of the best-preserved collections of such establishments. After the completion of the Garden State Parkway (1955), the Wildwoods became a popular vacation destination for working- and middle-class families. To attract a modern and youthful clientele, motel owners employed futuristic motifs similar to establishments in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Hotels in the Twenty-First Century

Although numerous grand hotels were demolished, especially during the 1950-70s era of urban renewal, remaining structures were commonly repurposed as luxury apartments. For example, after sixteen years of abandonment, the Divine Lorraine Hotel was transformed into luxury apartments in 2017. The $44 million renovation spearheaded by developer Eric Blumenfeld accommodated various functions, including residential units, retail space, and a restaurant on the first floor. The flexible functions of hotels also enabled preservation of distinctive office buildings that had become obsolete for their original purposes. The PSFS Building (1932), which became the Loews Philadelphia Hotel in 2000, was designed by William Lescaze (1896-1969) and George Howe (1886-1955) as the first International Style skyscraper in the United States. However, by the 1980s, businesses were attracted to more modern office spaces and the structure was auctioned to a developer. It was then remodeled by Bower Lewis Thrower Architects (1961–) and preservation consultants starting in 1998 for a hotel to complement the Pennsylvania Convention Center (1993). While the T-shaped tower lent itself well to accommodating hotel rooms, the conversion necessitated the construction of an additional structure for a ballroom and meeting spaces, and the rehabilitation of the original facade.

The evolution of hotel and motel industries paralleled urbanization and trade patterns and responded to the growing popular interest in consumerism, technological innovation, and entertainment. Due to their mission of serving travelers’ contemporary needs, hotels and motels became some of the most rapidly disappearing historic resources in metropolitan regions, commonly demolished to make way for more technologically advanced establishments or other forms of high-density development. Although much of the means of hospitality has changed, the ends of comforting visitors to the the city and region remained, a theme modern promoters of the region exploited to the hilt in describing Philadelphia as “the place that loves you back.”

Vyta Baselice is a Ph.D. student in American Studies/Historic Preservation at the George Washington University, where she studies the intersecting histories of architecture, urbanism, materials, labor, and race. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Modernizing Magic: Portland Cement and the Material Construction of America,” employs critical theory and ethnographic methodologies to investigate the production and consumption of concrete, and its material effects on built environments and communities. She also holds a master’s degree in architectural history from University College London and a bachelor’s degree in studio arts/architecture from Wesleyan University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The history of Independence Hall dates to 1729, when the Pennsylvania Assembly authorized construction of “a House for the Assembly of this Province to meet in.” The site chosen, on Chestnut Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets, was then on the outskirts of Philadelphia and therefore pulled the city’s development westward.  In architectural style, the building that began construction in 1732 was Georgian—a common choice for American public buildings but also a statement of British elite culture at a time when Pennsylvanians were concerned about large in-migrations of Germans and Scots Irish.

Assembly Speaker Andrew Hamilton (1676-1741) led the committee to select the site and is credited with the building’s design, which closely resembled architectural pattern-book plans for English country houses. Edmund Woolley (c. 1695-1771), a member of the Carpenters’ Company, supervised the craftsmen and laborers who built the structure, which was ready for use by the Assembly by 1736.  In 1749, the Assembly again called upon Woolley to add a tower and steeple to the south side of the building, thereby creating the building’s distinctive, church-like silhouette and providing a place to hang a new bell—the same bell that later became known as the Liberty Bell.

The Pennsylvania State House served many purposes in its first half-century, as the seat of provincial government, a banquet hall for occasions such as celebrations of birthdays of British monarchs, and a meeting place for learned societies such as the American Philosophical Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia. But its lasting place in American history was secured during the era of the American Revolution, when Pennsylvania’s central location and relatively moderate politics made Philadelphia the logical gathering place for the First and Second Continental Congresses.

State and National Governments

Despite resistance to independence by the Pennsylvania Assembly, the Second Continental Congress met in the State House beginning in May 1775, and in the east room on the first floor resolved to break from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, and approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4. Within the State House, Pennsylvania government also changed. In July 1776, a Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention produced a constitution regarded as the most democratic among all the former British colonies, and in 1780, the Pennsylvania Assembly passed the nation’s first law mandating the gradual abolition of slavery. The State House served as capital of both the state and national governments for the duration of the War for Independence, interrupted by the British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777-78, when the building served as jail and hospital ward for American prisoners.

A second hallmark event in the building’s history occurred in 1787, when the State House served as meeting place for the Constitutional Convention, which convened in May and completed its work on a new frame of government on September 17. Activity in and around the State House then shifted to whether Pennsylvania would ratify the document, and violent street confrontations occurred between supporters (Federalists) and dissenters. After lengthy public debates by a ratifying convention in the State House, focused on issues such as the lack of guarantees for individual rights, Pennsylvania became the second state (after Delaware) to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

The State House continued as the seat of Pennsylvania government through the 1790s, when Philadelphia also served as the nation’s capital, but became the “old” State House after Pennsylvania followed its westward-growing population by moving the state capital to Lancaster in 1799 and later to Harrisburg. When the federal government also left Philadelphia for the new District of Columbia in 1800, the old State House faced an uncertain future.  Through the 1790s and the early decades of the nineteenth century, the second floor gained a new purpose as the home of Charles Willson Peale’s (1741-1827) Museum, which aimed to cultivate a new national culture through appreciation of the arts and natural sciences. But the building and square around it became surplus state property at risk of being sold for redevelopment as building lots.

Altered Architecture

Philadelphians also showed little regard for the original fabric of the old State House when, in 1812, they allowed the structure’s wings and arched piazzas to be replaced by rows of brick buildings for city offices. However, when state proposals in 1813 and 1816 called for selling off the State House square, Philadelphia city officials acted to preserve the building and opened a period of local guardianship that continued until the mid-twentieth century. The city agreed to buy the building and square from the state in 1816, an act regarded as important in the history of historic preservation in the United States.

When the Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), a hero of the American Revolution, visited the United States in 1824, he was welcomed to Philadelphia at the old State House. In the process of planning this event, Philadelphians began to refer to the first-floor east room as “the Hall of Independence” and “Independence Hall”—a name that gradually came to be applied to the entire building. The surrounding square was named Independence Square in 1825, when the city also gave names of historic figures (Washington, Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Logan) to other squares. In 1828, Philadelphia City Councils also ordered a new steeple for the old State House and insisted that it resemble the original, which had rotted away four decades before.  Such actions reflected a growing dedication to preserving the memory of the American Revolution as the founding generation passed from the scene.

As a public building associated with the nation’s founding events but surviving in the midst of a growing, industrializing city, Independence Hall served as a focal point for engaging the political, economic, and social issues of the nineteenth century. Other than the first-floor room where independence was declared, through the mid-nineteenth century the building housed courtrooms where judgments determined the freedom or loss of freedom for individuals accused of crimes; apprentices who sued for release from their contracts; and African Americans suspected of being fugitives from slavery.

Just Outside, Historic Gatherings

Outside in the square, laborers demonstrated for improved working conditions, immigrants demonstrated in sympathy with revolutions in Europe, and Frederick Douglass (1818-95) spoke against slavery in 1844.  In 1876, Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and other women’s rights activists distributed a Declaration of Rights of Women. Independence Square remained a forum for public dissent until the early twentieth century, when the City of Philadelphia responded to a planned demonstration by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) by restricting activity to officially designated “patriotic purposes.” After the creation of Independence National Historical Park in the mid-twentieth century, the National Park Service tolerated demonstrations during the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras, but federal regulations subsequently placed new restrictions on the use of the square, especially following attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

Under the guardianship of Philadelphians, Independence Hall gradually transformed from a working government building to a national shrine, with traces of other local uses often erased in the process. The first-floor east room became a shrine to the founding fathers in 1854 under the sponsorship of nativist politicians, who gained control of the city government that year and created new City Council chambers on the second floor. During the Centennial celebration of 1876, the entire first floor of the building became the “National Museum,” featuring portraits and early-American artifacts. At the end of the century, when the City Councils left the building for the new City Hall, the Daughters of the American Revolution renovated and redecorated the second floor in Colonial Revival style. The despised “row buildings” that had flanked the central structure since 1812 were replaced by new, graceful archways that resembled the original piazzas and opened a view and passageway from Chestnut Street to the square.

With the building now fully dedicated to historic purposes, in the first decades of the twentieth century Philadelphians also advocated creating expanded parks to buffer the treasured landmark from its dense, heavily industrialized surroundings. They succeeded.  The resulting Independence Mall and Independence National Historical Park at mid-century led to demolition of six city blocks of buildings not regarded as “historic,” an urban renewal project that also opened a new era of professional stewardship by the National Park Service. Independence Hall gained additional recognition in 1979, when it was designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Independence Hall, the scene of events of national and international importance, also influenced the development and redevelopment of its home city and served as an impetus for the growth of the region’s tourist industry. By the first decades of the twenty-first century, Independence Hall anchored a historic district devoted to tourism and civic education, including the National Constitution Center, the Liberty Bell Center, the Independence Visitor Center, the National Museum of American Jewish History, and a memorial to the President’s House and individuals enslaved there by George Washington. Surrounded and dwarfed by larger institutions, Independence Hall is accessible by guided tours led by the National Park Service. Expertly restored, it is experienced as a time capsule of the past, but it has many stories to tell.

Charlene Mires is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden and the author of Independence Hall in American Memory(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Proposals to create expanded parks around Independence Hall originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Philadelphians, especially architects and members of hereditary societies, became unsettled by the contrast between the eighteenth-century landmark and the modern city. Their desires to safeguard the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution increased during the period of patriotism that accompanied World War I and World War II.

In 1942, Judge Edwin O. Lewis, a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, formed the Independence Hall Association, a group dominated by civic-minded professionals who lobbied successfully for creation of a state park (Independence Mall) in the three blocks north of Independence Hall and a national park extending three additional blocks east. Later united as Independence National Historical Park, these six blocks were cleared of all structures not regarded as “historic,” leaving primarily eighteenth-century buildings as well as the Second Bank of the United States, notable for its role in the Bank War between President Andrew Jackson and the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle.

Park Service Takes Control

When Congress authorized the national park, it defined its purpose as “preserving historic structures and properties associated with the American Revolution and the founding and growth of the United States.”  This guided the work of the National Park Service, which took over administration of Independence Hall from the City of Philadelphia in 1951 and embarked on an extensive program of research and restoration.

The patriotism of the Cold War era, combined with the family focus created by the Baby Boom and the popularity of automobile vacationing, brought increasing waves of tourists to Philadelphia to see historic sites.  At the same time, the expanded open spaces around Independence Hall attracted local uses, including festivals and celebrations but also demonstrations and dissent.  Because of its association with the nation’s founding principles, Independence National Historical Park became a place for demonstrating for civil rights for African Americans, women, and gays and lesbians, and it was a site of sharp conflict between demonstrators and counter-demonstrators during the Vietnam War.

The demands of tourism created change in and around the park. To better serve the steady flow of visitors, in 1973 the National Park Service instituted a policy of guided tours of Independence Hall, ending a longtime local practice of passing informally through the building to touch the Liberty Bell. Because of the bell’s popularity, it was removed from Independence Hall to its own pavilion during the Bicentennial celebration of 1976 and then to the much larger, exhibit-filled Liberty Bell Center in 2003.

Campus of Tourism and Civic Education

For the Bicentennial, the park also gained a modern visitor center at Third and Chestnut Streets; this too was replaced by a larger Independence Visitor Center at Sixth and Market Streets, opened in 2001 and emphasizing not only the nearby historic sites but also visitor destinations throughout the region. The Liberty Bell Center and Independence Visitor Center, together with the National Constitution Center that opened in the northernmost block of the park in 2003, transformed the Cold War-era plazas of Independence Mall into a campus devoted to tourism and civic education.

Additional changes resulted from local activism.  In 2002, an article in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography written by Edward Lawler Jr., a member of the Independence Hall Association, called attention to the history of the long-demolished President’s House and its site at Sixth and Market Streets near the planned Liberty Bell Center. Park management initially resisted the Independence Hall Association’s call to mark the footprint of this site of the Executive Branch under George Washington and John Adams, but Lawler’s article aroused public interest in the presence of slavery in Washington’s household.

Local historians, journalists, and African American groups such as Avenging the Ancestors Coalition and Generations Unlimited joined the pressure on the National Park Service to acknowledge the convergence of liberty and slavery on the doorstep of the Liberty Bell. In 2010, after long struggle, a memorial opened to mark the footprint of the house and inform visitors about the first “White House” and all of its occupants. By that time, new guidelines for interpretation also stressed that in addition to being an important site of the American Revolution, Independence National Historical Park offered opportunities to engage with the promise and paradox of liberty.

Charlene Mires is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden and author of Independence Hall in American Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). (Author information current at time of publication.)

It began inconspicuously as a two-thousand-pound mass of unstable metal; it nearly ended up in the scrap heap; it cracked and lost its voice; it was all but forgotten. But then, gradually, it became a priceless national treasure. The Liberty Bell captured American affections and became a stand-in for the nation’s vaunted values: independence, freedom, unalienable rights, and equality. It became a touchstone of American identity as Americans adopted it, along with the flag, as a symbol of justice, the rule of law, and the guardian of sovereign rights.

The Liberty Bell started out simply as the bell commissioned by the colonial legislature of Pennsylvania to hang in the steeple of the State House in 1752 so that the growing city would have a bell with great carrying power to announce meetings of the legislature and toll for notable events. Cast in London, it cracked at its first testing at which point two artisans in Philadelphia, John Pass and John Stow, recast the bell. Around its brim, it carried words from the Old Testament: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof” (Leviticus, XXV, 10).

During the revolutionary era the State House bell became an accomplice in revolutionary politics. It rang out in 1765 to warn of the approach of an English ship sailing up the Delaware River to deliver stamped paper for implementing the hated Stamp Act.  It tolled in 1768 to attract thousands gathering to protest the Townshend duties. Again it rang to assemble the citizenry in 1773 for a town meeting to protest the Tea Act. And then again, in 1774, the bell summoned Philadelphians to protest the Coercive Acts. On July 8, 1776, the bell is believed to have pealed as peopled massed in the State House yard to hear the sheriff of Philadelphia read the Declaration of Independence.

Bell Hidden From British

The State House bell had to sit out the British occupation of the city in 1777-78 because Philadelphians, knowing that the British would melt it down and convert it into bullets to be aimed at insurgent Americans, wrestled it down from the State House steeple and carried it by wagon to Allentown. But it was back in the city to toll the British surrender at Yorktown on October 24, 1781, and again to announce the signing of the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain on April 15, 1783.

The bell escaped a narrow brush with death in 1812 when Philadelphia officials considered demolishing the rotting hulk of the State House, which had lost its function since the state capital had moved inland to Harrisburg. But the city brokered a deal in 1816 to acquire the old State House, along with the bell, from the state. Eight years later, when the Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834) made his triumphal tour through the United States, the bell began to acquire a new life, largely through the publicity paid to the crumbling State House. Lafayette was received in a redecorated east room, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787 had been signed, amidst massive celebrations and a new wave of interest in the revolutionary era. Now the State House, called Independence Hall, became hallowed ground.  But the old bell still awaited its destiny.

That came in the 1830s when New York and Boston abolitionists, drawn by the bell’s inscription about proclaiming freedom throughout the land, appropriated the bell as an emblem of the growing campaign to abolish slavery. The New York Anti-Slavery Society’s Anti-Slavery Record named the “old bell,” as it was familiarly known in Philadelphia, as “The Liberty Bell”—“the tocsin of freedom and slavery’s knell,” as one abolitionist put it in a poem that was reprinted in the abolitionist paper The Liberator.  The New York abolitionists egged on their Philadelphia counterparts, reminding them that “Hitherto, the bell has not obeyed  the inscription and its peals have been a mockery, while one sixth of ‘all inhabitants’ are in abject slavery.”

1843: The Crack

After almost one hundred years of ringing in important commemorative moments, the Liberty Bell cracked in 1843. To this day many people believe the hoary legend that it cracked when tolling on July 8, 1835, as the funeral procession of John Marshall, longtime chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, passed through the city.  It is almost certain, however, that the fissure occurred while it rang in remembrance of Washington’s birthday eight years later.  Once damaged, it rested on the first floor of Independence Hall in elaborate settings.

The bell did not rest in the public’s admiration. In 1847, the  journalist George Lippard (1822-1854) wrote a story, “Ring, Grandfather, Ring” for The Saturday Courier that related how an old bellman rang the bell to pronounce independence, after his grandson heard Congress’s resolve. The popular tale, though fictional, was retold as truth and thereafter linked the bell to the Declaration of Independence.

Once firmly fixed in the American mind as an avatar of all they believed their nation to be, the Liberty Bell was sent to and fro across the continent.  After the Civil War, it became an important messenger of reconciliation between the North and South. Invited by the organizers of New Orleans’s World’s Industrial and Cotton Exposition in 1885, the bell, scrubbed and polished, was carried on an elaborately decorated flat car for a four-day trip to New Orleans.  At each stop, people surged forward to touch, stroke, and kiss the bell as the train wended through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi before finally reaching New Orleans. Once installed, it enthralled visitors for nearly five months, reaching iconic status. Once an antislavery symbol, it now became a symbol of national reconciliation, with its old antislavery message muffled in the process.

The next trip was to Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. On April 29, 1893, thirteen black horses with one hundred equestrial Chicago Hussars of the Illinois National Guard escorted the bell to the “White City”—the hundreds of building erected on the shore of Lake Michigan. The procession stretched for two miles “through crowds of enthusiastic people who cheered the Emblem of Liberty every step of the way—greater homage was never paid King or Queen,” wrote a Chicago newspaper. Most of some 27 million visitors gazed at the bell, displayed in the Pennsylvania building on a circular platform surrounded by a gilt railing built to keep at a distance the multitudes wanting to caress the bell.  Shoals of visitors on July 4, 1893, drank in “The Liberty Bell March,” composed by America’s bandmaster John Philip Sousa (1854-1932). By the time of its return to Philadelphia in November 1893, about one-third of the nation had seen it. Flag worship had seized the country in an era of mass immigration, and bell worship now became its cousin. Other trips took the Liberty Bell to expositions in Atlanta, Charleston, St. Louis, and Boston.

On the last of its seven trips, to San Francisco and San Diego in 1915, in the midst of a world set afire by World War I, a journalist in San Diego opined that “there is not a single person in any state of the union who does not feel a personal interest in the bell.” The historian of the Panama-Pacific Exposition echoed this: “The Bell is the great American patriotic symbol, almost a national Palladium. About that 20-odd hundred-weight of cracked metal there probably clings more of devotional feeling than about any other merely physical thing in the country.”

Never again would the Liberty Bell leave the city. The bell had accepted the laurels of an entire generation of Americans, and the nation’s school children had been taught–in poems, songs, and schoolbook stories–to revere the bell—a bell that belonged to everybody.  Making it the indispensable American icon was the marketing of its image in millions of trinkets, postcards, miniature versions, postage stamps, and other memorabilia. On New Year’s Eve in 1924, 1925, and 1926, the tapping of the Liberty Bell, broadcast by radio across the nation, welcomed in the New Year.  By this time, there was hardly a sensate American who did not know about the Liberty Bell.

The price of immortality was cooptation. Organizations of every political stripe and multiple causes enlisted the Liberty Bell for what they wanted. Among the first since the abolitionists were women suffragists. The Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association, campaigning amidst World War I, commissioned a Liberty Bell of their own to tour the state. Dubbing their bell the “Justice Bell,” they added two words to the famous inscription: the bell would not only proclaim liberty throughout the land but “establish justice,” which meant enfranchising women. Other groups followed their lead, including a citizens group called the Loyal Fraternity of the Liberty Bell formed to fight the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and the “Liberty Bell Ringers” in Michigan dedicated to keeping alive some of the unrealized Progressive reforms.

In both World War I and World War II, the U.S. government enlisted the Liberty Bell in “Liberty Bond” campaigns to finance the struggle to protect democracy. Ships and  airplanes were named after the Liberty Bell, and the Liberty Bell itself, standing in Independence Hall, formed the backdrop for many patriotic gatherings. At President Franklin Roosevelt’s (1882-1945) urging, the bell was tapped for his radio broadcasts to pump up patriotism.  The tapping went out over the radio waves throughout the war: tapping “V” for Victory in October 1942 to mark the thirty-first anniversary of the Chinese Republic; for “I am an American Day” on May 16, 1943; for July Fourth in the same year; for the opening of two new war bond drives in September 1943 and January 1944; for a recording to be played to the first wave of soldiers and marines storming the beaches of Normandy in June 1944; for the liberation of the Philippines on March 9, 1945; and tapping out VICTORY in August 1945. But while the United States fought a war in the name of freedom, African Americans recognized that the nation’s freedoms were not equally shared. In Philadelphia, Black banker Richard R. Wright Sr. (1855-1947) instituted an annual commemoration at the Liberty Bell to call attention to the continuing struggle for freedom and equality.

In the Cold War, Washington frequently deployed the Liberty Bell as the beacon demonstrating American unity and strength, while it was further immortalized when “Liberty Bell 7” carried Gus Grissom’s (1926-1967) into space in 1961. By this time, organizations from far right to far left claimed the Liberty Bell as their own. These ranged from the Liberty Belles, who saturated the country with messages that the Sixteenth Amendment (authorizing the federal income tax) was unconstitutional, to many organizations involved in the civil rights movement who staged sit-ins at the Liberty Bell, to members of the Quebec Separatist Movement that planned to dynamite the Liberty Bell in 1965, and to Earth Day environmentalists thronging the Liberty Bell on its first gathering in 1970.  Meanwhile, entrepreneurs happily appropriated the Liberty Bell, plastering its image on everything from skimpy women’s underwear, to cat and dog pillows, to the gigantic image at the Phillies Citizens Bank Park that lights up and rings whenever a hometown baseball player hits a home run.

In 1976, to celebrate the Bicentennial of the American Revolution, the National Park Service (which assumed custodianship of the bell, along with Independence Hall, in 1948) moved the Liberty Bell from Independence Hall, where it had rested for more than two centuries, to a glass-and-brick pavilion facing Independence Hall a block away. Then in 2003 it found a new home in a spacious exhibit building at Sixth and Market Streets. This location, adjacent to the site where enslaved Africans labored in the household of President George Washington, forced a new reckoning over the legacies of freedom and enslavement in American history. Visitors to the Liberty Bell, numbering about 1.5 million annually in the early twenty-first century, encountered the bell’s long and varied history in exhibits as they moved toward the sacred bell, to be viewed but no longer touched.

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

The LOVE design of four letters stacked in a square with a tilted “O” predated the Bicentennial, as did the artist’s association with Philadelphia. Indiana (who took the name of his home state) worked in New York, but his first single-artist museum exhibition occurred in Philadelphia in 1968 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. On the rise as a Pop artist, Indiana was working in a style he termed “verbal-visual,” in which words became elements of art. LOVE, which appeared at ICA in the form of paintings, prints, and a small sculpture, had been developing as a motif in Indiana’s art since 1961, when he created the design for a personal Christmas card and then for an immensely popular set of holiday cards issued by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. A subsequent LOVE poster for an Indiana show at New York’s Stable Gallery in 1966 further disseminated the design, which struck a responsive chord in the emerging counterculture of the 1960s. Along with love-ins, love beads, and other symbols of love and peace, Indiana’s work seemed symbolic of the times.

In addition to LOVE, the body of Indiana’s work displayed by ICA in 1968 included many other paintings, sculpture, and prints with themes drawing primarily upon American literature, current events, history, and popular culture. ICA director Stephen S. Prokopoff (1929-2001), one of the exhibition’s curators, viewed Indiana’s focus on American themes as harmonizing with Philadelphia’s history as a center for American art in the early nineteenth century. The catalog for the ICA exhibition contributed to later scholarship about Indiana’s work by including the artist’s “auto-chronology” of his life and work to that point in time.

By the early 1970s, LOVE came to overshadow Indiana’s other work as it circulated in many forms, as original art and in copies both authorized and unauthorized. The artist had come to the opening of the ICA exhibit sporting an 18-carat gold LOVE ring, one of series of 100 he had authorized to be made by Villanova-based Rare Rings, a new venture by Pop-art merchandise entrepreneurs Joan Kron and Audrey Sabol. For the cover of the novel Love Story (1970), another artist closely mimicked the colors and typography of Indiana’s design. Indiana himself produced versions large and small. A 12-foot-tall steel sculpture of LOVE, which became part of the permanent collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, traveled for exhibition in Boston and New York in 1971 and 1972. A 20-foot painting of LOVE appeared in an Indiana exhibition in New York. Indiana also created a miniature version of LOVE for a postage stamp, issued in time for Valentine’s Day 1973. Philadelphia, as the City of Brotherly Love, provided the setting for a first-day-of-issue ceremony held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The U.S. Postal Service went on to sell more than 300 million of the eight-cent LOVE stamps. Intended to be red, green, and blue, the stamps turned out to be red, green, and purple—the result of overprinting blue over red.

The aluminum LOVE sculpture placed in John F. Kennedy Plaza, the public park at Fifteenth and JFK Boulevard near City Hall, featured the same colors as the stamp—red, green, and purple (replaced by blue during subsequent restorations but returned to the original purple in 2018). Indiana loaned the work to Philadelphia for the Bicentennial, a year also marked by the installation of Clothespin by another leading Pop artist, Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), one block away at Fifteenth and Market Streets. LOVE, alas, proved to be fleeting. When the artist’s dealer recalled the sculpture to New York for a potential buyer in 1978, a public outcry ensued. City officials, who admitted to having no knowledge of the art market, had declined to pay the $45,000 asking price to keep LOVE in the park. Ultimately the price came down to $35,000, paid as a donation by Fitz Eugene Dixon Jr. (1923-2006), owner of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team and chairman of the Philadelphia Art Commission. The Quaker Export Packaging Company donated its labor to retrieve the lost LOVE.

Secured again in John F. Kennedy Plaza, LOVE became a landmark and reference point in local geography. The Philadelphia Inquirer attributed the usage “Love Park” to homeless people who frequented the plaza during the 1980s. During the 1990s, “Love Park” gained widespread currency among skateboarders attracted by the varied levels of stone and concrete walls, steps, and benches of the plaza. Skateboarding videos and video games spread the image of LOVE in Philadelphia. By the time a thorough redesign and reconstruction of the plaza occurred in 2016-18, plans prioritized keeping LOVE in its place and termed the surrounding public space as JFK Plaza/Love Park. When the park reopened, “Love Park” appeared on banners and signs as a promotional brand.

Indiana continued to create LOVE sculptures into the late 1990s, including variations in other languages. By the twenty-first century, they could be found across the United States, in Israel, Europe, and Asia. In the Philadelphia region, the University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University each had its own LOVE, and Ursinus College had a copy authorized by the artist. In 2015 for the visit of Pope Francis (b. 1936), the Philadelphia Museum of Art brought one of Indiana’s Spanish-language AMOR sculptures to the city, where it remained.

Philadelphia did not possess LOVE alone. Nevertheless, the sculpture became one of the city’s most recognizable icons, attested and reinforced by the steady flow of visitors seeking it out, posing for photographs, and placing themselves into a distinctively Philadelphia scene of LOVE.

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.)