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When Philadelphia's iconoclastic city planner Edmund N. Bacon looked into his crystal ball in 1959, he saw a remarkable vision: "Philadelphia as an unmatched expression of the vitality of American technology and culture." In that year Bacon penned an essay for Greater Philadelphia Magazine, originally entitled "Philadelphia in the Year 2009," in which he imagined a city remade, modernized in time to host the 1976 Philadelphia World's Fair and Bicentennial celebration, an event that would be a catalyst for a golden age of urban renewal. What Bacon did not predict was the long, bitter period of economic decline, population dispersal, and racial confrontation that Philadelphia was about to enter. As such, his essay comes to us as a time capsule, a message from one of the city's most influential and controversial shapers that prompts discussions of what was, what might have been, and what could yet be in the city's future. Imagining Philadelphia brings together Bacon's original essay, reprinted here for the first time in fifty years, and a set of original essays on the past, present, and future of urban planning in Philadelphia. In addition to examining Bacon and his motivations for writing the piece, the essays assess the wider context of Philadelphia's planning, architecture, and real estate communities at the time, how city officials were reacting to economic decline, what national precedents shaped Bacon's faith in grand forms of urban renewal, and whether or not it is desirable or even possible to adopt similarly ambitious visions for contemporary urban planning and economic development. The volume closes with a vision of what Philadelphia might look like fifty years from now.
Designing the Centennial is an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the planning of America's first important world's fair -- the 1876 United States Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The conflicts between the players -- scientists and engineers, planners and politicians, organizers and their audience -- demonstrate wider cultural clashes between a traditional view of things as object lessons and our more current understanding of things as commodities. Bruno Giberti uses the official reports of the U.S. Centennial Commission and photographs of the Centennial Photographic Company, as well as the ephemera of the exhibition and literary accounts in books, magazines, and newspapers to examine the concept of world's fairs, contrasting the 1876 event with other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exhibitions and related institutions. The author goes beyond previous works on world's fairs by investigating the design process and by considering the nature of display -- what people were looking at and how they were looking.
Independence Hall is a place Americans think they know well. Within its walls the Continental Congress declared independence in 1776, and in 1787 the Founding Fathers drafted the U.S. Constitution there. Painstakingly restored to evoke these momentous events, the building appears to have passed through time unscathed, from the heady days of the American Revolution to today. But Independence Hall is more than a symbol of the young nation. Beyond this, according to Charlene Mires, it has a long and varied history of changing uses in an urban environment, almost all of which have been forgotten. In Independence Hall, Mires rediscovers and chronicles the lost history of Independence Hall, in the process exploring the shifting perceptions of this most important building in America's popular imagination. According to Mires, the significance of Independence Hall cannot be fully appreciated without assessing the full range of political, cultural, and social history that has swirled about it for nearly three centuries. During its existence, it has functioned as a civic and cultural center, a political arena and courtroom, and a magnet for public celebrations and demonstrations. Artists such as Thomas Sully frequented Independence Square when Philadelphia served as the nation's capital during the 1790s, and portraitist Charles Willson Peale merged the arts, sciences, and public interest when he transformed a portion of the hall into a center for natural science in 1802. In the 1850s, hearings for accused fugitive slaves who faced the loss of freedom were held, ironically, in this famous birthplace of American independence. Over the years Philadelphians have used the old state house and its public square in a multitude of ways that have transformed it into an arena of conflict: labor grievances have echoed regularly in Independence Square since the 1830s, while civil rights protesters exercised their right to free speech in the turbulent 1960s. As much as the Founding Fathers, these people and events illuminate the building's significance as a cultural symbol.
This book addresses the religious life of Philadelphia, watches as revivalists come and go from 1828 to 1876, and examines the impact of revivals in the city. Mass revivalism was touted as the solution to cities' social problems, so the account of the close relationship between the YMCA movement and revivalism is appreciated. Meanwhile, America's middle-class evangelical majority, caught in the web of an individualistic ideology, persisted in ignoring the destruction of "community" as the cities grew in complexity, anonymity, and ethnic and class divisiveness. While depending rather too heavily on a "great man" approach to revivalism in Philadelphia, in confirming in a very specific, well-documented manner the inconsistencies in revivalistic preaching and the gap between goals, means, and ends in urban mass evangelism, this work is a significant contribution to the study of American religious history.
Explorer's Guide Philadelphia, Brandywine Valley, and Bucks County: A Great Destination takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the many pleasures to be found in the Delaware Valley, a region famous for its rich history and natural beauty. It explores greater Philadelphia’s under-appreciated attributes, including its first rate dining scene, diverse architecture, and recreational opportunities, and includes chapters on lodging, dining, transportation, history, shopping, recreation;a section packed with practical information, such as lists of banks, hospitals, post offices, laundromats, numbers for police, fire, and rescue, and other relevant information; maps of regions and locales; and more.
Includes entries for maps and atlases.
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1681 Edition.