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This book covers the 20 years that transformed Philadelphia into a city of neighborhoods, from Kingsessing to Wissahickon. At the turn of the 20th century, Philadelphia was the "workshop of the world," with builders toiling tirelessly to fill the staggering demand for housing. This golden age of construction resulted in whole new neighborhoods for the city's burgeoning population, transforming it into a place where immigrants could easily find jobs and a community to call their own. More than 200 vintage photos and postcards whisk readers back to the neighborhoods as they once were, exactly as our grandparents and great-grandparents knew them, before modern influences altered them beyond recognition. Arranged by neighborhood, this Philadelphia family album, a scrapbook for the city, is filled with rare vintage photographs and comprehensive information about the houses, the builders, the neighborhoods, and the people who lived in them.
Covering more than two centuries of social, economic, and political change, and offering a challenging, innovative approach to urban as well national history, First City tells the Philadelphia story through the wealth of material culture its citizens have chosen to preserve.
Beneath the modern city of Philadelphia lie countless clues to its history and the lives of residents long forgotten. This intriguing book explores eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia through the findings of archaeological excavations, sharing with readers the excitement of digging into the past and reconstructing the lives of earlier inhabitants of the city.Urban archaeologist Rebecca Yamin describes the major excavations that have been undertaken since 1992 as part of the redevelopment of Independence Mall and surrounding areas, explaining how archaeologists gather and use raw data to learn more about the ordinary people whose lives were never recorded in history books. Focusing primarily on these unknown citizens-an accountant in the first Treasury Department, a coachmaker whose clients were politicians doing business at the State House, an African American founder of St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church, and others-Yamin presents a colorful portrait of old Philadelphia. She also discusses political aspects of archaeology today-who supports particular projects and why, and what has been lost to bulldozers and heedlessness. Digging in the City of Brotherly Love tells the exhilarating story of doing archaeology in the real world and using its findings to understand the past.
At the crossroads of Center City, Philadelphia, stands city hall, an architectural and sculptural masterpiece whose size and beauty rival the grand structures found in the capitals of Europe. Shortly after the Civil War, city hall embraced the community's need for a new municipal building while filling the visionary desire of its designers to underscore Philadelphia's reputation as "the Athens of America." Thirty years later stood a monumental structure that was easily the largest building in North America and one of the most beautiful, displaying over two hundred fifty pieces of sculpture. Philadelphia's City Hall illuminates the fascinating account of the building's controversial origin, its symbolic sculptural program, and the largest statue topping a building in the world. These stunning photographs highlight a marvel of masonry and community vision created by a city with the desire to show the world what it could produce.
By the time William Penn was planning the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia at its heart, Europeans on both sides of the ocean had long experience with the hazards of city life, disease the most terrifying among them. Drawing from those experiences, colonists hoped to create new urban forms that combined the commercial advantages of a seaport with the health benefits of the country. The Contagious City details how early Americans struggled to preserve their collective health against both the strange new perils of the colonial environment and the familiar dangers of the traditional city, through a period of profound transformation in both politics and medicine. Philadelphia was the paramount example of this reforming tendency. Tracing the city's history from its founding on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682 to the yellow fever outbreak of 1793, Simon Finger emphasizes the importance of public health and population control in decisions made by the city's planners and leaders. He also shows that key figures in the city's history, including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, brought their keen interest in science and medicine into the political sphere. Throughout his account, Finger makes clear that medicine and politics were inextricably linked, and that both undergirded the debates over such crucial concerns as the city's location, its urban plan, its immigration policy, and its creation of institutions of public safety. In framing the history of Philadelphia through the imperatives of public health, The Contagious City offers a bold new vision of the urban history of colonial America.
Preface Acknowledgments 1: A Framework for Articulating Horror 2: What Is MOVE? 3: The Language of Domesticity 4: Bureaucratic Discourse: The Policy, the Plan, the Operation5: The Law and Its Apparatus: Speaking Warrants and Weapons 6: Decarcerating Discourse Notes Bibliography Index.
A forgotten, and often bizarre, history of Philadelphia is unearthed in these quirky vignettes.
A "deeply moving survey of the great civic structures that Philadelphia erected, then neglected."—Philadelphia Inquirer "An aesthetic masterpiece—most relevant and revealing for our time."—Robert Venturi With the photographs in this book, Vincent Feldman offers Philadelphians a testament of who we were, who we are, and who we are likely to become. Some of his subjects have succumbed to neglect or demolition (the Ridge Avenue Farmers' Market, for example); some have been successfully rehabilitated to new uses (the Victory Building); while others remain in limbo in their ruined states—their futures far from secure. Yet besides recording the current state of the buildings, Feldman's photographs can play an active role in their preservation and renovation. His photos can serve, not only as documentary records, but also as catalysts for the rescue and rehabilitation of some of Philadelphia's most significant and neglected "abandoned" city architecture. "By focusing on buildings that embody the civic aspirations of decades past and by portraying them in such stark terms, Vincent Feldman has created a body of work that is a vivid reminder of the fragile nature of what we have inherited and the need to remain ever diligent in its preservation."—John Andrew Gallery, "On Vincent Feldman's Philadelphia" "[Feldman's] images move us to a deeper feeling and understanding of the city, as they pose important questions about our stewardship and the city's future. It's the story of a city on the edge, and we're glad to be along for this freeze-frame journey of photographic brinksmanship."—Kenneth Finkel, "Looking at the Past" "By inviting you to look carefully at buildings from Philadelphia's past, I hope to promote inquiry about our history and also to inspire thoughtful discussion about what we might do for our future."—Vincent D. Feldman, from his Introduction "[Vincent] Feldman is not the kind of photographer who shoots and runs. An old-school craftsman, he uses a large-format view camera much like the one Mathew Brady hauled around to record the devastation of the Civil War. Feldman then retreats to the darkroom to print his images on paper, rendering them with such precision that bricks and stones appear to leap from the page in three-dimensional relief."—Inga Saffron, Philadelphia Inquirer The Wall Street Journal writes that the images of City Abandoned are "a melancholy catalog of such civic failures. In understated compositions that transcend merely local appeal, [Feldman] documents schools, theaters, hotels and churches left to deteriorate even as Philadelphia's downtown has boomed."
Historian Thomas Keels tells many ribald stories in his book, "Wicked Philadelphia: Sin in the City of Brotherly Love," including various methods of body snatching and murder. --Marty Moss-Coane, WHYY-FM Prim and proper Philadelphia has been rocked by the clash between excessive vice and social virtue since its citizens burned the city's biggest brothel in 1800. With tales of grave robbers in South Philadelphia and harlots in Franklin Square, Wicked Philadelphia reveals the shocking underbelly of the City of Brotherly Love. In one notorious scam, a washerwoman masqueraded as the fictional Spanish countess Anita de Bettencourt for two decades, bilking millions from victims and even fooling the government of Spain. From the 1843 media frenzy that ensued after an aristocrat abducted a young girl to a churchyard transformed into a brothel (complete with a carousel), local author Thomas H. Keels unearths Philadelphia's most scintillating scandals and corrupt characters in this rollicking history.
Philadelphia possesses an exceptionally large number of places that have almost disappeared—from workshops and factories to sporting clubs and societies, synagogues, churches, theaters, and railroad lines. In Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City, urban observers Nathaniel Popkin and Peter Woodall uncover the contemporary essence of one of America’s oldest cities. Working with accomplished architectural photographer Joseph Elliott, they explore secret places in familiar locations, such as the Metropolitan Opera House on North Broad Street, the Divine Lorraine Hotel, Reading Railroad, Disston Saw Works in Tacony, and mysterious parts of City Hall. Much of the real Philadelphia is concealed behind facades. Philadelphia artfully reveals its urban secrets. Rather than a nostalgic elegy to loss and urban decline, Philadelphia exposes the city’s vivid layers and living ruins. The authors connect Philadelphia’s idiosyncratic history, culture, and people to develop an alternative theory of American urbanism, and place the city in American urban history. The journey here is as much visual as it is literary; Joseph Elliott’s sumptuous photographs reveal the city's elemental beauty.