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Constructing a 150th Birthday Celebration
By Deborah Sting
Spread over a large portion of land in the south portion of Philadelphia along the Delaware River, the Sesquicentennial Exposition featured huge buildings filled with exhibitors, technical innovations, and displays from around the world. These huge halls, along with a new stadium, a military encampment, and a recreation of a Philadelphia street in 1776,...
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Catch a Movie and See a Teen Idol in South Philly
By Zach Lechner
A bustling hub of the Philadelphia public transportation network, the intersection of Broad Street and Snyder Avenue is still a place where a person can get a hot meal and the latest news. The lavish, 2183-seat Broadway Theater (seen in the background) opened in 1913, originally featuring Keith Vaudeville productions. It had been converted into a full-time movie house by the time this photo was taken in 1949. The theatre no longer stands; it was demolished in 1971 and has been replaced by various commercial ventures.
The nearby subway stop may seem like...
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Signs, Signs. . .
By Zach Lechner
Some people (the Five Man Electrical Band included) may call them eyesores, but billboards reveal much about the changing urban landscape during the modern era.
By the early twentieth century, advertisers, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, had progressed beyond pasting handbills onto walls. Drivers passing the intersection of Broad Street and Girard Avenue in 1917 saw a wealth of consumables foisted upon them. Razor blades, food, and wine ads foreshadowed the increasing importance of consumption in sustaining the American economy.
But we also see that billboards often included more patriotic messages. An ad for Liberty...
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Fires, Fights and Benjamin Franklin: Philadelphia's Volunteer Firemen, Part Two
By Spencer Willig
By 1752, there were already eight active fire companies in Philadelphia. That same year, Franklin built on his own achievement by helping to found the Philadelphia Contributionship, the oldest fire insurance company in America. Interestingly, though Franklin modeled his creations after their English counterparts, the American system was fundamentally different. In England, fire brigades were founded and administered by insurance companies, whose properties they protected exclusively. In America, the sequence was reversed. Though Franklin´s Contributionship and the companies that sprung up soon after followed the English practice of issuing their policy holders...
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The Life of the Schuylkill: Part One
By Spencer Willig
The Schuylkill is not an unattractive river. Reflections of the illuminated arches of the bridges above it gleam on its dark surface at night, while the lights of Boathouse Row have given commuters on I-76 and Amtrak and Septa passengers something to enjoy as they speed past. The Fairmount Waterworks, newly restored and featuring a high-end restaurant and high-tech museum, has been attracting locals and tourists alike for almost 200 years. Many Philadelphians spend hours on and around the river, jogging, fishing, boating and relaxing.
But how many would drink straight out of...
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Creativity in Cast Iron: Strickland Kneass’s Chestnut Street Bridge
By Christopher R. Dougherty
For Strickland Kneass (1821-1884) engineering was not about letting tradition dictate uninspired designs nor did the profession thrive in clannish fiefdoms of expertise. Trained in the era before formal engineering curricula, Kneass saw engineering as an organic profession whose rules, though important, were always secondary to imaginative...
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The Philadelphia Peace Jubilee of 1898
By Deborah Sting
Although lasting only four months, the Spanish-American War was a decisive moment in United States history and served as America’s entry into the world of foreign affairs. Weeks of tension between Spain and the US over the issue of Cuban independence culminated in the US sending the battleship USS Maine to Cuba to protect American interests in the region. When the battleship sank due to an explosion on February 15, 1898, several US newspapers encouraged retribution and war was eventually declared on April 25. After four months of fighting in the Phillipines and...