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Delaware River Port Authority
The Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) was created nearly one hundred years ago as a bi-state commission for the purpose of building a single toll bridge. By the 1930s regional leaders had started to...
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Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC)
The Market East Shopping Center (known also as the Gallery) was part of PIDC’s efforts to attract shoppers back into the heart of Philadelphia. When the Gallery opened in 1977, it was one of the first...
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Gallery at Market East
The entrance of the Gallery at Ninth and Market Streets takes customers below street level. (Photograph by Donald D. Groff for the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.) Following the birth and success...
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Free Society of Traders
The Free Society of Traders, a joint-stock company founded by a small group of English Quakers in 1681, was organized with the intention of directing and dominating the economic life of colonial...
View ArticleOpportunities Industrialization Center (OIC)
In the 1960s, after leading protest campaigns to expose discriminatory hiring and open thousands of jobs to African Americans, the Reverend Leon Sullivan (1922-2001) founded the Opportunities...
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Penn’s Landing
Penn’s Landing, a 35-acre redevelopment site between Columbus Avenue and the Delaware River and South and Vine Streets, was designed to attract visitors to Philadelphia’s waterfront. Since construction...
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Avenue of the Arts
The Avenue of the Arts is the appellation for a section of Broad Street—from Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia to Glenwood Avenue in North Philadelphia—devoted to arts and entertainment...
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Schuylkill Navigation Company
This late-nineteenth-century photograph shows the serenity of the Schuylkill Canal, a contrast to parts of the Schuylkill River, whose rapids made navigation impossible. (Library Company of...
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Brownfields Redevelopment
First designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1995, the polluted tracts of land known as “brownfields” resulted from Greater Philadelphia’s industrial heritage. For more than a...
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Philadelphia Board of Trade
Philadelphia’s Board of Trade worked for more than a century to promote commercial development in the city and the region while also arbitrating disputes among its member businesses. Formed in 1833,...
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Atlantic City
The Atlantic City Boardwalk, introduced in 1870, became the city’s signature attraction. (Photograph by Donald D. Groff for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia) Before Disneyland, Atlantic City...
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Admiral Wilson Boulevard
Admiral Wilson Boulevard, a two-and-a-half-mile section of U.S. Route 30 extending from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Camden to the Route 70 overpass in Pennsauken, was the first “auto strip” in the...
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Greater Philadelphia Movement
The reform wave that swept through City Hall in the mid-twentieth century owed much of its power to the Greater Philadelphia Movement (GPM), a volunteer group of corporate leaders who believed the...
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Bank War
This 1836 cartoon satirizes Andrew Jackson’s campaign to destroy the Bank of the United States and its support among state banks. (Library of Congress) Conflict over renewing the charter of the Second...
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First Purchasers of Pennsylvania
Upon receiving his grant for Pennsylvania in March 1681, William Penn (1644-1718) immediately set about attracting investors and settlers. To pay expenses and realize a profit from his enterprise, Penn...
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Model Cities
The Model Cities program was the last major urban aid initiative of the Great Society domestic agenda of President Lyndon Johnson (1908-73). The legislation called for the coordination of federal...
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Smith’s and Windmill Islands
This late nineteenth century depiction of Philadelphia, engraved from sketches by Theodore R. Davis, shows Windmill and Smith’s Island in the foreground. (Library of Congress) Once a prominent feature...
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Tourism
Philadelphia has been a tourist destination since leisure travel emerged as a common pastime for the middle and upper classes in the nineteenth century. By the twenty-first century, the region’s...
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King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
Twenty miles northwest of downtown Philadelphia, where the Pennsylvania Turnpike converges with the Schuylkill Expressway, a sleepy rural town clustered around a colonial-era tavern expanded massively...
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Petty Island
Petty Island, part of Pennsauken, New Jersey, in the Delaware River opposite the Kensington section of Philadelphia, played a significant supporting role in the economic development of the region. Also...
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