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Blue Route
Famous for the many protracted conflicts that delayed its full construction for decades, Pennsylvania’s Mid-County Expressway, also referred to as the Veterans Memorial Highway and, more commonly, the...
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Pennsylvania (Founding)
In March of 1681, King Charles II of England (1630-85) granted William Penn (1644-1718), gentleman and Quaker, the charter for a proprietary colony on the North American continent. Although both...
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University City Science Center
The University City Science Center, the nation’s first and oldest urban research park, represents a pivotal chapter in the story of American urban renewal, its associated racial tensions, and the...
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Surveying (Colonial)
Produced by Pennsylvania’s first surveyor-general, Thomas Holme, A Map of ye Improved Part of Pensilvania in America is one of the first two maps created of Pennsylvania. (Historical Society of...
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Coal
In the nineteenth century, Philadelphia banks and entrepreneurs played a pivotal role in facilitating the emergence of coal as the nation’s principal energy source for industry, transportation, and...
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Enterprise Zones and Empowerment Zones
Introduced in the Philadelphia area and the nation in the early 1980s, the enterprise zone was a new kind of urban policy that emphasized market-based, “supply-side” strategies for tackling urban...
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New Sweden
Founded in 1638, the colony of New Sweden survived less than twenty years and at its peak numbered only about four hundred people, most of whom lived along the western bank of the Delaware River...
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Manufacturing Suburbs
This 1915 aerial view of the Schuylkill River, looking southeast from the vicinity of Fountain Street in Manayunk, shows the numerous factories and homes that lined its banks. (Library Company of...
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Military Bases
For centuries, the American military valued Philadelphia because of its size, manufacturing capability, and location. Bases and other military facilities in the region contributed to the United States’...
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Urban Renewal
Earle Barber (left) of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, Edmund Bacon (center) of the City Planning Commission, and architect Vincent Kling consider 1950s projects to follow the removal of the...
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Chemical Industry
Since the eighteenth century, chemical or chemical processing industries have been an important part of the economy of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley region and have reflected larger trends in...
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Community Development
The community development movement encouraged neighborhood activism, such as that exhibited here in 1973 by opponents of expressway work in Chinatown. Their signs voiced their objections at a City Hall...
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China Trade
First pursued by the city’s merchants after the American Revolution, the China trade linked Philadelphians to the rest of the world through commerce. Alongside merchants in New York, Boston, and Salem,...
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Trade Unions (1820s-30s)
As industrialization began changing the nature of work and society in the United States during the 1820s and 1830s, workers concerned with their low wages, long hours, and the growing power of...
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Hinterlands
This map, charted by a British cartographer during the American War for Independence, illustrates the extent of the economic region Philadelphia commanded. By the middle of the nineteenth century,...
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Deindustrialization
The Philadelphia region’s long-held reputation as the “workshop of the world,” though richly deserved, did not prevent it from suffering the same loss of manufacturing firms and jobs that devastated...
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West Philadelphia
One of the single largest sectors of the city of Philadelphia at almost fifteen square miles between the Schuylkill River to the east and Delaware County to the west, West Philadelphia at its peak, in...
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Deindustrialization
The Philadelphia region’s long-held reputation as the “workshop of the world,” though richly deserved, did not prevent it from suffering the same loss of manufacturing firms and jobs that devastated...
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Horses
Horses played a critical role in Philadelphia’s growth and development as an industrial city, but over time their role as prime movers gradually diminished, and after the mid-twentieth century their...
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Lotteries
Lotteries have a long and controversial history in the Philadelphia region. Since the early eighteenth century, random drawings of numbers have funded charities and clubs, paid for roads and schools,...
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