Eight stops on the first urban-planning experiment in North America. Penn's sixteen-eighty-two grid is still the working blueprint of Center City; City Hall on the original central square is its warden; the four corner squares are the surviving instruments of a laboratory that has been running for three hundred and forty-three years.
Start · Philadelphia City Hall: The Warden on Centre Square
DirectionsStops
- 1
Philadelphia City Hall: The Warden on Centre Square
The masonry building on Penn's original central square. Built 1871 to 1901 by John McArthur Jr. and Thomas U. Walter in the French Second Empire style; 548 feet to the top of the Penn statue; the world's largest free-standing masonry building. The 19th century put a thirty-year stone tower on the 17th-century green and turned the square into civic stone.
- 2
Broad and Market: The Axis of the Grid
The intersection at the four cardinal entrances to City Hall. The geometric center of Penn's grid and the axis from which every other street descends. Broad runs north to south; Market (originally High Street) runs east to west. Both were laid wider than any colonial American street that preceded them.
- 3
Rittenhouse Square: The Square That Held
The southwest corner square of the original Penn plan. Renamed in the nineteenth century after David Rittenhouse, the Philadelphia astronomer and clockmaker who became the first director of the United States Mint. The only one of the four corner squares whose orthogonal geometry and high-status residential character continued unbroken across three centuries.
- 4
Washington Square: The Square That Buried
The southeast corner square of the original Penn plan. Renamed in the nineteenth century after George Washington. Holds the unmarked graves of Revolutionary War soldiers (Continental and British), victims of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, and African Americans buried in segregated potter's-field plots. The Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier stands at the center.
- 5
Reading Terminal Market: Three Centuries on One Block
The food market that opened in 1893 in the train shed beneath the elevated Reading Railroad terminal. The market survived the post-1971 closure of the Reading Railroad, the postwar decline of downtown Philadelphia, and the rise of suburban supermarkets; it now anchors Center City foot traffic and integrates with the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
- 6
PSFS Building: The Grid Receives Modernism
The 491-foot tower at Twelfth and Market completed in 1932 by George Howe and William Lescaze. An early International Style skyscraper in the United States and the first Modernist tower in Philadelphia. National Historic Landmark December 8, 1976. Now operates as the Loews Philadelphia Hotel; the original rooftop PSFS sign is still extant.
- 7
Wanamaker Building: The Retail Monument
The twelve-story department-store building immediately west of City Hall. John Wanamaker opened his Grand Depot at this site in 1876; the present building was completed in 1911. The Grand Court inside holds the Wanamaker Organ, the largest functioning pipe organ in the world. Now operates as a Macy's.
- 8
Logan Square and Swann Memorial Fountain: The Amended Corner
The northwest corner square of the original Penn plan, renamed for James Logan, Penn's colonial secretary. Reshaped into a traffic circle in the 1910s and 1920s as part of Jacques Greber's Benjamin Franklin Parkway plan. The Swann Memorial Fountain at the center, dedicated 1924, was sculpted by Alexander Stirling Calder, son of Alexander Milne Calder (sculptor of the Penn statue on City Hall). The only one of the four corner squares whose orthogonal geometry was altered.
Details
Best Time to Visit
Spring and early fall are the easiest months on the corridor. Late April through early June, the corner squares are in full leaf and Rittenhouse runs cool under its tree canopy; mid-September through late October, the same trees turn and the light at Logan Square in the afternoon is the clearest of the year for reading the Penn statue six blocks back down the Parkway. Summer days are humid and the City Hall plaza is exposed, but the early evening from about six o'clock onward is one of the best times to read the masonry tower against a softer sky. Winter mornings are uncrowded; January and February read the grid cleanly with the trees bare, and the seam between Penn's seventeenth-century plan and the twentieth-century skyscrapers along North Broad is most legible without summer foliage. Weekday mornings before about ten are the quietest at City Hall and on the Walnut Street walk between Rittenhouse and Washington. The Reading Terminal Market is busiest between eleven and two; arrive before eleven or after two if you want room to walk the aisles.
Pro Tips
- •Stop One reads best from the south plaza of City Hall, where you can see the full height of the tower and the Penn statue at the top in a single sightline. The four entrance arches under the building are open during weekday business hours; if you have time, walk through the central courtyard once before continuing to Stop Two.
- •The Stop Two intersection of Broad and Market is one of the busiest pedestrian crossings in Philadelphia. The corner where the audio asks you to stand is most workable as one of the four corners under the City Hall arches, where you have room to read all four cardinal directions without standing in traffic.
- •Stop Three, Rittenhouse Square, is dog-friendly and busy on weekends. The reflecting pool at the center is the cleanest single anchor for reading the square's geometry; the diagonal paths from Cret and Olmsted Jr.'s early-twentieth-century redesign converge near it.
- •Stop Four, Washington Square, is the quietest of the three squares on the corridor. Walk a slow circuit around the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier and read the inscriptions before continuing. The seventeen-ninety-three yellow-fever framing in the audio lands more clearly if you have stood on the lawn for a minute.
- •Stop Five, the Reading Terminal Market, is at its commercial peak between eleven in the morning and two in the afternoon. The audio reads the market as a building and a continuous use; if you want lunch from one of the counters, plan that as a sit-down after the audio finishes rather than mid-stop.
- •Stop Six reads the PSFS Building from the south side of Market Street, looking up at the rooftop sign and the ribbon windows. The interior of the building operates as the Loews Philadelphia Hotel and is publicly accessible at the lobby; the second-floor banking hall is one of the most-preserved Modernist interiors of the period if you have time to look inside.
- •Stop Seven, the Wanamaker Building, reads its interior best during the daily organ performances at noon and around five in the afternoon, six days a week. If your walk timing lets you arrive at noon, plan a few minutes in the Grand Court to hear the organ. The bronze eagle in the court center is the city's most-cited meeting place; the Meet me at the Eagle phrase is still in everyday use.
- •Stop Eight, Logan Square, reads the Parkway sightline back to City Hall most cleanly from the south side of the Swann Fountain, where the alignment between the fountain's central jet and the Penn statue six blocks east is direct. Late afternoon light brings out the bronze figures' detail.
Safety & Precautions
- •The corridor crosses major arterial streets at several stops. Broad and Market at Stop Two is a high-volume pedestrian crossing under City Hall; use the marked signals at the corners rather than crossing mid-block. The walk between Rittenhouse and Washington along Walnut Street and the walk along Arch Street to the Reading Terminal both cross numbered downtown streets with active traffic.
- •City Hall and its plazas are open public space with active municipal use; the courtyard arches and the southwest entrance to the Pennsylvania State Office Building sometimes have security screening during working hours. The audio tour does not enter any building requiring screening, but expect uniformed presence at the City Hall perimeter.
- •The Reading Terminal Market is busiest at lunch hour and on weekends and can feel crowded for travelers with mobility assistance or strollers. The market is fully accessible but the central aisles can bottleneck; the perimeter aisles along Twelfth and Filbert are quieter and equally legible for the Stop Five audio.
- •The Benjamin Franklin Parkway between City Hall and Logan Square has wide pedestrian-scale crossings but also continuous vehicle traffic. Use the marked crosswalks at Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth streets; the diagonal Parkway crossings can be confusing on first approach because the traffic flow does not match the orthogonal grid.
- •In summer, the City Hall plaza and the Parkway between it and Logan Square are exposed to direct sun with limited shade. Carry water for the Stop One and Stop Eight portions of the walk; Rittenhouse, Washington, and Logan Squares are all shaded but the connecting walks along Market and the Parkway are not.
Travel advisory: Exercise Normal Precautions (Level 1).
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Read the walk
The full story of Center City: William Penn's Three-Hundred-Forty-Three-Year Experiment, in words. Prefer to listen? Play it narrated, from home or on location.
Introduction
Center City Philadelphia is a seventeenth-century surveyor's drawing you can walk across. In sixteen eighty-two, an English Quaker named William Penn stepped off a ship onto the Delaware River. With a surveyor named Thomas Holme, he laid out a rectangle of streets between two rivers: Broad Street running north to south; a street first called High Street, later renamed Market, running east to west; a public square at every corner of the city; a fifth square at the geometric center. Holme published the plan in sixteen eighty-three. The grid is still running.
The wide streets were the experiment's first instrument. Penn belonged to a generation that had lived through the sixteen sixty-five plague of London and the sixteen sixty-six fire that followed. The wide streets and the five public squares were a seventeenth-century answer to plague and fire risk, drawn before there was a country to govern. Every American grid city descends in some part from this rectangle: Manhattan above Fourteenth Street, Chicago, Washington's quadrants, roughly two thousand smaller plats.
Hold two things about Penn while we walk. He was a Quaker pacifist whose treaty with the Lenape at Shackamaxon, with a leader named Tamanend, is held in Quaker memory and in contested historical record. He was also an English aristocrat whose Pennsylvania charter was a Crown grant in payment of a debt the Crown owed his father, and the rectangle he drew was drawn over Lenape land that was occupied without consent in any sense the twenty-first century would recognize. The grid is both. The transcript holds both.
The walk is eight stops, about three kilometres, and ninety minutes including stop dwell. City Hall is the warden of the experiment. The four corner squares are its surviving instruments.
When you arrive at Broad and Market on the south side of City Hall, begin with stop one.
1. Philadelphia City Hall: The Warden on Centre Square
You have arrived at City Hall on Broad and Market. Stand on the south side, on the plaza, and look up. The masonry tower above you rises five hundred and forty-eight feet to the top of the bronze figure at its apex. That figure is William Penn. The sculptor was Alexander Milne Calder. The statue was hoisted to the top of the tower in fourteen sections in eighteen ninety-four. Remember the sculptor's name. It returns at the end of the walk.
Here is the structural fact of where you are standing. Penn's original plan had five public squares: one at each corner of the city, one at the center. The square at the center was called Centre Square. It was the geographic heart of the rectangle Penn and Holme drew. The building behind you is built on it. The square was renamed Penn Square in the nineteenth century, and the city laid the cornerstone for City Hall in eighteen seventy-one. Construction took thirty years. The architects were John McArthur Jr., a Scottish-born American, and Thomas Ustick Walter, who had earlier worked on the United States Capitol. The style is French Second Empire. The building was completed in nineteen oh-one.
Now hold the size of the claim. City Hall is the world's largest free-standing masonry building. No steel skeleton. Load-bearing brick, marble, and limestone, stacked for thirty years to hold the weight. When the tower was finished in eighteen ninety-four, it was the tallest habitable building in the world. It held that record until the Singer Building in New York surpassed it in nineteen oh-eight. The building consumed the central square of Penn's plan and turned it from public green into civic stone.
This is the warden of the experiment. Not the villain. The nineteenth century built a thirty-year masonry monument on the seventeenth-century central square, and then the twentieth century did something even stranger. For ninety-two years after the Penn statue went up in eighteen ninety-four, no building in Philadelphia exceeded its height. There was no law. No zoning rule. Only an informal agreement among developers and architects that the founder's bronze hat would be the city's skyline ceiling. The agreement held until nineteen eighty-six and nineteen eighty-seven, when a tower called One Liberty Place rose to nine hundred and forty-five feet and broke it. For ninety-two years, the experiment was running not just on the ground but in the air.
Now turn around and face the intersection itself. Broad Street running north and south. Market Street running east and west. That corner is your next stop, and what looks like one thing is two.
2. Broad and Market: The Axis of the Grid
You have arrived at the intersection of Broad and Market. Stand on one of the four corners under City Hall's archways. Look down each direction in turn. Broad Street to your north, vanishing into the skyscrapers of the twenty-first-century corporate district. Broad to your south, running down toward the stadiums. Market to your east, running toward the Delaware River. Market to your west, running toward the Schuylkill.
This intersection looks like every busy downtown intersection in America. It is also two things at once.
What looks like one thing is two. This is an intersection. It is also the geometric center of an entire city plan. Every street you can see from this corner descends from a drawing made by Penn and Holme in sixteen eighty-two and sixteen eighty-three. Broad Street is the north-south spine of the grid. Market Street, which Holme called High Street, is the east-west spine. The two streets cross here because Penn put a public square at the geographic center of the city, and the nineteenth century built City Hall on top of it. The intersection is the axis. The axis is the experiment.
The streets you are standing on are wider than any colonial American street that came before them. That was not decorative. Penn belonged to the generation that had lived through the sixteen sixty-five plague of London and the sixteen sixty-six fire. Both events read in his lifetime as failures of dense, narrow, organic-medieval city plans. The wide streets and the orthogonal regularity of Penn's grid were drawn as a seventeenth-century answer to those failures. Air. Light. Fire breaks. Room for carts and pedestrians and the cleaning of the city. The plan was not a romance. It was infrastructure.
Now widen the frame. Every American grid city you can name inherits something from this corner. Manhattan above Fourteenth Street was laid out as the Commissioners' Plan in eighteen eleven. Chicago's grid. Washington's quadrants. Roughly two thousand smaller American towns plotted on rectangular surveys through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They did not all copy Penn directly. They inherited the discipline he and Holme made legible: that a city plan could be drawn before the city was built, on a rectangle, with public squares, with streets wide enough to breathe. The first time that argument was made on this continent, it was made here.
Now walk southwest along Walnut Street, about one kilometre, to Eighteenth and Walnut. The corner square called Rittenhouse is the next stop. It is one of the four Penn drew, and the only one whose neighborhood never changed register.
3. Rittenhouse Square: The Square That Held
You have arrived at Rittenhouse Square, the southwest corner square of Penn's plan. Walk into the square and stand near the central pool. Look around. Residential towers ring the park on all four sides. The Curtis Institute of Music sits on the western edge. There are benches, fountains, dogs, and old trees. On a weekday morning, you will see strollers and laptops. On a weekend, you will hear music students practicing as they walk to class.
Of the four corner squares that Penn and Holme drew, this is the one whose neighborhood never changed register. The southwest square sat at the edge of the eighteenth-century city, became the most fashionable residential address of the nineteenth century, attracted the early-twentieth-century apartment buildings you can see ringing the park, and held that residential continuity straight through to the present day. The squares at the other three corners each ran different experiments and arrived in different places. This one held.
The square was renamed in the nineteenth century after David Rittenhouse, a Philadelphia astronomer and clockmaker born in seventeen thirty-two, who built astronomical instruments for the American Philosophical Society and later served as the first director of the United States Mint. Rittenhouse was a Philadelphia kind of polymath: a craftsman who became a scientist who became a federal official. The square took his name long after his death, and the residential neighborhood that grew around it inherited a kind of civic gravity from the naming.
The square was redesigned in the early twentieth century by the French-born Philadelphia architect Paul Philippe Cret, working with Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the Olmsted who designed Central Park in New York. The reflecting pool, the diagonal paths, and the central plaza you are walking on came from that redesign. What did not change was the square's outline. Penn and Holme drew a rectangle. The rectangle is still a rectangle. Three centuries later.
This is the first laboratory bench. The southwest square ran one experiment: can a public square anchor a high-status residential neighborhood across centuries of urban change? The answer that this square gives is yes. The other three corner squares give different answers. The next square you will visit ran an entirely different experiment, on the same starting design.
Now walk east on Walnut Street, about one and a quarter kilometres, to Sixth and Walnut. The southeast corner square is the next stop. It is the burial ground.
4. Washington Square: The Square That Buried
You have arrived at Washington Square, the southeast corner square of Penn's plan. Walk into the square and stand near the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier in the center. Look at the statue of Washington in repose, the eternal flame, and the inscribed stone beneath…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
5. Reading Terminal Market: Three Centuries on One Block
You have arrived at the Reading Terminal Market on Twelfth and Arch. Walk inside through the main entrance, past the central clock, and stand in one of the wide aisles. The smell hits first. Coffee. Smoked meat. Fresh bread. Pretzels from the Amish counter. Take a moment to look…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
6. PSFS Building: The Grid Receives Modernism
You have arrived at the PSFS Building on Twelfth and Market. Stand on the south side of the street and look up. Four hundred and ninety-one feet of tower. Ribbon windows running horizontally across the upper stories. An asymmetric base that bends around the corner. The acronym…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
7. Wanamaker Building: The Retail Monument
You have arrived at the Wanamaker Building on Thirteenth and Market, immediately west of City Hall. If the doors are open and the day permits it, walk inside and stand in the Grand Court. If not, stand on the sidewalk and look up at the twelve-story limestone facade. The…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
8. Logan Square and Swann Memorial Fountain: The Amended Corner
You have arrived at Logan Square, the northwest corner square of Penn's plan. Stand on one of the four paths leading to the central fountain. Look at the basin in the middle. Three reclining bronze figures rise from the water, each holding a fish or pouring water from a vessel.…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.