How America's Most Powerful City Quietly Lost Everything: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]In 1882, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest corporation in the world.

[00:00:05]Not the largest railroad, the largest corporation, period. Its budget exceeded that of the United States government.

[00:00:12]Its workforce numbered a quarter of a million people and its headquarters sat on Broad Street in Philadelphia in a Gothic train station designed by a Civil War Medal of Honor recipient named Frank Fernesse where 16 tracks fed into a single shed with the widest roof span of any station on Earth. That building is gone now. It was torn down in 1953.

[00:00:35]Where it stood, there's an office plaza and a historical marker. But in 1882, if you wanted to understand where American money lived, where American industry breathed, where the deals were made that moved wheat and steel and coal across a continent, you came to Broad Street. The story of how that happened starts almost exactly two centuries earlier with a debt and a dreamer. In 1681, King Charles II of England owed money to the estate of Admiral William Penn. The admiral had died, and his son, also William, but a very different man, was a Quaker, a pacifist, a man who'd been thrown in prison for his religious writings. Instead of collecting the debt in cash, the younger Penn accepted something far stranger. 45,000 square miles of wilderness across the Atlantic.

[00:01:23]It was at the time the largest land grant to a private individual in history. Penn named it Pennsylvania, Penn's Woods, and immediately set about doing something almost no colonial founder had ever done. He planned the city before he built it.

[00:01:39]Penn arrived in October 1682 aboard a ship called the Welcome. The crossing had taken 57 days, and a smallox outbreak had killed nearly a third of the passengers. But Penn had already drawn up a grid, already named his streets after trees, chestnut, walnut, spruce, pine, and already set aside five public squares in a symmetrical pattern, one at the center and one in each quadrant because he wanted his city to breathe. He called it Philadelphia, borrowing the name from an ancient Greek city, and it means what everyone says it means, brotherly love. He called the whole venture his holy experiment. And here's the thing that distinguished Penn's experiment from every other colonial enterprise on the continent. He opened the door not just to English Quakers, but to German Lutheran, Dutch Menanites, French Hugenats, Swedish settlers who were already there, and really anyone willing to work and tolerate their neighbors. He even learned the language of the Lapi people and insisted on purchasing land from them through negotiation rather than simply claiming it by royal charter. The result was predictable in hindsight, but astonishing at the time. People came. By 1700, Philadelphia's population surpassed Boston's. By 1750, it was the largest city in the colonies. By the time the Continental Congress gathered in 1774, Philadelphia was the obvious place to do it. Not because it was the oldest city or the most English, but because it was the most prosperous, the most diverse, and the most connected.

[00:03:12]Now, most people know the revolutionary chapter, Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, the Declaration, the Constitution.

[00:03:20]Philadelphia served as the nation's capital from 1790 to 1800. And during those years, it was the financial center of the country as well. The first bank of the United States opened on Third Street in 1797, a marble-faced neocclassical building that still stands, one of the oldest bank buildings in America. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange, founded in 1790, was the first in the nation. Benjamin Franklin, who had adopted the city as his own in 1723, had already turned it into a capital of practical invention, the lending library, the Volunteer Fire Company, the American Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania. By the time of his death in 1790, Philadelphia was synonymous with both commerce and learning, a city that believed you could make money and make sense of the world at the same time. But what fewer people appreciate is how quickly after the federal government moved to Washington, Philadelphia pivoted. It didn't mourn the loss of political power. It went to work. The pivot was industrial and it happened because of two rivers. The Delaware, broad and tidal, connected the city to the Atlantic. The shelkill, narrower and faster, powered the mills.

[00:04:31]By the 1820s, textile factories were multiplying along both water courses and in the neighborhoods in between. Coal came down from the anthraite fields of northeastern Pennsylvania by canal and then by rail, cheap enough to fuel anything. And the genius of Philadelphia's industrial economy, the thing that would sustain it for a century, was its diversity. This was not a one industry town. By the middle of the 19th century, Philadelphia made locomotives, ships, hats, carpets, cigars, pharmaceuticals, saws, sugar, and beer. 700 separate companies were producing textiles alone by 1900, and textile workers still represented only a quarter of the city's industrial workforce. If one sector stumbled, others kept humming. The business logic was diversity as insurance. And for decades it worked. Consider what was happening on Broad Street in the 1870s.

[00:05:30]The city had just pulled off something extraordinary. The 1876 Centennial Exposition, the first World's Fair held in the United States. The idea had come from a college professor in Indiana of all people, who wrote to the mayor of Philadelphia in 1866, suggesting the country ought to celebrate its 100th birthday in the city where it was born.

[00:05:53]Philadelphia took him up on it. Congress was reluctant to spend the money. The country was still reeling from the Civil War and reconstruction. So, the city of Philadelphia put up a million half dollars. The state added a million and Congress eventually came through with a loan of another million and a half, which the city had to repay. Nearly 250 buildings were constructed across 285 acres of Fairmont Park. All designed almost entirely by a 27-year-old German immigrant architect named Herman Schwarzman. President Ulissiz Grant opened the gates on May 10th, 1876 to a crowd of a 100,000. Over the next 6 months, nearly 10 million visitors poured through to see what America had become a century after its founding.

[00:06:37]They saw Alexander Graanbell demonstrate the telephone. They saw the coreless steam engine, a 40-foot mechanical marvel that powered every exhibit in machinery hall through an underground network of shafts and pulleys. They saw the right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty, still a decade away from completion, standing alone on the fairground like a strange monument to the future. They saw the Remington typewriter, Thomas Edison's automatic telegraph, and exhibits from 37 nations.

[00:07:06]The whole production cost over 11 million dollars. What the visitors took home with them, besides headaches and sore feet, was the impression that Philadelphia was not merely a historic city. It was a manufacturing titan. And the exposition itself drew something back to the city in return. Waves of immigrants who had seen what American industry looked like and wanted a part of it. And that Titan was building itself a throne. In 1871, construction had begun on a new city hall at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets, right on the center square that William Penn had set aside two centuries before. The architect was a Scottishborn Philadelphiaian named John MacArthur Jr.

[00:07:45]who designed it in the French Second Empire style. Mansard roofs, elaborate cornises, columns upon columns. The plan was grandiose. The building would be the tallest in the world. It would contain nearly 700 rooms. Its walls in places would be 22 feet thick, made of brick and granite and marble with no steel framing at all. Pure masonry, the largest freestanding masonry building ever constructed. 88 million bricks went into its skeleton. The cost, by the time it was finished 30 years later, reached $24 million, something like 700 million in today's money, bloated by corruption and delay. MacArthur himself didn't live to see his building completed. He died in 1890, 11 years before the interior was finished, and by the time City Hall opened in 1901, its architecture was already considered hideously out of date. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it an architectural monstrosity and argued it should be torn down. Fashion had moved on, but the building hadn't, and it couldn't because you cannot easily demolish a structure made of 88 million bricks and walls thick enough to drive a carriage through. In the 1950s, the city council actually investigated tearing it down and discovered the demolition would cost roughly as much as the construction had. So, it stayed. And at its top, 548 ft above the street, Alexander Mil Calder's 37 ft bronze statue of William Penn gazed out over the city his father's debtor had imagined. For decades afterward, a gentleman's agreement held that no building in Philadelphia would rise above the brim of Penn's hat. Remember that agreement. We'll come back to it.

[00:09:26]While city hall inched toward completion, the real energy of the city was concentrated a few blocks south and east in the industrial districts that sprawled along both rivers and deep into North Philadelphia. The Baldwin locomotive works, founded in 1831 by a jeweler named Matias Baldwin, who saw a business opportunity in the new railroad craze, had grown into something colossal. Baldwin's first locomotive, Old Ironsides, was a 5-tonon contraption with wooden spokes and a top speed of 28 mph. He handed the cylinders with a chisel fixed in a block of wood. By the 1880s, Baldwin employed 3,000 men and was shipping 600 locomotives a year to railroads in Russia, Central Europe, and Australia. By 1906, the peak year, the factory on Broad Street turned out over 2600 locomotives with a workforce of 18,000 running around the clock in shifts. The complex sprawled across eight city blocks from Broad to 18th Street, from Spring Garden to the Reading tracks past Noble Street, 70 buildings. the largest locomotive factory in the world, producing machines that were sold on six continents. And Baldwin wasn't even the most famous manufacturer in town. That distinction, at least in the popular imagination, might belong to John B. Stson, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1865 with $60 borrowed from his sister and a one room hat repair shop at 7th and Callahill.

[00:10:54]Stson had been a Hatter's son in New Jersey, had gone west for his health, and had come back east with an idea for a wide-brimmed, high-cowned hat made of felted fur. He called it the boss of the Plains, and he let the product speak for itself. He didn't send advertisements to Western merchants. He sent hats. By 1874, he'd moved his operation to a 9 acre campus in Kensington. By the turn of the century, the Stson factory employed over 5,000 workers and occupied nearly a million and a half square feet, the largest hat factory in the world.

[00:11:27]Stson paid above scale wages, offered profit sharing, built a free hospital on the factory grounds, provided below market rate mortgages through a company building and loan association, and held weekly orchestra concerts in a 5,500 seat auditorium, the largest in Philadelphia when it opened in 1906, 3 months after Stson himself died. He gave Christmas bonuses, hats for single men, turkeys for married men, gloves, and candy for women. None of this generosity was accidental. It was a strategy and an effective one. It kept his workers loyal and his factory non-union. Between 1947 and 1968, Stson's revenues would fall from $29 million to about 8 million, a casualty of the Hatless era. The Philadelphia plant closed in 1971. The auditorium, the gymnasium, the clock tower, they burned in 1980. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Down on the Delaware waterfront in the Kensington neighborhood, another dynasty was rising. William Cramp, the son of German immigrants, had opened a small shipyard in 1830, building wooden vessels with a handful of workers. His sons joined him, and by the 1890s, William Cramp and Sunship, an engine building company, employed 5,000 men. It was on par with Harland and Wolf in Belfast, the builders of the Titanic. In November 1894, 25,000 people surged through the gates of the Cramp Yard to watch the launching of the SS St. Louis, the largest passenger liner yet built in the United States, 11,000 tons, powered by twin steam engines, nearly two football fields long. President Grover Cleveland was in the crowd. The first lady christened the ship. The yard had already launched the USS Indiana, the first true battleship in the United States Navy, and the USS Baltimore, whose construction cost over $1.5 million.

[00:13:23]Cramp built vessels comprised three of the five capital ships that defeated the Spanish fleet at Santiago de Cuba in 1898. The Imperial Russian Navy was so impressed it commissioned a state-of-the-art cruiser, the Variag, from the Philadelphia yard. Smoke stacks soared above Kensington's rowouses. A railroad ran through the building so finished components could be wheeled out across Richmond Street directly to the docks. By 1900, the city's population had reached 1.3 million. It had more than doubled since 1860, fed by wave after wave of immigration. Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and later black southerners who came north looking for factory work and a measure of dignity.

[00:14:07]The Italian population alone surged from 516 in 1870 to over 76,000 by 1910.

[00:14:15]These people didn't just fill the factories. They built neighborhoods with their own churches, their own newspapers, their own commercial streets. South Philadelphia became Italian. Kensington was Irish. German Town predictably German. The northern liberties mixed everyone together. Each neighborhood had its own economy, its own identity, its own way of walking to work. And at the center of all of it, literally, physically, at the intersection of the two grand avenues, was Broad Street, which by the early 20th century had become Philadelphia's spine. Broad Street ran north south through the city, straight as a rifle barrel, and along its length clustered the institutions that defined what Philadelphia believed itself to be.

[00:15:01]Start at City Hall, that hulking second empire wedding cake, and walk south. You pass the Masonic Temple, a Norman Gothic fantasy completed in 1873. You reach the Academy of Music, which opened in 1857 and is still the oldest grand opera house in the United States that's continuously used for its original purpose. Its interior was modeled after Lascala in Milan and when it opened it seated 2900 then the Belleview Stratford Hotel. The Belleview Stratford deserves its own paragraph because it was for half a century the social and political headquarters of the city. It opened in September 1904. Built for the astonishing sum of $8 million by a Prussian immigrant named George C. Bolt who had previously managed the Waldorf Histori in New York. The architects George W. and William D. Hewitt gave it a French Renaissance exterior with mansard roofs and elaborate dormers rising 19 stories above broad and walnut. A thousand rooms, marbleized columns, guilt ornament, brass and opolescent glass chandeliers. 15 presidents stayed there, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt. They called it the Grand Dame of Broad Street, and the name was earned. The Belleview Stratford was where Philadelphia's establishment held its charity balls. its society weddings, its political meetings, a United Nations conference in 1943, a pan-American organization meeting in 1945, the Republican National Convention of 1940.

[00:16:34]If you were a dealmaker, a politician, or someone who needed to be seen in the right room, this was the room.

[00:16:40]Meanwhile, a few blocks east, John Waker was building something equally ambitious, but aimed at an entirely different audience. Womaker had opened his first clothing store in 1861, and by 1876, he'd purchased an abandoned Pennsylvania railroad depot at 13th and Market and converted it into a grand depot, essentially the first department store in Philadelphia. In 1910, he tore that down and built something far grander, a 12story granite palace designed by Daniel Burnham of Chicago, the architect of the Flat Iron Building and Washington's Union Station. The new W maker store encompassed an entire city block. Its heart was a seven-story marbleclad atrium called the Grand Court of Honor, 149 ft from floor to ceiling.

[00:17:29]President William Howard Taft dedicated the building on December 30th, 1911. But the Grand Court's most extraordinary feature was its organ. John Wanaker had purchased the world's largest pipe organ from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair where it had amazed visitors with its 10,000 pipes. It took 13 freight cars to transport the instrument to Philadelphia and two years to install it. It was first played on June 22nd, 1911 at the exact moment King George V was being crowned at Westminster Abbey. Womaker liked his symbolism, but the organ still wasn't loud enough to fill the sevenstory space. So, Womaker opened a private organ workshop in the store's attic, employing up to 40 full-time craftsmen. And over the next two decades, they added another 18,000 pipes, bringing the total to nearly 29,000.

[00:18:21]It became the largest fully functioning pipe organ in the world, and it still is. For more than a century, it has been played twice a day, its sound filling the Grand Court with the power of three symphony orchestras. Generations of Philadelphiaians learned to say as a way of making plans downtown, "Meet me at the eagle." The bronze eagle sculpture also acquired from the St. Louis fair that stood on the main floor beneath the organ. This was Philadelphia at its zenith. The population hit 1.8 million in 1920 and nearly 2 million by 1930.

[00:18:58]Consider what it meant to live here. You could walk from your row house in Kensington to the cramp shipyard and build warships for the Navy. You could ride the trolley from Germantown to the Stson factory and make hats that cowboys wore in Montana. You could take the Broad Street subway, opened in 1928, one of the first subway lines south of New York, downtown to shop at W Makers, hear the organ, and take the elevator to the Crystal Tea Room on the 9th floor for lunch. Your children went to public schools built of stone and meant to last. Your newspaper arrived twice a day. The Morning Inquirer and the Evening Bulletin, which by midentury would become the largest circulation evening paper in the United States, selling over 700,000 copies daily. On Saturday nights in autumn, you might walk to Shybeay Park, later renamed Connie Stadium, to watch the Athletics or the Phillies in a concrete and steel ballpark with a French Renaissance facade on Lehi Avenue. On New Year's Day, you watch the Mummers strut down Broad Street in sequins and feathers, a tradition stretching back to colonial era celebrations that remains improbably alive. The Pennsylvania Railroad made all of this possible, and the railroad knew it. The Pensy wasn't just headquartered in Philadelphia. It was Philadelphia in a way that no single corporation has ever been a city. It operated over 10,000 m of track across 13 states. It employed over 215,000 people. It paid dividends to its shareholders for more than a 100 consecutive years, a record that still stands. It merged with, owned, or leased more than 800 other railway lines. At its peak, the PRR carried nearly three times the freight traffic of any comparably sized railroad in the country. It called itself the standard railroad of the world, and nobody laughed because it was true. When the railroad decided in the late 1920s to build a new station west of the Skookill River, it didn't build a station. It built a monument. 30th Street Station opened in stages starting in 1933.

[00:21:02]A neocclassical colossus with Corinthian columns, coffford ceilings, and travertine walls. Its waiting room so vast the railroad's own promotional materials compared it to the baths of Caracala in Rome. The message was unmistakable. This railroad, this city would endure. 578 trains a day had been arriving at Broad Street Station by 1910. The city's industrial output was staggering in its breadth. Textiles, chemicals, metals, furniture, pharmaceuticals, ships, locomotives, hats, sugar, beer, cigars, printed goods. The Reading Terminal Market, housed in a train shed dating to 1893, was feeding the city with Pennsylvania Dutch specialties, artisan cheeses, fresh produce from Lancaster County.

[00:21:52]Electric street cars crisscrossed every neighborhood. The city felt complete, the way a prosperous household feels when every room is furnished and every lamp is lit. But even at the peak, the seeds of what came next were already in the ground. The Pennsylvania Railroad's Broad Street Station, magnificent as it was, had a fatal design flaw. It was a stub end terminal. Long-d distanceance trains couldn't pass through. They had to back out, adding as much as 45 minutes to certain routes. The nineblock elevated vioaduct that carried tracks from the station west to the school.

[00:22:26]Philadelphiaians called it the Chinese wall, biseected the heart of the city, blocking light and development on the north side of Market Street. The railroad knew this was a problem as early as 1910, which is why it began building 30th Street Station and Suburban Station as alternatives. What no one yet understood was that solving the train problem would erase the building that had defined the city's center for 70 years. The other seed was subtler and more consequential. The city's tax structure, its geography, its politics.

[00:22:59]Philadelphia had consolidated its city and county governments back in 1854, which at the time was visionary. It doubled the population overnight and brought enormous swaths of land under a single municipal authority. But by the 20th century, this meant there was no suburban ring for the city to annex as population grew outward. Unlike cities in the south and west that could expand their borders, Philadelphia was locked into its 1854 footprint. When people left the city, they left the tax base and the city had no way to follow them.

[00:23:31]And people did begin to leave. The automobile made it possible. The suburbs were quieter, greener, newer. The GI Bill after World War II made home ownership in places like Levittown, built just north of the city, attainable for millions who'd never imagined owning property. The interstate highway system, begun in 1956, made commuting practical.

[00:23:54]The same roads that were supposed to connect the city to the rest of the country also made it easy to drive past.

[00:23:59]The population peaked in 1950 at just over 2.07 million. Then it began to fall, not dramatically at first. a decline of about 69,000 by 1960. Then faster, over 120,000 lost in the 1960s.

[00:24:16]Over 260,000 in the 1970s. By 2000, the city held 1.5 million people, a loss of more than half a million from its peak, a decline of nearly 27%.

[00:24:30]The great factories went quiet one by one, each for its own particular reason.

[00:24:36]The cramp shipyard, idled in 1927 after the Washington Naval Treaty cut demand for warships, reopened briefly during World War II with $22 million in government money and 18,000 workers, then closed for good when the war ended.

[00:24:52]The last remaining cramp building was demolished in early 2011 to make way for an I95 interchange. Baldwin locomotive had started moving production to a larger plant in Eddie, 15 mi south. as early as 1906. The Broad Street complex was vacated by the late 1920s. Baldwin declared bankruptcy in 1938, merged, struggled, and ceased production entirely in 1956. 70,000 locomotives built over 125 years, and then silence.

[00:25:24]The company's 60th,000th commemorative locomotive sits today in the Franklin Institute, a few blocks from where it was built. The Stson factory held on longer than most, finally ceasing operations in 1971, defeated by the simple fact that American men had stopped wearing hats.

[00:25:43]The company donated its 9 acre campus to the city in 1977.

[00:25:48]Broad Street Station closed on April 27th, 1952.

[00:25:53]The last train out carried the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy conducting Al Lang Sign. Within a year, the wrecking crews arrived.

[00:26:03]Frank Feress's Gothic masterpiece, the largest passenger railroad terminal in the world when it opened with the widest single span train shed roof ever built, was reduced to rubble to make room for Penn Center. A development of modernist office towers that could have been built anywhere. The Chinese wall came down, too. You can argue it needed to come down, that it had strangled development for decades. You'd be right. But the building that anchored it didn't need to be destroyed. It was destroyed because in 1953, nobody in Philadelphia valued Frank Feress.

[00:26:40]They would later. The architectural critics would later call him one of the most inventive architects in American history. The man who influenced Lewis Sullivan, who influenced Frank Lloyd Wright. By then, the building was a parking lot. The Belleview Stratford hung on, its grandeur slowly tarnishing through the depression, the 1940s, the 1950s, as the clientele it had been built for moved to the suburbs, or died.

[00:27:07]In 1976, the hotel earned a grim kind of fame when 35 members of the American Legion died after attending a convention there. The cause turned out to be a previously unknown bacterium breeding in the air conditioning system. The disease was named Legionnaire's disease after the incident. The hotel was ordered shut down immediately. It reopened, closed again, was gutted and renovated, changed hands and names repeatedly. A $100 million was eventually spent restoring what had cost 8 million to build. Today, it operates as a Hyatt with offices on the lower floors and hotel rooms only on the top eight. The Grand Dame of Broad Street is still there, but she's been subdivided. And here is where the gentleman's agreement comes back. For nearly a century, no building in Philadelphia rose above the brim of William Penn's hat 548 ft above the street. It was never a law, just an understanding, an unspoken compact between the city and its founder. Then in 1987, developer Willard Rouse completed one Liberty Place, a steel and glass skyscraper that soared 945 ft into the sky, nearly 400 ft above Penn's head. The skyline changed overnight. to Liberty Place followed in 1990. Other towers came after. Philadelphia sports fans who are nothing if not superstitious noted that no major professional team won a championship for the next 21 years and blamed the violation on what they called the curse of Billy Penn. In 2007, during the topping off of the Comcast Center, two construction workers named John Joyce and Dan Ginon affixed a small figurine of Penn to the highest beam. The following year, the Phillies won the World Series. When the Comcast Technology Center was completed in 2017, another Penn Statueette went up. Nobody wanted to take the chance. But the curse, if that's what it was, had deeper causes than a broken skyline. The Pennsylvania Railroad, that colossus, that standard of the world, that corporation whose budget had once exceeded the federal government's reported its first net loss in 1946.

[00:29:16]The automobile and the airplane were eating its passenger traffic. Trucking was taking its freight. The interstate highways that crisscrossed its territory carried goods faster and cheaper than rail. In 1968, desperate and diminished, the Pensy merged with its old rival, the New York Central, to form Penn Central Transportation.

[00:29:38]It was supposed to be a rescue. It was a disaster. Duplicate roots, incompatible computer systems, and catastrophic mismanagement consumed whatever was left. On June 21st, 1970, less than two years after the merger, Penn Central filed for bankruptcy. It was at that moment the largest bankruptcy in American history. The reverberations were enormous. Multiple other Mid-Atlantic railroads followed Penn Central into insolveny, including the Reading. The federal government had to create Amtrak in 1971 to salvage passenger service and Conrail in 1976 to take over freight. By 1998, when Conrail itself was split between Norfolk, Southern and CSX, it marked the first time since the 1830s that no major railroad was headquartered in Philadelphia. The Standard Railroad of the world had vanished from the city that built it. The tax base continued to erode. The manufacturing economy had migrated south overseas or simply vanished. The wage tax Philadelphia levies won on everyone who works in the city, residents and commuters alike, was originally imposed in 1939 and has been rising ever since, giving businesses a persistent reason to locate just beyond the city line. Between 1950 and 2000, the city lost twothirds of its industrial jobs and virtually all of its greatest firms. The Navyyard, once one of the largest naval installations in the world, was decommissioned in 1996.

[00:31:07]The street car stopped running on most lines. The newspaper shrank. The Bulletin, once the largest circulation evening paper in America, folded in 1982. The department stores that had made Market Street a destination, Womakers, Strawbridge and Cloier, Gimbals, Lit Brothers, closed or were absorbed by chains that didn't understand what they'd bought. Womakers itself passed through a bewildering succession of owners. Sold in 1995, rebranded as Hex, then Lord and Taylor, then Straw Bridges, then Macy's. The Macy's store finally closed in March 2025, leaving the Grand Court and its 29,000pipe organ with an uncertain future. The building is a national historic landmark. The organ is a protected interior feature under Philadelphia's preservation laws. But a landmark without a purpose is a building waiting for someone to decide what it means. There's a particular quality to walking Broad Street now that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't done it.

[00:32:10]The scale is still there. The buildings are still enormous. The avenue is still wide. City Hall still anchors the whole composition with its absurd, beautiful, indestructible mass. The Academy of Music still hosts the opera. The Kimmel Center, opened in 2001, brought a new concert hall to the Avenue. The corridor from City Hall South to Washington Avenue has been rebranded the Avenue of the Arts. And on a good night, when the theaters are lit and the restaurants are full, you can feel something of what the street once meant. But the factories are gone, the shipyard is gone, the locomotive works is gone, the hat factory is gone, the train station is gone. The population has stabilized. It actually grew slightly between 2000 and 2010, the first increase in 60 years, driven by immigration and by young professionals drawn to a housing market that was, by northeastern standards remarkably cheap, but it hasn't recovered anything close to what was lost. The city that held 2 million people in 1950 holds about 1.55 million today. What remains is the grid. William Penn's grid, Thomas Holmes grid. Those straight streets running east west between two rivers named for trees that were growing here before anyone imagined a factory or a railroad or a skyscraper.

[00:33:33]Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, Pine. The five squares Penn set aside are still parks.

[00:33:40]Written House, Washington, Franklin, Logan, and Penn square, where City Hall sits, right where Penn always intended a public building to be, though he could never have imagined this one. The Reading Terminal Market is still open, still crowded on Saturday mornings, still selling scrapple and soft pretzels and Amish baked goods in a train shed that predates everything around it.

[00:34:02]Writtenhouse Square in Spring is full of people who look like they have nowhere else to be. The Italian market on 9inth Street still hangs its produce outside, still fills the sidewalk with bins of peppers and eggplant and imported cheese, though now the signs are as likely to be in Spanish or Vietnamese as in Italian. The rowous, Philadelphia has more rowous than any city in America, still line the side streets in their endless brick ranks, many of them still owned by the families who bought them when a factory paycheck could cover a mortgage. The organ in the Grand Court is silent now, or nearly so. The building changed hands, and what comes next is anyone's guess. Whether the pipes will play again for shoppers who aren't there, or for concert audiences, or for no one at all. But the instrument itself hasn't changed. 29,000 pipes, some of them 120 years old, arranged across five stories of a sevenstory atrium in a building designed by the man who designed the Flat Iron. The console has six keyboards. The sound when it plays is the sound of a full orchestra or three orchestras filling a marble room that was built to sell dry goods and ended up holding something that no one involved in the transaction could have anticipated, a city's memory of itself. Broad Street runs north from City Hall into neighborhoods that were once so thick with factories, the smoke dimmed the sun. It runs south past the Academy and the Belleview and the old theaters into what used to be the most densely populated part of the city. At its intersection with Market Street, the building that took 30 years to build and couldn't be torn down, still stands, still holding its nearly 700 rooms, still bearing its 250 sculptures, still anchored by walls 22 ft thick. On top of it, Penn's statue, 53,000 pounds of bronze cast in 14 sections at the Takani Iron Works in 1894, faces northeast toward the river where he arrived on a ship called the Welcome in a city that did not yet exist with a plan for streets named after trees. is