which Strickland was the architect are the stock exchange, St Paul's Protestant Episcopal Church, St Stephen's Church, the almshouse and the United States Naval Asylum. The main building of Girard College (on Girard Avenue, between North 19th and North 25th streets), of which Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-1887), a pupil of Strickland's, was the architect, is one of the finest specimens of pure Greek architecture in America. Near the Schuylkill river, in West Philadelphia, are the buildings of the university of Pennsylvania. Its free museum of science and art, at South 23rd and Spruce, on the opposite side of the river, was built from the designs of Walter Cope, Frank Miles Day and Wilson Eyre, and its north-western part was first opened in 1899. Tall steel-frame structures, of which the Betz Building, completed in 1893, was the first, have become numerous. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, east of Logan Square, was begun in 1846 and was eighteen years in building. The Arch Street Methodist Episcopal Church is one of the most handsome churches in the city. The South Memorial Church of the Advocate (1897), on North 18th and Diamond streets, is a reproduction on a smaller scale of Amiens Cathedral.
Perhaps the most famous historical monument in the United States is Independence Hall, on Chestnut Street between Fifth and Sixth streets, designed for the state house by Andrew Hamilton (c. 1676-1741), speaker of the assembly, and was used for that purpose until 1799. The foundations were laid in 1731 and the main building was ready for occupancy in 1735, although the entire building was not completed until 1751. The steeple was taken down in 1774 but was restored by Strickland in 1828, and further restorations of the building to its original condition were effected later. In the east room on the first floor of this building the second Continental Congress met on the 10th of May 1775, George Washington was chosen commander-in-chief of the Continental army on the 15th of June 1775, and the Declaration of Independence was adopted on the 4th of July 1776. The room contains much of the furniture of those days, and on its walls are portraits of forty-five of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration and a portrait of Washington by Peale. At the head of the stairway is the famous Liberty bell, which bears the inscription, “Proclaim liberty through all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” and is supposed (without adequate evidence) to have been the first bell to announce the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. It was cast in England in 1752, was cracked soon after it was brought to America, was recast with more copper in Philadelphia, and was cracked again in 1835 while being tolled in memory of Chief Justice John Marshall, and on the 22nd of February 1843 this crack was so increased as nearly to destroy its sound. On the second floor is the original of the charter which William Penn granted to the city in 1701 and the painting of Penn's treaty with the Indians by Benjamin West. The building has been set apart by the city, which purchased it from the state in 1816, as a museum of historical relics. On the north-west corner of Independence Square is old Congress hall, in which Congress sat from 1790 to 1800, and in which Washington was inaugurated in 1793 and Adams in 1797. At the north-east corner is the old city-hall, on the second floor of which the Supreme Court of the United States sat from 1791 to 1900. A short distance east of Independence Square in Carpenters' Hall, in which the first continental congress assembled on the 5th of September 1774 and in which the national convention in 1787 framed the present constitution of the United States; the building was also the headquarters of the Pennsylvania committee of correspondence, the basement was used as a magazine for ammunition during the War of Independence, and from 1791 to 1797 the whole of it was occupied by the First United States Bank. The Carpenters' Company (established in 1724) erected the building in 1770, and since 1857 has preserved it wholly for its historic associations. On Arch Street near the Delaware is preserved as a national monument the house in which Betsy Ross, in 1777, made what has been called the first United States flag, in accordance with the resolution of Congress of the 14th of June. Not far from this house is Christ Church (Protestant Episcopal), a fine colonial edifice designed mainly by Dr John Kearsley (1684-1772). The corner stone was laid in 1727, but the steeple, in part designed by Benjamin Franklin and containing a famous chime of eight bells, was not completed until 1754. The interior was restored to its ancient character in 1882, the pews of Washington and Franklin are preserved, and a set of communion plate presented to the church by Queen Anne in 1708 is used on great occasions. In the churchyard are the graves of Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, Brigadier-General John Forbes, John Penn, Peyton Randolph, Francis Hopkinson and Benjamin Rush. St Peter's, the second Protestant Episcopal Church in the city, has a massive tower and a simple spire; within are the original pews. In the south-east part of the city near the Delaware is the ivy-clad Old Swedes' Church, built of brick in 1698-1700. The house which William Penn built about 1683 for his daughter Letitia was removed to Fairmount Park and rebuilt in 1883. In Germantown (q.v.), a suburb which was annexed in 1854, are several other historic buildings.
The dominant feature of the domestic architecture is the long rows, in street after street, of plain two-storey or three-storey dwellings of red (“Philadelphia”) pressed brick with white marble steps and trimmings, and with white or green shutters, each intended for one family.
Parks.—Fairmount Park extends along both banks of the Schuylkill for about 5 m. and from the confluence of the Schuylkill and Wissahickon Creek it continues up the latter stream through a romantic glen for 6 m. Its area is about 3418 acres. Five acres of an estate belonging to Robert Morris during the War of Independence and known as “Fair Mount,” or “The Hills,” were purchased by the municipality for “a city waterworks and for park purposes” in 1812, and from this beginning the park grew to its present dimensions by purchases and gifts. The principal buildings in the park are: the McPherson mansion, once the property of Benedict Arnold and in October 1780 confiscated by the committee of safety; the Peters (or Belmont) Mansion, built in 1745 and much frequented by the notables of the Revolutionary and early national period; the birth-place of David Rittenhouse, the astronomer, and a monastery of the German pietists, both on the banks of Wissahickon; and memorial hall and horticultural hall, both survivals of the centennial exhibition of 1876. On Lemon Hill, near the south end of the park, stands the Robert Morris mansion; in the vicinity is the cabin which was General U. S. Grant's headquarters at City Point, Virginia, during the winter of 1864-1865. Near the Columbia Avenue entrance to the park and near the East Park Reservoir are the children's playhouse and playground, endowed by the will of Mrs Sarah A. Smith (d. 1895). At the Green Street entrance is an imposing monument to Washington, designed by Rudolph Siemering and erected by the Society of the Cincinnati in 1896-1897, with a bronze equestrian statue. The Smith Memorial entrance, white granite with bronze statues, was erected in memory of the officers of the Civil War. The park also contains[1] a monument to Lincoln by Randolph Rogers; an equestrian statue of Grant by Daniel Chester French and Edward C. Potter; an equestrian statue of Major-General James Gordon Meade by Alexander Milne Calder; an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc by Emmanuel Fremiet; an heroic bust of James A. Garfield by Augustus St Gaudens; statues of Columbus, Humboldt, Schiller and Goethe; a Tam O' Shanter group of four figures in red sandstone by James Thorn; John J. Boyle's “Stone Age in America”; Cyrus Edwin Dallin's “Medicine Man”; Wilhelm Wolff's “Wounded Lioness” (at the entrance to the Zoological Gardens); Albert Wolff's “Lion Fighter”; Auguste Nicolas Cain's “Lioness bringing a Wild Boar to her Cubs”; Edward Kemeys's “Hudson Bay Wolves”; Frederick Remington's “Cow Boy”; and several artistic fountains, and a Japanese temple-gate. In the down-town district, Franklin, Washington, Rittenhouse and Logan squares, equidistant from the city-hall, have been reserved for public parks from the founding of the city; in Rittenhouse Square is the bronze “Lion and Serpent” of A. L. Barye. In Clarence H. Clark Park, West Philadelphia, is Frank Edwin Elwell's group “Dickens and Little Nell.” In Broad and Spring Garden streets opposite the Baldwin Locomotive Works is Herbert Adams's statue of Matthias William Baldwin (1795-1866), founder of the works. Close to the bank of the Delaware, some distance N.N.E. of the city-hall, is the small Penn Treaty Park with a monument to mark the site of the great elm tree under which Penn, according to tradition, negotiated his treaty with the Indians in 1683. In the south-west part of the city, along the Schuylkill, is Bartram's botanical garden (27 acres), which the city
- ↑ Many of the statues and other works of art in Fairmount and other parks are the gift of the Fairmount Park Art Association (1871; reorganized in 1888 and 1906).
