Mount Airy was named for wealthy colonial merchant William Allen's long-demolished summerhouse. The area's portion of Germantown Avenue contains churches for new middle-class congregations by architects such as Rankin and Kellogg. They designed the antihierarchical auditorium-plan...
The change from middle-class Mount Airy to elite Chestnut Hill is signaled by a railroad bridge, a war memorial, and a small creek that converge where Cresheim Valley Road intersects the great Germantown Avenue. A more prepossessing entrance occurs where Cresheim Valley Road crosses...
The west side of Chestnut Hill west of Germantown Avenue is the site of most of the more architecturally important houses. A walk along W. Chestnut Hill Avenue and then Seminole Avenue to St. Martin's Lane provides an overview of the best. Houses built of local Wissahickon schist...
The zones described so far comprise less than a quarter of the 130 square miles of contemporary Philadelphia. A very nearly as complete a history could be constructed of the regions and buildings left out of this volume. The vast tract of...
The southern end of Philadelphia was largely marsh until it was filled as a part of the project to create a site for the Sesquicentennial Exposition in 1926. The most important cluster of buildings is in the former U.S. Naval Yard that occupied League Island. This has...
William Penn's original settlement zone in Pennsylvania extended from the lower counties, now the state of Delaware, to the first great bend of the Delaware River north of Philadelphia where Penn's own estate of Pennsbury ( BU16) was...
The first of William Penn's three original counties and the only one to retain its full size, Bucks County was established in the first survey of 1682. Its name derives from the English abbreviation for Buckinghamshire, the county of Penn's ancestors in England, and Bucks County became...
In one of the fortunate juxtapositions that make Bucks County so remarkable, a trip to elite and singular Andalusia ( BU2) can be followed almost immediately by the mass-housing model of the twentieth century—Levittown. The...
Bucks County had four important Delaware River ports: Bristol, to the south, served the largest oceangoing vessels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the nineteenth century became the terminus of the Delaware Canal. Fallsington just to the north marks the fall...
Because of its position on the deep water portion of the Delaware River and its proximity to Philadelphia, Bristol was the first county seat of Bucks County. The democratic urge perhaps stimulated by the bottom-up structure of Quaker meetings soon led to the removal of county...
Named for the nearby falls of the Delaware, Fallsington was bypassed by development in the nineteenth century as river travel was channeled to the Delaware Division of the canal and to railroads, and later highways missed the village. In the twentieth century, the core...
New Hope is another Delaware River town that had its beginnings as a river port. Ferries and an early toll bridge provided connections to New Jersey and are marked by River, Ferry, and Bridge streets that reveal the shifting sequence of transportation systems from barge to ferry, to...
Newtown was the second seat of Bucks County, serving in that role from 1726 until 1813. The town's handsome square plan recalls Philadelphia in its rigorous grid but lacks the secondary public squares. After the Revolution, the village streets were renamed for William Penn...
The continuing democratic imperative to equalize distances to government led to centrally located Doylestown being named the county seat in 1813. A government center was added to the original cluster of markets and taverns at the intersection of State and Main streets....
Montgomery County was established in 1784 by partitioning the northwest arm of Philadelphia County just beyond where Germantown Avenue crossed Wissahickon Creek. It was formed as a convenience for residents of Philadelphia County's northern corner, who were more than a day's...
The first buildings of Lower Merion were constructed when it was part of Philadelphia County and reflected the diverse origins of English, Welsh, and German settlers. A network of roads was focused on crossings of the Schuylkill River into Philadelphia, linking...
As it passes through Bryn Mawr, Lancaster Avenue contains surprisingly modest shops and restaurants while the surrounding neighborhoods are among the wealthiest in the state. The town's central role was planned in the early 1870s by the leaders of the Pennsylvania...
The impetus for the growth of industrial river towns was the construction of the Schuylkill Canal by the Schuylkill Navigation Company (1816–1824) that made the river passable by sizeable cargo boats and also made it possible to divert...
With the subdivision of Montgomery County from Philadelphia, Norristown (originally known as Norriton) was laid out as the new county seat in 1785 by surveyor William Moore Smith, son of the provost of the University of Pennsylvania. His plan provided for a public...
John Potts laid out his town on the Philadelphia plan in 1753 with streets paralleling the Schuylkill riverfront variously named for trees (Chestnut, Walnut, Beech) and royal titles (King, Queen), and a central High Street intersecting cross streets named for both local royalty (Penn...
The hinterlands of Montgomery County occupy the core of the plateau between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Northwest Montgomery County is a checkerboard of township names, some German (Hanover, Frederick), some Welsh (Gwynned, North...
The area of Montgomery County between the arms of Philadelphia has much of the flavor of the late-nineteenth-century Main Line, but with different architects reflecting the distinct social caste of nouveau riche rather than old Quaker and industrial Philadelphia. Ambler,...
As the nineteenth century ended, Philadelphia's moneyed classes split into distinct groups that reflected social affiliation and heritage. The old elites developed Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia and the middle Main Line, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Rosemont, while the...
The area now encompassed by Delaware County was originally a part of Chester County, one of the three counties laid out by surveyor general Thomas Holme in 1683. Because of its location on the Delaware River between Philadelphia and the other Swedish and Dutch settlements, Delaware...
Chester is now a sad ruin of the wealthy nineteenth-century industrial city that arose out of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlement and port village. The kernel of the original settlement was located on the banks of Chester Creek where the 1724 county...
Media was little more than a crossroads village until 1847 when, because of its central location within the county and on the chief road, Baltimore Pike (U.S. 1), it was designated the county seat. Joseph Fox laid out the town in 1847 following the Pennsylvania model of a...
The Delaware County border along Philadelphia's western edge takes on different manifestations depending on the nature of the area. Philadelphia ends in an explosion of row houses stimulated by the early-twentieth-century construction of the Market-Frankford Elevated...
The western Main Line that passes through the middle of Delaware County became a region of large properties that shifted from gentlemen's farms to gentlemen's estates at the end of the nineteenth century. It was here that new money became old in houses designed by the...
Lancaster Avenue is Wayne's main street and in the past few years has become a thriving commercial district in the center of what Wayne native and journalist David Brooks, in Bobos in Paradise (2000), tells us is a “Latte-town.” The town center developed near the...
Despite losing a third of its territory and its Delaware River frontage following the subdivision of Delaware County, Chester County remains the largest in area of the five counties of William Penn's initial settlement. Like Bucks County, Chester County's economy is primarily...
