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In 1916, Philadelphia department-store magnate John Wanamaker launched plans for a Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition in 1926. It would be a magnificent world's fair to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The “Sesqui” would also transform sooty, industrial Philadelphia into a beautiful Beaux Arts city. However, when the Sesqui opened on May 31, 1926, in the remote, muddy swamps of South Philadelphia, the fair was unfinished, with a few shabbily built and mostly empty structures. Crowds stayed away in droves: fewer than five million paying customers attended, costing the city millions of dollars. Philadelphia became a national scandal—a city so co...
Philadelphia, the birthplace of America, is the final resting place of some of the nation's greatest citizens. The burial grounds of Christ Church hold the remains of Benjamin Franklin and six other signers of the Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia pioneered the development of the rural cemetery with the establishment of Laurel Hill, eternal home to Gettysburg hero George Gordon Meade and thirty-nine other Civil War-era generals. In Philadelphia's Jewish, Catholic, and African American burial grounds rest such notable figures as Rebecca Gratz, model for the Jewish heroine of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe; John Barry, Catholic father of the U.S. Navy; and Octavius Catto, an African American civil-rights leader of the nineteenth century. Finally, there are the vanished cemeteries, such as Monument, Lafayette, and Franklin. Transformed into playgrounds and parking lots, these cemeteries were obliterated with sometimes horrific callousness. Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries tells the intriguing history of these burial grounds, whether revered or long forgotten.
During the Gilded Age, Rittenhouse Square was home to Philadelphia's high society, with more millionaires per square foot than any other American neighborhood except New York's Fifth Avenue. Established by William Penn in 1682 as the South-West Square and renamed after astronomer David Rittenhouse in 1825, Rittenhouse Square and its environs changed from an isolated district of brickyards and workers' shanties into the city's most elegant and elite neighborhood between 1845 and 1865. The brownstone and marble mansions on the square itself were inhabited by the city's wealthiest and most prestigious families, with names like Biddle, Cassatt, Drexel, Stotesbury, and Van Rensselaer. As Philadelphia's upper classes fled to the suburbs in the early 20th century, their mansions were replaced by skyscrapers or taken over by cultural institutions like the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Curtis Institute of Music. While only a few original residences remain on Rittenhouse Square, it is still the center of a lively upscale neighborhood.
How does a landmark become, after just a few generations, a landfill? In Forgotten Philadelphia, Thomas Keels takes the reader through a lavishly illustrated journey through three centuries of Philadelphia's architecture: what was built, how the public perceived the value of certain buildings, and why those buildings were eventually demolished. Keels does not simply lament the loss of buildings. Instead, he argues that in some cases there were good reasons to demolish places like the Broad Street Station; while some people today see this as a loss on par with the destruction of New York's Penn Station, at the time its demolition was to many a symbolic liberation from political corruption. In writing that celebrates Philadelphia past without ever being sentimental, Keels describes a city that was always reinventing itself, filled with people who always had a very measured view of the worth and beauty of its public architecture
Historian Thomas Keels tells many ribald stories in his book, "Wicked Philadelphia: Sin in the City of Brotherly Love," including various methods of body snatching and murder. --Marty Moss-Coane, WHYY-FM Prim and proper Philadelphia has been rocked by the clash between excessive vice and social virtue since its citizens burned the city's biggest brothel in 1800. With tales of grave robbers in South Philadelphia and harlots in Franklin Square, Wicked Philadelphia reveals the shocking underbelly of the City of Brotherly Love. In one notorious scam, a washerwoman masqueraded as the fictional Spanish countess Anita de Bettencourt for two decades, bilking millions from victims and even fooling the government of Spain. From the 1843 media frenzy that ensued after an aristocrat abducted a young girl to a churchyard transformed into a brothel (complete with a carousel), local author Thomas H. Keels unearths Philadelphia's most scintillating scandals and corrupt characters in this rollicking history.
Philadelphia is not only the birthplace of America but also the birthplace of America's consumer culture. From the Civil War until Vietnam, Philadelphia's thriving middle class made the city a mercantile mecca, home to some of America's largest and most innovative department and specialty stores. Market Street between Seventh Street and Philadelphia City Hall was lined with five major department stores: John Wanamaker, Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbels, Lit Brothers, and N. Snellenburg & Co. Here, shoppers could buy everything they needed to furnish their house from attic to basement, as well as the house itself. On nearby Chestnut and Walnut Streets, the carriage trade selected silver and jewelry at J.E. Caldwell & Co. and Bailey Banks & Biddle, haute couture at Nan Duskin and the Blum Store, and men's clothing at Jacob Reed's Sons. Images of America: Philadelphia's Golden Age of Retail illustrates how these emporia taught generations of Philadelphians the proper way to live.
The many neighborhoods west of the Schuylkill River across from William Penn's "Quaker City" were distinctly rural until 1860, when horsecar lines first crossed the river. The area soon became home to wealthy businessmen who built elegant mansions and villas in University City and Powelton Village. West Philadelphia's growth accelerated northward into Belmont and Parkside-Girard after the 1876 Centennial Exposition and westward into Cedar Park, Spruce Hill, and Walnut Hill in the 1890s with the introduction of electric trolley lines. West Philadelphia: University City to 52nd Street is the first photographic history of the area in the last one hundred years. Images of the typical, modest West Philadelphia row houses, which slowly took over the open farmland after the Market Street Elevated opened in 1907, tell the story of how Philadelphia became known as the "City of Homes." Countless, rarely seen photographs of the streets where people lived and worked fill this extraordinary history.
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