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| Independence Hall, Philadelphia, c.1948. Courtesy of LIFE Magazine. |
My July 7 post celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of our Declaration of Independence in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, neglected to mention the considerable sacrifices made to showcase Independence Hall independently in a historical theme-park context. I stumbled upon this Instagram image of the Hall in its pre-park years, and it recalled a snatch of conversation I'd overheard in college: "When they created Independence National Historical Park, they tore down a lot of Victorian buildings." Yes, preservation of the site of the founding of our country and the ratification of our Constitution was, ironically, one of its city's worst historic preservation efforts.
Here's some of what was lost for Independence Mall, and what tour guides and Independence Visitors' Center staff don't tell you about:
President's House (1767)
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| President's House, sketch by John Fanning Watson, pre-1823. |
Yes, the remains of one of Independence Hall's contemporaries were unknowingly sacrificed, with little left of the original, but perhaps just enough to allow a full reconstruction rather than the "ghost" exhibit that's there now. The house was built by widow Mary Lawrence Masters as a dowry house for her eldest daughter and became the home of Richard Penn, grandson of Pennsylvania founder William Penn, when she married him.
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| President's House, lithograph by William L. Breton, 1830. |
Penn entertained George Washington and other Continental Congress delegates there, who entrusted Penn to deliver Congress's Olive Branch Petition to King George III in an 11th-hour effort to avert war with Great Britain. While Penn and his wife were away in England to do the honors, Gen. Sir William Howe occupied the house during the 1777-1778 British occupation of Philadelphia, and Gen. Benedict Arnold made it his headquarters in 1778 two years before his defection to the British Army. Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris purchased the house in 1780, and, yes, "George Washington slept here" as Morris's houseguest during Washington's presidency of the four-month 1787 Constitutional convention.
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Sketch of the President's House Replica for the
Sesquicentennial Exposition, R. Brognard Okie, 1925. |
While serving as our first President in the temporary national capital of Philadelphia, Washington rented the house as his residence, bringing in nine African slaves from his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia, and gradually replacing most of them with German indentured servants. His slaveless successor, John Adams, also lived there until the capital transferred to Washington and he moved into the not-yet-completed White House on November 1, 1800, as the first President to occupy the White House.
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President's House site, Market Street between
Fifith & Sixth Streets, south side. Photo c. 1903-08. |
Following the gut-renovation and partial demolition of the President's House for retail use beginning in 1804, including Nathaniel Burt's hardware stores in 1832 and John Wanamaker's first clothing store in 1836, original party walls survived until they were unknowingly demolished in 1951 as the preliminary site clearance for Independence Mall. Archaeological excavations revealed the L-shaped foundations of the Presidential House's kitchen, the remains of its icehouse pit, the main house's rear wall, the curved foundations of the bow window of the State Dining Room that Washington had added, and enough vestiges for an open-air "ghost" pavilion of suggestions of the house, President's House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation, built on the site by 2010.
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| Memorial at the site of the President's House. Courtesy of RevolutionaryPA.com. |
The pavilion places mock window and door casings, fireplaces, chimneys and walls at their estimated original locations to let visitors imagine the house while perusing the exhibits on the roles of slaves in Washington's household and slavery in general, until Trump's executive order had the exhibits removed this year. |
| Memorial to Washington's nine slaves (their names are carved in the wall). |
Their removal is an outright denial of the history that Abraham Lincoln famously said "we cannot escape" in his Second Annual Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, less than three months after issuing his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation |
| Independence Hall, Philadelphia, pre-1910. |
giving Confederate states 100 days to end their rebellion and free their slaves. And more history is denied here, like everywhere else on Independence Mall: the President's House itself, which reportedly contained enough of its original walls to be reconstructed, just as the 19th-century growth of Philadelphia around Independence Hall contained enough buildings to merit preservation of the intact Central Business District that had taken shape around the Hall over the years, as a living demonstration of the evolution of the city from a colonial village to a prosperous yet aesthetically diverse and attractive metropolis – a true City of Brotherly Love.
Jayne Building (1848-1851)
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Jayne Buildng, c.1859, Library Company of Philadelphia,
Frederick De Bourg Richards Photograph Collection. |
Considered to be Philadelphia's first skyscraper, the Jayne Building was designed by William L. Johnston as a Gothic Revival edifice of Quincy granite featuring strongly vertical lines and a castle-like tower crowned with crenellations, expressing the upward mobility of the edifice, its owner, and its city.
When Johnston died of tuberculosis during the building's construction, Thomas Ustick Walter supervised the rest of it and designed the building's six-story wings. Afterwards he was named Architect of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., for which he designed its iconic dome and House and Senate wings.
Dr. David Jayne, a physician, owned the Jayne Building as the headquarters for his patent medicines, which he claimed could treat cancer, gout, lung and skin diseases, rheumatism, scrofula, scurvy, syphilis and ulcers, dubious as his asseverations were.
Architect Charles E. Peterson advocated for the preservation of the Jayne Building and many other 19th-century structures in this district earmarked for clearance for Independence Mall. Peterson's argument was that the Jayne Building had inspired the design of more skyscrapers, particularly those of high-rise pioneer Louis Henry Sullivan, whose office was once across the street from it, and who went on to change the face of the Chicago, St. Louis, Buffalo and New York skyscraper to an honest expression of their rise, pier structure, and Celtic Revival ornamentation. But, in the eyes of Independence Mall's planners, no tower could out-rise that of Independence Hall. Today the Museum of the American Revolution occupies the Jayne Building's site, offering no clues to the skyscraper revolution its predecessor led.
Penn Mutual Building (1850-1851)
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| The Penn Mutual Building, c.1951. |
The Penn Mutual Building stood near the Jayne Building and was considerably dwarfed by it, but was still distinctively handsome as Philadelphia's first cast-iron building. It featured an innovative method of cast-iron plate sheathing with an advanced jointing and bolting technique, round-arched windows and doors, decorative window hoods, bracketed cornices and pressed-iron reliefs defining its floors, and a Mansard roof and corner location giving it enough semblance of height and independence for it to stand out on its block. Peterson wanted this gem preserved too, but its stylistic competition for attention with Independence Hall was unacceptable in the sight of the planners, so down it went around 1956.
20-22, 24 South 5th Street (c.1850-1860)
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| 20-22 South 5th Street, c.1949. |
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| 24 South 5th Street, c.1949. |
These mid-19th-century brick and masonry buildings, cleared for Independence Mall as part of "Mall Project A," housed such businesses as the Bulkley, Raiguel & Co. paper manufacturer and rag dealer, Hershman's Men's Clothing, Ezra Levinson Paper, the American Shuffleboard Company, and the Variety Sandwich Shop. No. 20-22 is noteworthy for its corbelled brickwork and its brick paneling hinting at its internal structure, as well as its vertical stack of "Juliet" fire-escape balconies. No. 24 has a crisp simplicity to its façade, effecting a smooth transition between the left-hand cast-iron building and the right-hand brick masonry edifice. The wooden water-tower, recalling the iconic ones in New York City, is another distinctive feature.
Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Company Building (1873-1875)
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Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Company, published in Moses
King's Philadelphia and Notable Philadelphians (1901). |
Designed by Frank Furness before his renowned Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and most closely resembling it with its squared twin turrets, the Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Company Building was designed to offer secure storage for currency, securities, jewelry, and silver. One of the most imposing structures on Chestnut Street, rising like a commanding castle in front of Carpenter's Court (rear), it was built in Italianate polychrome brick, carved stone, and encaustic tile trimmings in a square layout with two bold tower pavilions topped by square Mansard roofs. Pioneering a fireproofing technique for secure storage of valuables, the building used as little wood as possible. But its solid stone structure, fortress-like presence, and stylistic flourishes (probably outdoing Carpenter Hall and Independence Hall in visual prominence, in the eyes of the planners) didn't stop its demolition in 1957.
Provident Life & Trust Building (1876-1879, 1888-1890)
Located catercorner from the Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Company Building, the Provident Life & Trust Building was also designed by Furness before his Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with a more elaborate Gothic château presence sprouting gables, turrets, arches, compressed columns, and a floating corner turret in a multitude of directions, as an ornate circus of forms and finials. The building was extended with the triangle-capped, grand-arched Provident Building next door, which was demolished in 1945.
Perhaps the Independence Mall planners feared the Provident Life & Trust Building would outshine Independence Hall in historical and architectural prominence, so down it went in 1959-1960. The Omni Hotel occupies its site today.
Drexel & Co. Building (1885)
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| Drexel & Co. Building, in an undated image. |
Erected on the site of the original Library Hall of the Library Company of Philadelphia (built c.1790) and razed in 1956 for the Library Hall's reconstruction, the Drexel & Co. Building was home to one of the city's leading investment banks. Its dominant partner, Anthony Joseph Drexel, founded Drexel, Morgan & Co. in 1871, later J.P. Morgan & Co. (now JPMorgan Chase), with John Pierpont "J.P." Morgan as his junior partner. Drexel also founded Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1891. The building was noteworthy for its "twin" Renaissance Revival façade interconnected with a smaller central one with a Diocletian window, forming a pleasing composition expressing the influence of the banking industry. The Signers' Garden marks its site today.
Irvin Building (1890-1931)
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| Irvin Building, c.1912, before its expansion. |
The last of the Central Business District "holdouts" to go for Independence Mall – and the largest to be torn down, in 1974 – the Irvin Building was a jigsaw composite of two structures that solemnly expressed the gradual growth of their owner, the Fire Association of Philadelphia, an alliance of five volunteer hose companies and 11 volunteer engine companies formed to cooperate in first responses and to provide a new kind of fire insurance. First built in 1912 (right) as an expansion of an 1890 building from a neoclassical design by Edgar V. Seeler, it soon proved to be inadequate for the Fire Association's rapid growth and acquisition of smaller insurers. |
| Irvin Building, expanded in 1931. |
So an obscure architect named Ernest Matthewson was hired to expand the building, which he did by replicating its neoclassical façade on the addition's initial six floors and transitioning its style to a muted Art Deco for a sequence of 10th-floor and 14th-floor setbacks for visual variation in its massing, raising the building to a total of 17 stories. The skyscraper was renamed for Elihu C. Irvin, former president of the Fire Association of Philadelphia. Following its name-change to Reliance Insurance Company and its relocation to larger quarters, the company leased the Irvin Building to the Chilton Book Company before plans for Independence National Historical Park were announced in preparation for the Bicentennial 20 years on. Razed in 1974, its site now contains a model 18th-century garden.
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Independence National Historical Park in its early stages in the
mid-1960s, with the Irvin Building still standing on the right. |
Clearly dwarfing the Colonial structures of Independence Mall, the Irvin Building typified the soaring setback "Superman" skyscraper of the 1930s, bringing the New York aesthetic of the Daily News Building and the Empire State Building into Philly as a towering symbol of the growth of fire insurance and its guardianship of the city.
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| Independence Hall, c.1952. |
By 1969, 143 buildings had been razed for Independence Mall, so Philadelphia could re-create its Colonial city for the Bicentennial. This ironic combo of historic preservation with "urban renewal" favored the latter, in league with Boston's bulldozing of Scollay Square for Government Center and the West End for Charles River Park. |
| Independence Hall in 1940 and 2010. |
As a result, Independence Mall strangely looks more like a football field than a Colonial village, as if pandering to the contemporary taste for recreational space rather than showcasing the Colonial predilection for grazing meadows, pastures, farms and gardens. This awkward arrangement focuses all our attention on the main attraction the land was cleared for, Independence Hall, which was given too much independence on its site. It therefore seems lonely on its void of green, barren of the buildings that once integrated it into a panoply of historic edifices that brought a rich tapestry of stylistic diversity to Philadelphia, as a logical, gradual outgrowth of the Colonial landmarks that were its foundations. Which once again proves that a few isolated Colonial shrines doth not an historic city make. A truly historic city tells a story about its growth and evolution, from Colonial to Federal to Victorian to Modern times, through preserved architectural representations of all those periods in its history, not vapid Disney-esque theme parks that tell only a smidgen of the story to restless tourists.
Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!
Falcone, Alissa, "Drexel in Philly: The Founder’s Old City," Drexel News, March 24, 2025, https://drexel.edu/news/archive/2025/March/drexel-in-philly-the-founders-old-city
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