The sights and attractions of Philadelphia are particularly impressive, combining as they do a naturally beautiful setting with a rich cultural and architectural tradition. The Adam's Mark Hotel, with its immediate proximity to downtown Philadelphia via the Schuylkill Expressway or the dramatic West River Drive, offers an ideal starting point for Philadelphia's best sights and museums. It sits adjacent to Fairmount Park, the world's largest landscaped city park, with 8,900 acres of wooded hills and valleys, winding creeks, trails, and meadows.
Minutes from the hotel, just across the Schuylkill, is Manayunk, a former mill town whose steep hills are reminiscent of the Umbrian Italian hill towns. A gentrification effort in the last ten years has yielded some of the Philadelphia area's most varied and exciting shops and restaurants; the ethnic community above Main Street has many small row houses and tiny, narrow streets of great charm and character.
The five-minute drive from the hotel to downtown Philadelphia along the West River Drive is one of the most magnificent entrances into any major city. Across the Schuylkill one soon sees Boathouse Row, a picturesque assemblage of rowing clubs that impart a late Victorian aura to the riverfront. The first, Sedgeley Club, incorporates a lighthouse that once warned steamboats of the Fairmount Dam; another, the Undine Barge Club, was designed by Frank Furness. At night these riverside landmarks are particularly memorable, their architectural features outlined by hundreds of white lights.
Sitting above Boathouse Row is Lemon Hill, one of many eighteenth-century mansions scattered throughout Fairmount Park; particularly impressive are those on the hills overlooking the Schuylkill, such as Strawberry Mansion, a spacious home featuring a Federal center section and Greek revival wings. The finest panoramic view of the Philadelphia skyline, the Schuylkill, and the meadows of Fairmount Park is afforded from the Belmont Mansion, only three minutes from the hotel.
Immediately downriver from Boathouse Row is the often depicted, colonnaded Waterworks, built in 1812–1815 by Frederick Graff. A notable engineering achievement for its day, the Waterworks pumped nearly four million gallons of water daily from the river to the “Faire Mount” reservoir, where the Philadelphia Museum of Art now stands commandingly. The Waterworks was used as an aquarium from 1911 to 1962. The Museum of Art, the largest Greek revival structure in the world, has a warm, yellow marble facade and gabled blue tile roof which combine to give this world-class museum a majestic appearance.
As the West River Drive crosses the Schuylkill, it joins with Kelly Drive at the top of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, dominated by the Art Museum with its spectacular view toward Philadelphia's City Hall at the parkway's other end. City Hall, the finest municipal example of Second Empire style, commands a site designated by William Penn as Center Square, one of five squares called for in his original plans for the city. Alexander Milne Calder created the sculpture on the building, including the enormous 27-ton cast-iron statue of Penn atop the tower. The Parkway is a beautiful boulevard, ideal for strolling and for visiting such institutions as the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum, the Franklin Institute Science Museum, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Moore College of Art and Design, and the Rodin Museum, containing the largest collection of the artist's sculptures and drawings outside Paris, including a cast of The Thinker.
Philadelphia's architects, from William Strickland (Merchants Exchange, Society Hill) and Frank Furness (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), through Louis Kahn (Richards Medical Research Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania), I. M. Pei (Society Hill Towers), and Robert
Venturi, have established Philadelphia as the preeminent city of American architecture over the last three hundred years. The area within several blocks of City Hall features several impressive museums and other architectural sights. One block north of City Hall on Broad Street is the imposing 1873 Masonic Temple, with its Egyptian Hall and other extraordinary rooms. A block further north is the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the country's first art school and museum, designed by Furness in 1876 and a National Historic Landmark. It is the most outstanding example of Furness's work and one of the most magnificent Victorian buildings in the country. Its pointed arches and floral ornamentation are executed in rusticated brownstone, sandstone, polished pink granite, red pressed brick, and purplish terra-cotta. The museum and academy contain masterpieces by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, and others.
Several blocks south of City Hall on Broad (or Fourteenth) Street is the famous Academy of Music, the oldest concert hall in continuous use in the country, with its mixed Renaissance and baroque design, somewhat derivative of the architecture of La Scala in Milan. Just east of City Hall is the John Wanamaker Department Store. Its handsome facade is an adaptation of a Renaissance palazzo, with little ornament or detail; inside, the floors are organized around a dramatic court rising five floors—the most impressive interior space in any commercial building in the city.
Several blocks east of Wanamaker's, on Market Street, is Market Place East, the largest assemblage of cast-iron buildings in the U.S. Formerly the Lit Brothers Building, this is the only complete block of Victorian commercial buildings in the city and a spectacular architectural standout. West of City Hall is the new, dramatically powerful Liberty Place, the tallest building in Philadelphia and reminiscent of the Chrysler Building in New York. The Shops at Liberty Place are refined, impressive, and of a scale that is welcoming.
Downtown Philadelphia lies between two rivers, the Schuylkill and the Delaware. The heart of Center City is the several blocks surrounding the elegant Rittenhouse Square, more commercial eastward and more residential south and west. Located approximately at Nineteenth and Walnut Streets, the square and its surrounding neighborhood contain luxurious high-rise apartments, historic private townhouses, the imposing Delancey Place mansions, and tiny, serene streets such as Panama and Waverly and those around Fitler Square. In this area are some of the finest examples of Philadelphia architecture after 1850, when Philadelphians had moved westward; this area includes the Rosenbach Museum and Library as well as the Civil War Museum.
Between Broad Street and Washington Square off Pine Street (Antique Row) one discovers a labyrinth of cobblestone alleyways, such as Quince, Iseminger, and Fawn Streets, lined with tiny nineteenth-century homes and trinities. Pennsylvania Hospital, founded in 1794 by Dr. Thomas Bond, was the first hospital in the colonies. The facade facing south on Pine Street between Eighth and Ninth, with its beautiful garden and plantings, is particularly noteworthy.
From Eighth Street to the Delaware lie the most historic neighborhoods, with the famous Society Hill at the center of “America's most historic square mile.” The colonial quality of this area is underscored by the cobblestone streets, small alleyways, imposing red brick townhouses and tiny trinities, as well as by hidden courtyards, some with spectacular gardens. In this area is the largest concentration of eighteenth-century Georgian and Federal colonial architecture in the U.S., as well as synagogues (Mikveh Israel) and churches (St. Augustine's, Old St. George's) from the same era. Directly to the north is Independence National Historical Park, containing such treasures as the Pennsylvania State House, or Independence Hall; Congress Hall; the First and Second Banks of the United States; Carpenters Hall; and the fabulous Merchants Exchange, the first stock exchange in the country, with its rectangular main structure and semicircular portico. Just across Walnut Street at Second is the Ritz Five movie complex, showing the most avant-garde and thoughtful new releases in the city.
North of Society Hill is Old City, an eclectic neighborhood combining the historical with cutting-edge contemporary art galleries and boutiques. In this area is Philadelphia's oldest continually residential street, Elfreth's Alley, with colonial homes almost unchanged since the 1720s lining both sides of this tiny cobblestone street. Christ Church, at Second and Market nearby, gave Philadelphia its first taste of architectural splendor, its first and most beautiful spire. Flanking Society Hill on the south, past Head House Square, is the nestled colonial enclave of Queen Village, settled by Swedes in 1630. Some of the homes and historic buildings here, such as Gloria Dei Church (1678), date back to the 1600s; the colonial, Victorian, and contemporary homes contain many charming courtyards and are intermingled with small restaurants.
Special mention should be given to several other areas, all within fifteen minutes' drive of the Adam's Mark. The prerevolutionary German-town section was founded in 1683 and contains remnants of colonial times worth exploring; among them are the National Trust Museum of Cliveden (1767), site of the Battle of Germantown in 1777; Rittenhousetown, a partially preserved seventeenth- and eighteenth-century industrial village and site of America's first paper mill, off Lincoln Drive along the Wissahickon Creek; and the ancient Wyck Home (1690), featuring the furnishings of the Quaker family that lived there for nine generations.
Immediately west of Germantown, along Germantown Avenue, is Chestnut Hill, a charming and beautiful section of the city reminiscent of an English village, with its stone houses from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, small shops and churches, and alleyways. A special excursion should be made by anyone visiting Chestnut Hill into the nearby Valley Green area, including the Valley Green Inn on the Wissahickon Creek, both now National Historic Landmarks. The lovely bridle paths, scenic walkways, and stunning hilly terrain—all within ten to fifteen minutes of Center City—are an incomparable example of the preserved, unspoiled natural beauty of the Schuylkill River Valley.
In West Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania, everyone's list should include the University Museum and its world-renowned archaeological and ethnographic collections. Also of special interest nearby are the Furness Building and Arthur Ross Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania, and the John Bartram home and gardens (1728).
Finally, two major markets in Philadelphia should be mentioned. The Reading Terminal Market, with a wide diversity of cuisines including Pennsylvania Dutch foods from the surrounding counties, is located near the new Convention Center. The second is the Italian Market located on South Ninth Street, in South Philadelphia, famous for its shops and street vendors and reflective of European traditions, including some of the best selections of ethnic and Italian foods found anywhere in the Philadelphia area. It is in the heart of a predominantly Italian neighborhood with diverse shops and restaurants of great character and local color.