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Center City

Center City is a thriving downtown and the vibrant hub of the Greater Philadelphia metropolitan region. If you’re looking for culture, fine dining, theater, entertainment and shopping, all within walking distance of one another, this is the place to be.

Center City offers its residents friendly neighborhoods with Old World charm. And since many residents also work in Center City, the beautiful historic streets provide many convenient and attractive walking routes to work. Plus, the perfect combination of modern-day high-rises and historic architecture and landmarks offers people a little bit of the past and the present.

Center City has the third largest downtown population of any U.S. city, after New York and Chicago. 78,000-plus Center City residents live in more than ten Center City neighborhoods including:

• Society Hill
• Rittenhouse Square
• Washington Square
• Logan Square
• Chinatown
• Franklin Parkway
• Callowhill
• Olde City
• Delaware Riverfront

Society Hill
Named after the long obsolete Free Society of Traders, this area was home to many members of the federal government when Philadelphia served as the nation's capital. The area also attracted both the locally and internationally wealthy as well. As the land juxtaposed the river and the seat of government, it was the most valuable in the city. From greed and speculation, lots were divided and divided again. The result: the serpentine walkways, abrupt angles, and tiny alleys that today make the area so appealingly intimate.

Over decades the area lost its cachet and ultimately became a dilapidated slum. The city seeking to improve its image tore down many buildings and homes. Historic colonial houses were acquired by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority who sold them to private citizens along with a binding agreement that the individuals would restore the buildings. In this way, about 600 historic houses were renovated. Empty lots were filled by contemporary houses that tried to merge contemporary style with a colonial heritage.

Today this district is full of charming row houses, tree-lined streets, and brick and cobblestone sidewalks that “appear” to have been virtually untouched in the last 200 years. Once again, it is a neighborhood with considerable pedigree and history.

Rittenhouse Square
One of William Penn's original five squares, Rittenhouse boasts lush plantings and fine statuary that contradict its more humble 18th century beginnings as a pasture for stray cows, pigs, and chickens. During the mid-1800s, the area underwent a transition to become a fashionable downtown address for many city residents. In the early 20th century, famed architect and planner Paul Philippe Cret conceived the square's current layout. Today, it is a popular gathering place for everyone from students to seniors, couples to families.

Residents of Rittenhouse Square enjoy a diverse mix of lovely shuttered brownstones and stately apartment buildings. At one time it was a mark of great prestige to live on the “square”. Today, private homes are gone, but it still counts for something to live on the Square. There are several houses still standing, but they have been converted into apartments. With cooperative apartments and condominiums displacing private dwellings in the last three decades, some of the Old Guard still live on here — in these homes in the sky rather than family mansions.

Washington Square
Washington Square was also one of Philadelphia's five original squares as laid out in 1682 by William Penn's surveyor, Thomas Holme. It was then called Southeast Square, as Quakers did not believe in naming places after people. The square started as a pasture but later served as a burial ground — potter's field — and many American and British soldiers of the Revolution lie here, along with victims of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.

In 1825 the city changed the square's name to Washington Square in tribute to George Washington. Later in the nineteenth century, legal firms moved into the area, and in the first half of the twentieth century Washington Square became the center of Philadelphia's publishing industry. Popular books, medical texts, and magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal were published from offices around the square. Many of the buildings facing the square reflect that era. Particularly notable is the ornate Art Deco N.W. Ayer building whose great bronze doors illustrate the goals and purposes of the advertising industry.

Logan Square
The original Northwest Square provided burial plots, pasturage, and an area for public executions — a gallows stood here until 1823. In 1825, the square was renamed for James Logan, who had served as secretary to William Penn and chief justice to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. As the neighborhood developed, the city began to improve the square, planting trees and installing walks and fences.

The Circle in the Square: Logan Square entered the 20th century as a pleasant but modest area of trees, flowers, and walkways. But its size and appearance changed dramatically with the adoption of Jacques Griber's Parkway plan of 1919. Griber, a French architect, created the final design for the city's great diagonal boulevard, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and like a jewel at its center he placed a remodeled Logan Square. Basing his concepts on the Place de la Concorde, Griber designed a large traffic circle in the square with space for a monument and formal gardens in the middle. As the square became a link between center city and the green belt of the upper Parkway, the surrounding area changed from a predominantly residential neighborhood to a locale for major cultural institutions such as the Franklin Institute and the Free Library.

Chinatown
Philadelphia's Chinatown is a compact neighborhood that does not approach the scale of the more famous Chinatowns in San Francisco or New York. Yet, the neighborhood's intimacy is also what makes it attractive. It's been said that if you bring any 20 people together in Philadelphia's Chinatown, five are relatives. It's an enclave bordered by a Convention Center, an Expressway, and a downtown shopping megamall. With ducks hanging upside down in restaurant windows and streets signs in Chinese, Chinatown feels a world apart from the rest of the city.

The area grew slowly until the 1940, and was considered a "bachelor society". After World War II, a new wave of immigrants helped transform Chinatown into a family community. This also transformed the culinary front as well. The few early restaurants served mostly Cantonese fare. Today one can get all manner of Chinese cuisine -- Szechuan, Mandarin and Hunan. In addition to the dozens of Chinese restaurants, there are now several Vietnamese restaurants and a handful of Burmese, Japanese and Thai eateries located in Chinatown as well.

Franklin Parkway
Benjamin Franklin Parkway is Philadelphia's Champs Elysees — or its Pennsylvania Avenue. True, there is no Arc de Triomphe or White House, but there are such fine buildings as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rodin Museum and the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul.

In the beginning the Parkway was an architect's and a planner's dream — something breathtakingly bold for the staid old city. Then it became a cultural mecca — a center for museums and educational institutions. Today, anyone viewing the sweep of the Parkway from the Art Museum steps may be compelled, like Rocky Balboa himself, to raise one's hands, and share in that triumph.

Callowhill
Callowhill Street, or "Callow Hill," as it used to be called, is understood to bore the name of William Penn's second wife, Hannah Callowhill-Penn. This area of Philly was also known at one time as “the town of Callowhill.”

Here and there in local histories of the Colonial and Revolutionary days one finds passing mention of this "town," which deserves to be counted as one of the city's earliest and nearest suburbs. Prior to the Revolution much of the land in that part of the Northern Liberties was owned by the Penns, and Thomas Penn, son of William Penn and Hannah Callowhill Penn, was particularly concerned with selling off the lots around Front and Callowhill. They were choice lots, the first across the city line, near the waterfront and, with the road improvements promised, easy of access from all parts of the old city.

Olde City
Olde City has transformed itself from a commercial waterfront district to a thriving, cultural neighborhood coexisting beautifully with some of the most historic land in the United States. Art galleries, performance art venues, restaurants, boutiques, and museums are nestled along the same quaint, cobblestone streets that lead visitors to the birthplace of the United States — Independence Hall. This is the site where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the U.S. Constitution was drafted. Olde City has successfully retained its historic charm while re-inventing itself, through artistic expression and cultural awareness, as an invigorating blend of Philadelphia's past, present, and future.

Today, contradictory to its name, Olde City is the place to go to enjoy some hometown brew, catch some of the best local bands, and shop for one-of-a-kind art furniture. The turn-of-the-century buildings that characterize the neighborhood have been transformed into dramatic, light-filled loft apartments with spectacular views of the Delaware River and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Penn's Landing and the waterfront are close by.

Delaware Riverfront
In some sections, Philadelphia's Delaware riverfront is still a confusing tangle of highways, abandoned industrial facilities and warehouses, and rail lines that weave in and out of waterfront piers. Vestiges of the maritime and industrial development that made Philadelphia great are still to be found between these older networks and newer commercial and residential development. There is a treasure trove of Philadelphia history to uncover for the visitor willing to venture away from the well-known hot spots and explore less traveled routes along the river.

One of the attractions you can view on the Delaware riverfront is Penn’s Landing, the area where William Penn first stepped foot on Philadelphia. But much of the riverfront is forgotten land. As Congressman Robert Borski, D-Pa., a Torresdale resident declares: "The Delaware River is majestic and we in Philadelphia have turned our backs on it. "It's now the city's back door where it once was the city's front door," says James Corner, chairman and associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts.