Philadelphia

Philadelphia is a big city in the United States. Many tall buildings stand beside a river.

Long ago, important papers for a new country were signed here.

Philadelphia is the largest city in the state of Pennsylvania. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 1,574,281 people lived there on 1 July 2025; the 2020 census had counted 1,603,797.

The city is famous for its history. In Independence Hall, leaders adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution of the United States in 1787. Today the building is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the cracked Liberty Bell is shown close by.

Philadelphia is Pennsylvania's largest city by far: the Census Bureau's estimates for 1 July 2025 give it 1,574,281 residents, against about 308,000 for Pittsburgh, the next largest. That is a little below the 2020 census count of 1,603,797; the estimates dipped to 1,565,822 in 2023 before rising again.

The city's world fame rests on one brick building. UNESCO, which listed Independence Hall in 1979, notes that the Declaration of Independence was adopted there in 1776 and the Constitution of the United States framed there in 1787, and that the principles of these two documents influenced lawmakers and the charters of many other nations. The building stands in Independence National Historical Park, run by the U.S. National Park Service.

The Liberty Bell is a big old bell. It has a long crack, so it cannot ring anymore.

The city hall has a very tall tower. A huge statue of a man named William Penn stands on top.

Independence Hall is a brick building, finished in 1753; its wooden steeple was put up in 1828. It was built for the lawmakers of the colony of Pennsylvania.

Its bell, now called the Liberty Bell, was cast in Philadelphia in 1753. Words about liberty run around the top. Nobody wrote down when it first cracked. In 1846 workers tried to repair a thin crack by widening it, but a new crack spread and the bell has stayed silent ever since.

Across the city center, City Hall took from 1872 to 1901 to build. With the bronze statue of William Penn on its tower, it rises 548 feet, about 167 meters.

Independence Hall was designed by the attorney Andrew Hamilton with the master builder Edmund Woolley to house Pennsylvania's colonial Assembly; it was begun in 1732 and finished in 1753. The present wooden steeple dates from 1828, and the National Park Service has restored the building since the 1950s to how it looked in the years of the Declaration and the Constitution.

The State House bell, ordered from London in 1751, cracked on its first test; the local metalworkers John Pass and John Stow recast it in 1753. Its inscription, 'Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof', inspired abolitionists, who first called it the Liberty Bell in 1835. The wide 'crack' is in fact a failed 1846 repair.

City Hall (1872–1901), by John McArthur Jr., was the world's largest load-bearing masonry building when it was finished. Its tower carries a 37-foot, 27-ton bronze statue of William Penn; with it, the building rises 548 feet above the ground.

Philadelphia's streets cross like the lines on a checkerboard.

Trains run under the streets and high above them too.

Thomas Holme's 1682 plan set out Philadelphia's center as a grid: straight lettered and numbered streets crossing at right angles, with wider main streets for trade and travel.

Under and above those streets run trains. The Market–Frankford Line opened its first part in 1907; it runs 20.8 kilometers with 28 stations, partly underground and partly on tracks raised above the street. The Broad Street Line, opened in 1928, runs 16.2 kilometers almost all underground. Most lines are run by SEPTA, while the PATCO line crosses the river to New Jersey.

The center still follows the 1682 plan: a rectangular grid of lettered and numbered streets meeting at right angles, with broader streets for commerce and transport forming its main axes. UrbanRail.Net describes the city as having one of America's most diversified urban rail networks, with subway, elevated lines, trams on the street and in tunnels, and suburban railways, all run by SEPTA except the PATCO Line.

The Market–Frankford Line opened from 69th Street to 15th Street in 1907 and reached Frankford in 1922; it is 20.8 km long with 28 stations, 5.8 km of it underground through the center. The Broad Street Line opened from Olney to City Hall in 1928 and is 16.2 km long, all underground except Fern Rock station. The PATCO Line, 23.3 km with 14 stations, links the city with Camden and Lindenwold in New Jersey.

Philadelphia has green squares with grass and trees. They are open to everyone.

A big old market sells fruit, cheese, bread and much more.

Penn's plan gave each quarter of the city a green public square, known today as Logan, Franklin, Washington and Rittenhouse Squares. In 1917 work began on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a tree-lined road about a mile long that runs from City Hall to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Reading Terminal Market has sold food in its building since 1893 and is one of America's largest and oldest public markets. On the Schuylkill River, the Fairmount Water Works opened in 1815 to pump river water for the city.

Holme's plan set a central square and four smaller squares, one in each quadrant, to stay open as public green space; they survive as Logan, Franklin, Washington and Rittenhouse Squares, with City Hall on the central one. The Cultural Landscape Foundation calls the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, begun by Jacques Gréber in 1917, the greatest change to Penn's plan: a mile-long diagonal from City Hall to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, lined with museums and cultural institutions.

Philadelphia pumped water from the Schuylkill with steam engines from 1801. The Fairmount Water Works, opened on 7 September 1815, was the country's first large-scale use of steam pumping for a public water supply; by 1822 the city had gone back to waterwheels, and turbines replaced them all by 1866. The Reading Terminal Market, in a National Historic Landmark building since 1893, is one of America's largest and oldest public markets.