Old Philadelphia Had Been Transformed

In 1850 a pair of pioneering photographers, William and Frederick Langenheim, hauled their daguerreotype camera to the top of the tower of Independence Hall and made panoramic views of the surrounding area. Their photographs show a city that had greatly expanded since the decade when it served as the nation's capital. Independence Hall was no longer at its western edge. Now the rows of buildings stretched westward toward the Schuylkill and far to the south. Yet the scale of the city was still much the same. Philadelphia remained a city of relatively low buildings, where only the spires of the churches punctuated the skyline. What the panorama, with its view of rooftops, failed to show was how much the function of the area around Independence Hall had changed, and how these changes in use had altered the appearance of the neighborhood at street level. Residences, shops, countinghouses, and taverns no longer intermingled in buildings that differed little in appearance from one another. The residential character of the blocks around Independence Square was almost gone, and the elegant retail shops had also followed the flight of fashion westward.

In the fifty years following the departure of the federal government for Washington, the face of old Philadelphia had been transformed. Some sections had become backwaters. The area around Independence Square had become the financial district, evolving from decorous rows of brick to a close-packed area of marble, brownstone, and granite. In the next fifty years this trend would continue, with taller buildings replacing both landmarks of the Proprietor's city and many of their successors. By the beginning of the twentieth century, many sites in the neighborhood had held four or five buildings in succession. Such old institutions as the Library Company and the Mercantile Library had left the neighborhood, although others, such as the Philosophical Society, remained.

The Independence Square neighborhood was still the center of the banking, insurance, and publishing industries. But with the completion of the new City Hall at Center Square in 1901, the financial community would follow the city's government westward. In the surrounding neighborhood, the pace of change would slow, although it would not cease. For the most part the change was not for the better. Small businesses replaced larger ones in what were fast becoming decaying buildings. Only around Independence Square did publishing and insurance firms, still securely anchored in the area, continue to build. By the Sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, the square was surrounded on three sides by tall office buildings.