On a perfect weekday evening in July, my husband and I sit in an outdoor dining alcove at a steakhouse in the Rittenhouse Hotel. The waning sun throws long slants of golden light into the treetops and along the facades facing west. Across the street on the west edge of Rittenhouse Square, couples stroll along the broad sidewalk, the better to see and be seen. Other strollers, their backs to us, lean against the iron fence surrounding the Square.

Inside the Square itself, families and groups of friends spread picnic blankets. The earliest arrivals sit on folding chairs in front...

Like Philadelphia itself, the place known today as Rittenhouse Square existed in one man’s imagination long before the first white settlers arrived.

William Penn saw little prospect that Quakers would be able to practice their religion freely in Restoration England. In this discouraged state of mind, in 1681 he prevailed upon King Charles II to pay off a debt to his father’s estate by granting Penn a vast colony on the west bank of the Delaware River, across from the Crown colony of West Jersey, which had already been settled for some time. Penn conceived of this “Pennsylvania” as a...

The first residents around Rittenhouse Square in the late 1820s belonged not to the upper class but to the working class. Some of them made bricks in the nearby brickyards; others hauled coal from the barges on the Schuylkill; still others operated looms in their cellars or in nearby mills. Many were single immigrants from the British Isles who lived in boardinghouses; others were family men whose wives and daughters earned extra money working as weavers. For the most part their names cannot be found etched on marble monuments today. Yet their travails during the summer of 1832 sowed the...

In their four-story mansion on Walnut Street, James Harper and his family could survey the city in all directions from any one of the six windows in the cupola.¹ So they were probably uniquely positioned on the nightmare evening of May 6, 1844, when the smoke of smoldering torches illuminated the shadowy forms of men on foot and on horseback, armed with brickbats, muskets, and pistols.

Some were weavers from William Divine’s textile mills on McDuffie Street (later Naudain), and some were laborers from Harper’s own brickyards. The volunteers also included dockworkers who lived in the small alleys and courts...

The Fourth of July fell on a Saturday in 1863, but anxiety over the battle caused the mayor to cancel all celebrations in Philadelphia. That night found Reverend Phillips Brooks and his Rittenhouse Square neighbor, Henry Cohen, huddled with fellow members of the Union League, an organization that had been founded a year earlier to support the Union cause. George Fahnestock, who had spent much of the day among the crowd waiting for “extras” outside a newspaper office on Third Street, observed that night in his diary:

A great battle was fought yesterday, in which we gained advantages, and captured...

In March 1884, Philadelphia’s two legislative bodies, the Select and Common Councils, announced a “plan for the improvement of Rittenhouse Square.” In order to better accommodate the city’s growing traffic of horsecars, carriages, and ambulances, streets around the Square were to be widened to thirty-six feet, and seventy-four treasured street trees, as well as the iron fence surrounding the Square, were to be removed.

To its proponents, the plan was a logical response to urban congestion: Thanks to its “golden triangle” of coal, iron, and railroads, Philadelphia had become America’s industrial hub, and its population had soared from 568,000 in...

Dr. J. William White, chairman of physical culture (that is, athletics) at the University of Pennsylvania, was an inveterate social creature who was not afraid to push the boundaries of social convention. White was known for what his friend and biographer Agnes Repplier called his “unaccommodating spirit” and his love of a uniform—two penchants that collided in 1880 when White, who was surgeon of the First City Troop, showed up at a Troop dinner in full troop regalia, rather than the surgeon’s customary white trousers and blue frock coat. An objection to Dr. White’s uniform by a “brash trooper”...

The day after Cordelia Biddle’s wedding, as if to demonstrate that nothing had changed, Cordelia’s eccentric father, Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, expropriated the Square for another mass quasi-public event. Major Biddle, as he was called, was a soldier and dilettante boxer whose YMCA-style Bible classes at the Church of the Holy Trinity offered a combination of athleticism and piety that many young people found very appealing.¹ On April 29, 1915, more than six hundred members of Biddle’s Athletic Christianity Bible classes—including three bishops, two hundred ministers, and visitors from four foreign countries—marched behind two bands around the Square,...

With the end of World War II, America’s postwar economy took off just as it had done following the Civil War eighty years earlier. The automobile whisked people out to Americans’ presumed suburban dream: a house and lawn on one’s own piece of land. Americans still worked downtown, but increasingly they commuted there from somewhere else.

“The old town has become a mere stopping-place for commuters,” wrote a Philadelphia architecture critic in 1953, “a place to traffic in and get out of.” As for Rittenhouse Square, it was “habited only by sitters in the sun and those melancholy young men...

By the mid-1970s the Vietnam war was over and many members of the protest generation, having aged a few years in the meantime, turned their countercultural energies in other creative directions, such as art studio co-ops and a blossoming of innovative restaurants. Some former hippies were now providingnouvelle cuisineto those who had feared them just a few years earlier. What was once “undesirable” became “normal.”

The overcrowding on Rittenhouse Square that was feared as a result of the new apartments built in the 1950s never came to pass. On the surface, Philadelphia seemed a place where people were...