Philadelphia Audio Walking Tour

Highlights

• 
  Liberty Bell Center

  The most famous cracked object in American history waits in front of you. The Liberty Bell was cast in London in 1752 and shipped to Philadelphia, where it cracked on its first test ring.

• 
  Independence Hall

  Notice the red brick and white trim of this most important building in American history. Independence Hall was built between 1732 and 1753 as the Pennsylvania State House, a handsome Georgian brick building designed to house the colonial legislature and courts of the Province of Pennsylvania.

• 
  Eastern State Penitentiary

  Look at one of the most influential — and infamous — prisons ever built, rising here. Eastern State Penitentiary opened in 1829 on a design by architect John Haviland, whose Gothic fortress exterior hid a revolutionary interior: a central surveillance hub from which seven cell blocks radiated like the spokes of a wheel, so that one guard could observe all corridors simultaneously.

• 
  Philadelphia City Hall

  Picture William Penn's original city plan meeting the largest masonry building in the United States, once the tallest habitable building in the world. Philadelphia City Hall sits at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets, the crossing point of Penn's two main boulevards, exactly as Penn planned in 1682.

• 
  The Barnes Foundation

  Inside this building hangs what many art historians consider the greatest single collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world: the Barnes Foundation. Albert C. Barnes was a Philadelphia physician who made a fortune from the antiseptic Argyrol and spent it buying art in Paris in the 1910s and 20s when Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir were still undervalued.

All 37 stops

• Independence Hall (Old City / Independence National Historical Park)

  Notice the red brick and white trim of this most important building in American history.

• Liberty Bell Center (Old City / Independence National Historical Park)

  The most famous cracked object in American history waits in front of you.

• Congress Hall (Old City / Independence National Historical Park)

  Picture the United States government meeting for the first time under the Constitution, right here.

• Elfreth's Alley (Old City)

  Elfreth's Alley, barely twelve feet wide, is the oldest continuously inhabited residential street in the United States.

• Christ Church (Old City)

  Picture the founders worshipping in the pews around you.

• Betsy Ross House (Old City)

  Betsy Ross lived and worked in this modest Georgian row house, the home behind one of the most persistent stories in American patriotic mythology.

• Independence Mall & the National Constitution Center (Old City / Independence National Historical Park)

  Picture the three-block green stretching north from Independence Hall to the National Constitution Center, created in the 1950s when the city demolished the eighteenth-century blocks…

• Reading Terminal Market (Center City / Market East)

  Since 1892 a train shed has covered the Reading Terminal Market, one of the great public markets in America, and it has never stopped trading.

• Philadelphia City Hall (Center City)

  Picture William Penn's original city plan meeting the largest masonry building in the United States, once the tallest habitable building in the world.

• Rittenhouse Square (Center City West)

  Rittenhouse Square, by the reckoning of many architects and urbanists, is the finest urban square in the United States.

• Eastern State Penitentiary (Fairmount / Spring Garden)

  Look at one of the most influential — and infamous — prisons ever built, rising here.

• Fairmount Park & the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Fairmount)

  Ahead of you climb the 72 granite steps that became the most famous staircase in American popular culture.

• The Barnes Foundation (Fairmount / Benjamin Franklin Parkway)

  Inside this building hangs what many art historians consider the greatest single collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world: the Barnes Foundation.

• Rodin Museum (Fairmount / Benjamin Franklin Parkway)

  Jules Mastbaum's money built the Rodin Museum, home to the largest collection of Auguste Rodin's work outside Paris and one of the most beautiful small…

• The Franklin Institute (Fairmount / Benjamin Franklin Parkway)

  Philadelphia's most famous citizen and America's first great scientist gives his name to the Franklin Institute in front of you.

• Penn's Landing & the Delaware River (Old City / Waterfront)

  On October 27, 1682, William Penn stepped ashore here at Penn's Landing, on this bank of the Delaware River, after a two-month voyage from England…

• South Street (South Philadelphia / Queen Village)

  An expressway that never came turned South Street into Philadelphia's bohemian and counterculture corridor.

• The Italian Market (South Philadelphia)

  Ninth Street's Italian Market began in the 1880s with immigrant pushcarts, and it remains the oldest and largest open-air market in the United States.

• Mural Arts Philadelphia (North Philadelphia / Various)

  More than four thousand outdoor murals cover Philadelphia's walls, more than in any other city in the United States, and Mural Arts Philadelphia is the…

• Northern Liberties (Northern Liberties)

  Northern Liberties ranks among the oldest and most continuously evolving neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

• Fishtown (Fishtown / Kensington)

  Shad fishermen gave Fishtown its name, and the neighborhood has become the symbol of Philadelphia's twenty-first-century revival.

• Germantown & the Battle of Germantown (Germantown)

  Germantown began in 1683 when thirteen Mennonite and Quaker families from Krefeld, Germany, led by Francis Daniel Pastorius, a lawyer recruited by William Penn, settled…

• Manayunk & the Schuylkill Canal (Manayunk)

  Manayunk grew on the power of the Schuylkill River, and its old mills still follow the water.

• Thomas Eakins & the Philadelphia Art World (Center City / Broad Street Arts Corridor)

  Broad Street, the Avenue of the Arts under your feet, has been the center of Philadelphia's visual and performing arts for more than a century.

• Academy of Music (Center City / Broad Street)

  Opera has sounded inside the Academy of Music since January 1857, longer than anywhere else in the United States.

• Powel House & Society Hill (Old City / Society Hill)

  Society Hill was the finest residential district in colonial America, and it has been preserved more completely than any other eighteenth-century American neighborhood.

• Congregation Mikveh Israel (Old City)

  Sephardic Jews from the Caribbean, England and other colonies founded Congregation Mikveh Israel in 1740, seeking the religious freedom William Penn had promised, and it…

• Washington Square & Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Old City / Washington Square West)

  During the Revolutionary War, Washington Square served as a mass grave, and today it is a park.

• Valley Forge National Historical Park (Valley Forge / Montgomery County)

  Here at Valley Forge the Continental Army spent the winter of 1777 to 1778 and came out a fighting force capable of winning the Revolutionary…

• Mütter Museum (Center City / Logan Square)

  Few museums in America are as unusual as the Mütter Museum, a medical history museum whose anatomical specimens, pathological preparations and medical instruments are at…

• Philadelphia Chinatown (Chinatown)

  Chinese immigrants, driven out of the West by anti-Chinese violence and legislation and drawn to Philadelphia by work in laundries and restaurants, settled around Ninth…

• Penn Museum (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) (University City / West Philadelphia)

  Founded by the University of Pennsylvania in 1887, the Penn Museum in front of you grew out of more than a century of field expeditions…

• 30th Street Station (West Philadelphia / University City)

  Rail travel built itself a Neoclassical temple here in 1933, and 30th Street Station remains one of the finest train station interiors in the United…

• University City & the University of Pennsylvania (University City / West Philadelphia)

  Benjamin Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania in 1740, and its campus opens ahead of you.

• West Philadelphia & Clark Park (West Philadelphia / Spruce Hill)

  Streetcars made the neighborhood you are in, Spruce Hill, one of the finest intact Victorian streetcar suburbs in America.

• Franklin Field & the Penn Relays (University City)

  Every April since 1895 the Penn Relays have filled Franklin Field, the oldest double-deck stadium in the United States and home to one of the…

• Philadelphia's Magic Gardens (South Street / South Philadelphia)

  Isaiah Zagar spent thirty years of obsessive work on Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, one of the most fantastical public art environments in America, and its mosaics…

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