The city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania's largest city, was founded and incorporated in 1682 by William Penn in the English Crown Province of Pennsylvania between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Before then, the area was inhabited by the Lenape people. Philadelphia quickly grew into an important colonial city and during the American Revolution was the site of the First and Second Continental Congresses. After the Revolution, the city was chosen to be the temporary capital of the United States. At the beginning of the 19th century, the federal and state governments left Philadelphia, but the city remained the cultural and financial center of the country. Philadelphia became one of the first U.S. industrial centers and the city contained a variety of industries, the largest being textiles.
After the American Civil War Philadelphia's government was controlled by a Republican political machine and by the beginning of the 20th century Philadelphia was described as "corrupt and contented." Various reform efforts slowly changed city government with the most significant in 1950 where a new city charter strengthened the position of mayor and weakened the Philadelphia City Council. At the same time Philadelphia moved its supports from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, which has since created a strong Democratic organization.
The city began a population decline in the 1950s as mostly white and middle-class families left for the suburbs. Many of Philadelphia's houses were in poor condition and lacked proper facilities, and gang and mafia warfare plagued the city. Revitalization and gentrification of certain neighborhoods started bringing people back to the city. Promotions and incentives in the 1990s and the early 21st century have improved the city's image and created a condominium boom in Center City and the surrounding areas that has slowed the population decline.
History
Pre-settlement
Before Philadelphia was colonized by Europeans, the area was inhabited by the Lenape (Delaware) Indians. The Delaware River was called the Lënapei Sipu or Lenapewihittuck, meaning Lenape River, as well as Kithanna.
Located north of what will eventually become the Center City and on the east bank of the Schuylkill was a Lenape settlement named Coaquannock, meaning "grove of pines." One of the largest Lenape settlements in the region, located in today's South Philadelphia near the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, was Passyunk, meaning "in the valley". Other settlements including the village of Nitapèkunk, "place that is easy to get to", located in today's Fairmount Park area, and Shackamaxon, "place where the chief was crowned", both were located on the west bank of Delaware River, upstream from today's Northern Liberties.
Colonial era
The first exploration of the area by Europeans was in 1609, when a Dutch expedition led by Henry Hudson entered the Delaware River valley in search of the Northwest Passage. The Valley, including the future location of Philadelphia, became part of the New Netherland claim of the Dutch Republic. Around 1630s, to control the Great Minquas Path, a fur trade route to the Susquehannock which passed through Philadelphia region, the Dutch authority of New Netherland built a palisaded factorij located near the confluence of the Schuylkill River and the Delaware River, named Fort Beversreede.
In 1637, Swedish, Dutch, and German stockholders formed the New Sweden Company to trade for furs and tobacco in North America. Under the command of Peter Minuit, the company's first expedition sailed from Sweden late in 1637 in two ships, Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip. Minuit had been the governor of the New Netherland from 1626 to 1631. Resenting his dismissal by the Dutch West India Company, he brought to the new project the knowledge that the Dutch colony had temporarily abandoned its efforts in the Delaware Valley to focus on the Hudson River valley to the north. The ships reached Delaware Bay in March 1638, and the settlers began to build a fort at the site of present-day Wilmington, Delaware. They named it Fort Christina, in honor of the twelve-year-old Queen Christina of Sweden. It was the first permanent European settlement in the Delaware Valley. Part of this colony eventually included land on the west side of the Delaware River from just below the Schuylkill River.
The first English settlement occurred about 1642, when 50 Puritan families from the New Haven Colony in Connecticut, led by George Lamberton, tried to establish a theocracy at the mouth of the Schuylkill River. The New Haven Colony had earlier struck a deal with the Lenape to buy much of the Province of New Jersey south of present-day Trenton. The Dutch and Swedes in the area burned the English colonists' buildings. A Swedish court under Swedish Governor Johan Björnsson Printz convicted Lamberton of "trespassing, conspiring with the Indians". The offshoot New Haven colony received no support. The Puritan Governor John Winthrop said it was dissolved owing to summer "sickness and mortality". The disaster contributed to New Haven's losing control of its area to the larger Connecticut Colony.
Johan Björnsson Printz was appointed to be the first royal governor of New Sweden, arriving in the colony on February 15, 1643. Under his ten-year rule, the administrative center of New Sweden was moved north to Tinicum Island, to the immediate southwest of present-day Philadelphia, where he built an outpost called Fort New Gothenburg and his own manor house which he called the Printzhof.
In 1644, New Sweden supported the Susquehannock in their successful conflict with Maryland colonists led by General Harrison II. With the alliance with Susquehannock, the Swedes further strengthened their claims for land at the mouth of the Schuylkill River. In 1648, New Sweden built a stockaded 30-by-20-foot blockhouse directly in front of the Dutch Fort Beversreede, called Fort Nya Korsholm or Fort New Korsholm. The Swedish building was said to be only twelve feet from the gate of the Dutch fort and was meant to intimidate the Dutch residents and intercept trade. As a result, the Dutch abandoned Fort Beversreede in 1651 and dismantled and relocated the nearby Fort Nassau to the Christina River, downstream from the Swedes' Fort Christina. The Dutch consolidated their forces at the rebuilt fort, renamed Fort Casimir.
The Dutch never recognized the legitimacy of the Swedish claim and, in the late summer of 1655, Director-General Peter Stuyvesant of New Amsterdam mustered a military expedition to the Delaware Valley to subdue the rogue colony. Although the colonists had to recognize the authority of New Netherland, the Dutch terms were tolerant. The Swedish and Finnish settlers continued to enjoy a much local autonomy, having their own militia, religion, court, and lands. This official status lasted until the English capture of New Netherland in October 1664, and continued unofficially until the area was included in William Penn's charter for Pennsylvania in 1682.
The Swedish immigration and expansion continued in the Philadelphia region. In 1669, one of the founders of the New Sweden, Sven Gunnarsson, moved into the region and settled at a place called Wicaco, a former native settlement located on today's Society Hill and Queens Village in present-day South Philadelphia, beginning with a log blockhouse. The Swedish congregation on Tinicum Island moved to Wicaco in 1677, and repurposed the blockhouse as their church, five years before the founding of the city of Philadelphia. Sven Gunnarsson died in 1678 and was one of the first buried at the church. The church and the cemetery eventually became the Gloria Dei (Old Swedes') Church of Philadelphia, the oldest church in Pennsylvania.
In 1681, King Charles II gave Penn a large piece of his newly acquired American land holdings to repay a debt the king owed to Admiral Sir William Penn, Penn's father. This land included present-day Pennsylvania and Delaware, though the claim as written would create a bloody conflict with Maryland (dubbed Cresap's War) over the land grant already owned by Lord Baltimore. Penn put together a colonial expedition and fleet, which set out for America in the middle of the following summer. Penn, sailing in the vanguard, first set foot on American soil at the colony at New Castle, Delaware. An orderly change of government ensued, as was normal in an age used to the privileges and prerogatives of aristocracy and which antedated nationalism: the colonists pledged allegiance to Penn as their new Proprietor. The first Pennsylvania General Assembly was soon held in the colony.
By 1682, the area of modern Philadelphia was inhabited by about fifty Europeans, mostly subsistence farmers living in and around the Wicaco settlement.
Penn later journeyed up the river and founded Philadelphia with a core group of accompanying Quakers and others seeking religious freedom on lands he purchased from the local chieftains of the Lenape or Delaware nation. Penn himself designed the layout of the city, based in part on the city design of the Latin tract Utopia by Thomas More. This began a long period of peaceful co-operation between the colony and the Delaware, in contrast to the frictions between the tribe and the Swedish and Dutch colonists. However, the new colonists would not enjoy such easy relations with the rival and territorial Conestoga peoples to the west for a number of decades as the English Quaker and German Anabaptist, Lutheran and Moravian settlers attracted to the religiously tolerant colony worked their way northwest up the Schuylkill and due west south of the hill country into the breadbasket lands along the lower Susquehanna River. Lord Baltimore and the Province of Maryland had circa 1652–53 finished waging a decade long declared war against the Susquehannocks and the Dutch, who'd been trading them furs for tools and firearms for some time. Both groups had uneasy relations with the Delaware (Lenape) and the Iroquois. Penn's Quaker government was not viewed favorably by the Dutch, Swedish, or English settlers in present-day Delaware. They had no historical allegiance to Pennsylvania, so they almost immediately began petitioning for their own Assembly.
Penn envisioned a city where all people regardless of religion could worship freely and live together. Being a Quaker, Penn had experienced religious persecution. He also planned that the city's streets would be set up in a grid, with the idea that the city would be more like the rural towns of England than its crowded cities. The homes would be spread far apart and surrounded by gardens and orchards. The city granted the first purchasers land along the Delaware River for their homes. It had access to the Delaware Bay and Atlantic Ocean, and became an important port in the Thirteen Colonies. He named the city Philadelphia (philos, "love" or "friendship", and adelphos, "brother"); it was to have a commercial center for a market, state house, and other key buildings. The grid plan was adapted from a grid plan originally designed by cartographer Richard Newcourt for London.
Penn sent three commissioners to supervise the settlement and to set aside 10,000 acres (40 km2) for the city. The commissioners bought land from Swedes at the settlement of Wicaco, and from there began to lay out the city toward the north. The area went about a mile along the Delaware River between modern South and Vine Streets. Penn's ship anchored off the coast of New Castle, Delaware, on October 27, 1682, and he arrived in Philadelphia a few days after that. He expanded the city west to the bank of the Schuylkill River, for a total of 1,200 acres (4.8 km2). Streets were laid out in a gridiron system. Except for the two widest streets, High (now Market) and Broad, the streets were named after prominent landowners who owned adjacent lots. The streets were renamed in 1684; the ones running east–west were named after local trees (Vine, Sassafras, Mulberry, Cherry, Chestnut, Walnut, Locust, Spruce, Pine, Lombard, and Cedar) and the north–south streets were numbered. Within the area, four squares (now named Rittenhouse, Logan, Washington and Franklin) were set aside as parks open for everyone. Penn designed a central square at the intersection of Broad and what is now Market Street to be surrounded by public buildings.
Some of the first settlers lived in caves dug out of the river bank, but the city grew with construction of homes, churches, and wharves. The new landowners did not share Penn's vision of a non-congested city. Most people bought land along the Delaware River instead of spreading westward towards the Schuylkill. The lots they bought were subdivided and resold with smaller streets constructed between them. Before 1704, few settlers lived west of Fourth Street.
Philadelphia grew from a few hundred European inhabitants in 1683 to over 2,500 in 1701. The population was mostly English, Welsh, Irish, Germans, Swedes, Finns, and Dutch. Before William Penn left Philadelphia for the last time on October 25, 1701, he issued the Charter of 1701. The charter established Philadelphia as a city and gave the mayor, aldermen, and councilmen the authority to issue laws and ordinances and regulate markets and fairs. The first known Jewish resident of Philadelphia was Jonas Aaron, a German who moved to the city in 1703. He is mentioned in an article entitled "A Philadelphia Business Directory of 1703," by Charles H. Browning. It was published in The American Historical Register, in April, 1895.