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Philadelphia is the fifth most populous city in the United States and the largest in population and area in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Since 1854, the city has been coterminous with Philadelphia County. Since 1952, the city and county have shared a common government, yet the county still exists as a separate entity within Pennsylvania. As of July 1, 2004, the population of the city was estimated at 1,470,151. Philadelphia has the third largest downtown residential population in the U.S., behind New York and Chicago, Illinois. It is also the second largest city on the U.S. East Coast (after New York). The Philadelphia metropolitan area is the fourth largest in the U.S. by the current official definition, with some 5.7 million people, though other definitions rank it sixth behind the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington-Baltimore. Philadelphia is the central city of the Delaware Valley metropolitan area. Philadelphia is one of the oldest and most historically significant cities in the U.S. During part of the 18th century, the city was the second capital and most populous city of the United States. At that time, it eclipsed Boston and New York City, New York in political and social importance, with Benjamin Franklin playing an extraordinary role in Philadelphia's rise. The city limits have been coterminous with Philadelphia County since The Act of Consolidation, 1854. Until then, the city consisted only of the area bounded by South Street, Vine Street, the Delaware River, and the Schuylkill River. The city's expansion incorporated current day West Philadelphia, South Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, and Northeast Philadelphia, as well as Germantown and many smaller communities. Philadelphia is also one of the largest college towns in the U.S., with over 120,000 college and university students enrolled within the city limits and nearly 300,000 in the metropolitan area. History
Before Europeans arrived, the Delaware (Lenape) Indian town of Shackamaxon was located where Philadelphia now stands, specifically the Germantown neighborhood. Although the area lay within the bounds described in the 1632 Charter of Maryland, the Calvert family's influence never reached this far north, and the first European settlers were mostly Swedes (see New Sweden), who called it Wiccacoa. A congregation was formed in 1646 on Tinicum Island by Swedish missionary Johannes Campanius; in 1700, the group built Gloria Dei Church, also known as Old Swedes. Philadelphia is a planned city, founded and developed in 1682 by William Penn, a Quaker. The city's name means "brotherly love" in Greek (Φιλαδέλφια). Penn hoped that the city, as the capital of his new colony founded on principles of freedom and religious tolerance, would be a model of this philosophy. During early immigration by Quakers and others, immigrants who purchased land in the city also received farmland outside the city; this was intended to allow the population to leave the city easily. Penn also mandated the construction of alleyways and open spaces, in the hope of controlling fires and disease, which were then common problems in London, England and other major cities.
For a time in the 18th century, Philadelphia was the largest city in the Americas north of Mexico City, and the fourth largest under the rule of the British crown (after London, England, Bristol, England, and Dublin, County Dublin, Leinster, Republic of Ireland). In 1790, as the result of a compromise between a number of Southern congressmen and Alexander Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, the seat of the United States Government was moved from Federal Hall in New York to Congress Hall in Philadelphia, before assuming its current site in Washington, DC. In exchange for locating a permanent capital on the banks of the Potomac, the congressmen agreed to support Hamilton's financial proposals. Philadelphia served as capital for a decade, until 1800, when the Capitol building in the new federal city of Washington, DC was opened.
An early railroad center, Philadelphia was the original home of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, the world's largest builder of steam locomotives (which eventually relocated to nearby Eddystone, Pennsylvania). The Pennsylvania Railroad, once America's largest railroad by revenue and traffic volume and at one time the largest public corporation in the world, was headquartered in the city, as was its merger successor, the Penn Central, and in turn its freight railroad successor, Conrail. In 1876 Philadelphia hosted the World's Fair, known as the Centennial Exposition. Memorial Hall and the expansive mall in front of it are remnants of this fair. In 1926, the city held the Sesquicentennial Exposition to celebrate the nation's 150th birthday. In 1976, Philadelphia was one of the participating cities in the United States Bicentennial observances that took place nationwide. Research Tips
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