William Penn’s city was planned as a utopian ideal; a grid of broad streets to promote green urban living for settlers to this 17th-century colony. While Penn grew disillusioned, his design lives on in Philadelphia, and around the world

The surveyor Thomas Holme’s “Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia”, printed in London in the politically turbulent and deathly cold winter of 1683, is a picture of urban grandeur, civility and order. Designed to encourage shareholders and lure settlers with the prospect of a new and improved life in the Quaker William Penn’s fledgling Pennsylvania colony, Holme’s document is a 17th-century forerunner of more modern US billboards selling “the American dream”.

The antique advertisement depicts a rectilinear grid of long, broad, intersecting streets stretching for two miles between navigable rivers to east and west, and a mile from north to south. At the grid’s heart is a giant civic square, echoed in each quadrant by a spacious park adorned with symmetrical plantings of bushy trees. A rash of numbered property lots spreading from each side and up the main streets suggests development is well under way; the blanks represent room for opportunity.



Like the nationwide dream it foreshadowed, the grid’s promise was at once mythical and foundational: a utopian urban ideal that not only guided the construction of Philadelphia, but resonates in cities and towns across America – and arguably the world – shaping millions of lives, identities and minds. Such has been the persuasive power of the 1683 advertisement that, three-and-a-half centuries later, its influence lives on in the city’s latest development plan, Philadelphia2035 – a vision for the future rooted in a vision of the past.



Penn – a well-connected Englishman who made it his mission to create a refuge in America for Quakers and other persecuted religious groups from Europe – was prone to celebrating his colony as a free gift from God. In fact, Philadelphia’s construction depended on a cunningly negotiated deal with the English king.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia (1683), by Thomas Holme. Illustration: HCQC

In March 1681, a cash-strapped Charles II, unable to repay a debt owed to Penn’s late father Adm Sir William Penn, instead made the young heir sole owner of 45,000 square miles of land south-west of New Jersey and north of Baltimore – the king assuming, in a god-like fashion typical of British imperial monarchs, that the territory was his to give. As a feudal-style proprietor, Penn could in turn grant out land as he saw fit.

Within a month, he published the first in a series of promotional tracts with the aim of generating investor interest in his plan to “settle a free, just and industrious colony”. His promised land guaranteed freedoms, rights and liberties – for white Europeans at least. The first cargo of enslaved Africans sold fast to his settlers on its arrival in 1684.

Penn wished that his new capital would 'never be burnt, and always be wholesome'

The constitution and laws Penn devised owed much to Magna Carta, the first American printing of which would appear in Philadelphia in 1687. Yet the province nonetheless constituted his personal estate, and the planning process merged religious and political considerations with economic pressures.



“I cannot make money without special concessions,” Penn wrote after a few months of intense meetings with prospective buyers. “Though I desire to extend religious freedom, yet I want some recompense for my trouble.” The “holy experiment” he had envisaged was giving way to hard-headed real estate development.



To encourage investors, Penn commissioned a map of “Some of the South and East bounds of Pennsylvania in America, being Partly Inhabited”. Those who “partly inhabited” the territory included Swedes, Dutch and English as well as indigenous peoples, though the map’s depiction of “Sesquahana fort Demolished” seems calculated to give the impression that the land sold to new buyers would be, as Penn claimed, “free from any Indian encumbrance”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Map of the ‘partly inhabited’ south and east bounds of Pennsylvania (1681). Illustration: John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

More attractive than accurate, the map is decorated with trees – almost an alphabet from ash to walnut – which served not merely to justify the name of Pennsylvania (meaning Penn’s woods), but to suggest the land’s great fertility and commercial viability, including an abundance of timber fit for building. Trees, John Evelyn had stressed in his 1664 bestseller Sylva, were the prime source of England’s national and imperial strength.



In a vast forest clearing along the Delaware river, Penn planned a great port city connected to the country by 17th-century superhighways uniting commercial and landed interests. The first purchasers were enticed with a property lot in each of three zones: country, city, and its surrounding liberties.

Troubled by the memory of fire and plague in London during the 1660s, and their frequent devastation of colonial ports, Penn wished his capital would “never be burnt, and always be wholesome”. With that aim, the streets were to be “uniform down to the water”, and each house would ideally be placed in the middle of its plot, “so there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields”. Penn’s imagined city was not really a city at all. It was, in his own words, “a green country town”.



When he arrived in America in autumn 1682, Penn found Holme, his surveyor general, staking out the city’s first streets on a neck of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. The pair agreed the location could hardly be bettered for the health of business and bodies alike. By extending the grid to connect the riverbanks, they created a 480-hectare (1,200-acre) city with two waterfronts, maximising its commercial potential as well as access to drinking water. This is the design idea set out in Holme’s Portraiture, and which continues to define Center City, Philadelphia today.



The design echoes myriad earlier grids stretching back to the ancient world – for Thomas Jefferson, it revived “the old Babylon” – but perhaps the closest inspiration was Richard Newcourt’s bold design for rebuilding London in 1666, with its central square at the intersection of axial streets, surrounded by four satellite squares. But while London was still, in reality, re-emerging from its ruins along roughly the same crooked and winding lines as before, Philadelphia began to grow and evolve according to the grid.



The grid’s great virtue is its adaptability, says Daniel McCoubrey, president and principal of the Philadelphia-based architectural firm VSBA LLC. “The grid was easily laid out by surveyors, then divided to meet commercial and residential needs, and it is infinitely extendable.” As Holme commented, his plan could “when time permits, be augmented”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An illustration of the city imprinted in the wider region before it even existed. Illustration: Library of Congress

For a speculative venture such as Philadelphia, McCoubrey says gridded plots made it easier to sell property “sight unseen”. Hence the grid plan “became the primary means of dividing and selling land during westward expansion” across America, forming the basis of many subsequent cities and towns.



But what makes Philadelphia’s grid so distinctive, and enduring, is “the green idea” embedded in its initial concept. For Kate Wingert-Playdon, associate dean of architecture and environmental design at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, this is the thread that links Penn’s vision to the present day, and has become Philadelphia’s “core asset and value”. While many American cities promote the idea of sustainability, she argues that Philadelphia’s strategy for green growth – including its bid to be the greenest city in the US – builds directly on its founding planning principles.

Even the smallest urban lots in Holme’s plan provided room for a garden and small orchard alongside a house – “to the great content and satisfaction of all here concerned” – and streets that initially commemorated prominent residents were renamed after “the things that spontaneously grow in the country”, such as Chestnut, Mulberry and Vine.

Most significantly, Penn’s dream of a green country town was preserved in the plan’s four park squares, intended “for the like uses, as the Moore-fields in London”. Lying just north of the English capital’s walls beyond present-day Moorgate, Moorfields was more than a much-praised recreational space in the 17th century, “a pleasurable place of sweet airs for citizens to walk in”. As a public space and buffer to development, it had strong communitarian associations.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A view of Philadelphia in 1777 by the artist Archibald Robertson. Illustration: The New York Public Library Digital Collections

It is testament to the power of Philadelphia’s garden squares as an idea that they were inscribed in maps for a century or more before they materialised (indeed, while their grounds were used as rubbish dumps and burial sites), and that they are now an indelible feature of the city’s urban identity and imagination.



“Initially, the four public squares and centre square had little impact, as most development was confined to the area between the Delaware River and Fifth Street up until the early 19th century,” explains John Andrew Gallery, a former executive director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia. “The western squares didn’t really exist at all since there was no development in that area until the 1850s. However, in the 19th and 20th centuries the four squares became focal points of their areas.”



Today, they form the centres of individual residential and cultural neighbourhoods – each one with a “unique character”, according to McCoubrey.

Whatever men may say, our wilderness flourishes as a garden, and our desert springs like a green field William Penn

“The plan continues to have a strong and positive impact on the life of Center City, Philadelphia,” says Gallery, who worked with the leading post-war planner Edmund Bacon at the Philadelphia City Planning Commission in the 1960s, then as founding director of the city’s Office of Housing and Community Development in the 1970s. Not only has it proved flexible for the wide range of residential and commercial development from 1683 right through to 2035, he suggests, but it is easy for both residents and visitors to understand. For his part, McCoubrey sees Philadelphia as a great city for walking as well as living and working.

Gallery is less positive about the developments that occurred beyond Penn’s grid, where no guidance was given to settlers and roads radiated out from the hub like spokes on a wheel. The extension of the grid following the consolidation of county and city in 1854 created awkward intersections between the planned and unplanned, and older commercial areas declined as development followed the grid rather than the earlier streets. Yet as Gallery acknowledges, it is perhaps unfair to blame Penn for his failure to foresee a city covering 125 square miles.



In time, Penn became all too aware of the “troublesome work” of urban planning. When he returned to England in 1684, forced home by politics and financial setbacks, he wrote in some despair from the ship: “And thou, Philadelphia ... what travail has there been, to bring thee forth, and preserve thee from such as would abuse and defile thee!”

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By 1700, he was so disillusioned that he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell back his proprietorship to the crown. But the Penn family’s hold on the province through to American independence – when now-prosperous Philadelphia provided the setting for the signing of both the Declaration and the Constitution – and the birth of institutions such as the American Philosophical Society and Pennsylvania Horticultural Society helped preserve his vision for posterity.



Writing in defence of his colony in November 1683, Penn wrote: “Whatever men may say, our wilderness flourishes as a garden, and our desert springs like a green field.” Were he able to download Philadelphia2035, he would surely take comfort from the lines that insist on his plan’s place “in the collective memory of the city and the region”, and especially its continued significance in promoting sustainable urban growth.

However much the physical imprint of Penn’s plan may morph and fade, the values inscribed in his grid and squares – egality, adaptability, community, greenness – promise to shape the city’s image for years to come.

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