Historic Philadelphia

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Top, left: From 1822 to 1839, William
Strickland designed eight major new
buildings in Philadelphia, and remodeled
three including Independence Hall,
influencing the city’s streetscape forever.
When Strickland gave a lecture on
architecture on February 12, 1839, a
disappointed attendee said the architect had
filled his talk with “coarse and vulgar jests,”
and complained, “His object appeared to be
to sneer at and ridicule those monuments
which have ever been the admiration of
the world.”
COURTESY OF THE DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN PORTRAITS.
Top, right: Nicholas Biddle.
COURTESY OF THE DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN PORTRAITS.
Below: The Second Bank of the United
States moved into what the bank directors
pronounced “a chaste imitation of Grecian
architecture” in 1824. Congress in 1811 had
refused to renew the charter of the first
Bank of the United States. Stephen Girard
bought its building and other assets and
operated his own bank. Financial confusion
resulted, and there was demand for Federal
regulation of the banking system. When the
government couldn’t find anyone anxious to
help finance a Second Bank of the United
States in 1816, Girard subscribed the whole
$3 million. The new bank’s first president,
William Jones, “fled in affright” after a
Congressional investigation in 1818.
Langdon Cheeves, his successor, instituted
unsuccessful policies. It was 1822 before a
thirty-seven-year-old Philadelphia
aristocrat, Nicholas Biddle, got the
government bank on track, and later, into
its pillared temple.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
1820s began. The novelty of his collection
was wearing thin, and the city had begun
charging him rent for the first time. Shortly
before his death at age eighty-six on
Washington’s birthday, 1827, he and some of
his sons moved to a new structure near the
Chestnut Street Theatre. In 1835 the family
would build its own museum at Ninth and
Sansom, with the street floor leased to Nathan
Dunn, a Quaker who had traded with Canton,
China for many years, for his personal
collection of Chinese art, clothing, and
household articles. As the Peale enterprise
diminished, the building became known as
the Chinese Museum.
Prominent Philadelphians organized the
Musical Fund Society in 1820. The society’s
charter said its purpose was the “elevation of
musical taste” by giving concerts and using
the proceeds to help sick or retired musicians;
“decayed musicians,” the charter called
them. In 1824 the group built Musical Fund
Hall on Locust Street between Eighth and
Ninth. William Strickland, a member of the
society, was the architect. Philadelphia’s elite
turned out to hear works of Rossini and
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
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