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Boathouse Row
1 Boathouse Row, Philadelphia, PA 19130, USA
Row of nineteenth-century boathouses outlined nightly in thousands of programmable lights along the river.
This guide to Boathouse Row in Philadelphia opens with the nightly ritual of the twelve boathouses lighting up along the Schuylkill, and the story nearly everyone repeats about why: that the city strung the lights up in October 1979 for a visiting pope. You'll hear why that story does not hold up, and meet the lighting designer whose real pitch to Mayor Frank Rizzo was about saving aging, half-forgotten buildings rather than impressing a dignitary. It also traces the row's lights forward to a 2024 rewiring, and asks why a story this easy to disprove has outlived the record.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.