Christ Church
Colonial Georgian church with a wooden steeple that rotted quietly for two centuries before repairs.
This guide to Christ Church in Philadelphia opens with Robert Smith's 1754 steeple, once the tallest structure in what would become the United States, and the quiet decay hiding inside it: by the 1770s a report already described its timbers as little more than powder. You'll hear how the two-hundred-foot pine frame kept standing for two centuries while nobody replaced its rotting posts, and about the 1908 lightning strike that set the spire burning before a sudden rain doused it. It is a guide about what wood does when nobody is watching, and about the steeple that kept its secret in plain sight above the churchyard.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.