Society Hill
Colonial row-house district named for a bankrupt trading company, later rebuilt from twentieth-century slum into a historic showcase.
This guide to Society Hill in Philadelphia opens with a puzzle: why would a neighborhood of manicured townhouses take its name from a company that went bankrupt? It traces the Free Society of Traders, formed in 1681 with William Penn's backing, whose collapse left its name on a low rise by the Delaware anyway, and then follows the neighborhood's own near-collapse by 1950, when its population had fallen from nearly twenty five thousand to barely seven thousand and Dock Street had become what one city councilman called a virtual skid row. Mayor Richardson Dilworth himself moved his family onto Washington Square as the turnaround began.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.