The Wanamaker Organ
Six-keyboard pipe organ of nearly thirty thousand pipes, still played twice daily in a grand marble department-store court.
This guide to the Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia traces how the largest organ built for the 1904 World's Fair in Saint Louis sat crated and forgotten for five years before John Wanamaker bought it in 1909 and shipped it east in thirteen freight cars. It follows the two-year installation inside the store's seven-story Grand Court, and the day in 1911 when forty thousand people, including President Taft, gathered to hear it sound for the first time, timed to a coronation across the ocean. The store later opened its own organ factory in the attic, employing craftsmen for decades to chase more volume than the marble court would allow.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.