c. 1904Philadelphia

City Hall, Philadelphia

Detroit Publishing Company.

Street photograph

What this plate shows

City Hall photographed from the street: the tower, William Penn at the top, a dense masonry civic building occupying the crossing of Broad and Market. A camera record of a finished structure. Set it beside the 1876 bird’s-eye of Philadelphia if you want the print tested against a later lens.

Image type: Street photograph
Structure: Philadelphia City Hall
Region: North America
Documented completion: 1901 (tower statue 1894).
Architect: John McArthur Jr.
Present status: Surviving — The building still stands at Centre Square. Masonry civic pile, not a steel-frame replacement.
Source: Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing, 4a12414.
License: Public domain.

Collections where this plate appears

05Monumental architecturePeriod photographs of named structures. Documented identification first. Present status is a later fact recorded beside the plate — surviving, altered, burned, demolished, reconstructed, replaced — not a verdict the image is asked to prove.