Growing up an hour from Philadelphia, you might think that we would be very familiar with the city. In reality we have been here many times as children for field trips, but very little as adults. We thought it would be fun to be tourists in our proverbial backyard.

Independence Hall is a historic civic building where both the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were debated and adopted by America’s Founding Fathers.

The Assembly Room, in which both the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were drafted and signed.

Christ Church’s congregation included 15 signers of the Declaration of Independence. American Revolutionary War leaders who attended Christ Church include George Washington, Robert Morris, Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross.

Christ Church Burial Ground is the final resting place of Benjamin Franklin and his wife, Deborah. Six other signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried here, Benjamin Rush, Francis Hopkinson, Joseph Hewes, James Wilson, Robert Morris and George Ross.

William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, is the figure on top of City Hall.  By the terms of a gentlemen’s agreement that forbade any structure from rising above the hat on the Penn statue, City Hall remained the tallest building in the city until it was surpassed by One Liberty Place in 1986.  Violation of this agreement supposedly brought a curse onto local professional sports teams. Twice during the 1990s, the statue was partially clothed in a major league sports team’s uniform when they were in contention for a championship: a Phillies cap in 1993 and a Flyers jersey in 1997—both teams lost.  The supposed curse ended 22 years later when the Phillies won the 2008 World Series, a year and four months after a Penn statuette had been affixed to the final beam of the Comcast Center during its topping out ceremony in June 2007.  Another Penn statuette was placed on the topmost beam of the Comcast Technology Center in November 2017, and the Eagles won the Super Bowl a few months later.