The ruins of Philadelphia's grandest structures show the city's dramatic evolution. Smoke no longer spews from the Philadelphia Electric Company's hulking riverside power plants. Nature long ago reclaimed the rusted steel bones of the Frankford Arsenal. Graffiti artists tag the Beury Building, while Philadelphia's Gilded Age elite rest beneath the weeds of the forgotten Mount Moriah Cemetery. Such sites mark three centuries of progress and destruction in William Penn's "Holy Experiment." T...

This account of the infamous asylum is "an excellent record of greed and corruption, but it is also a powerful testimonial to compassion and kindness" (Hidden City).The Quaker City and its hospitals were pioneers in the field of mental health. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, its institutions were crowded and patients lived in shocking conditions. The mentally ill were quartered with the dangerously criminal. By 1906, the city had purchased a vast...