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The Politics of Penn's Squares “For the like Uses, as the Moore-fields”: The Politics of Penn’s Squares HE PUBLICATION, IN 1683, of a plan for Philadelphia, assured prospective settlers and investors that William Penn’s new colony of Pennsylvania would be anchored by a well-designed commercial T 1 center (fig. 1). The so-called Portraiture is considered a seminal docu- ment in the history of city planning. Yet historians persistently have failed to grasp the importance of Surveyor General Thomas Holme’s statement, in an accompanying commentary, that four of five public squares were included “for the like Uses, as the Moore-fields in London.”2 In so doing, The research and writing of this essay was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The author wishes to thank Henry Abelove, Ellen G. D’Oench, Gregory Heller, and Diana Post, as well as the two anonymous readers who made several constructive suggestions. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Edmund N. Bacon. 1 A Letter from William Penn, Proprietary and Governor of Pennsylvania in America, to the Committee of the Free Society of Traders of that Province, residing in London (London, 1683), reprinted in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey and Delaware, 1630–1707, ed. Albert Cook Myers (New York, 1912), 243. The pamphlet was reprinted twice in 1683 and again in 1687 and was translated into Dutch, German, and French. 2 Historians typically describe the squares simply as open areas “for recreational use,” as in Hannah Benner Roach, “The Planting of Philadelphia, A Seventeenth-Century Real Estate Development. I,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92 (1968): 36, or Gary B. Nash, “City Planning and Political Tension in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Philadelphia,” THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY Vol. CXXX, No. 3 ( July 2006) 258 ELIZABETH MILROY July Fig. 1. A Portraiture of the city of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania in America, 1683. Historical Society of Pennsylvania. they have overlooked a significant category of spaces that inspired the form and meaning of what arguably were the most innovative elements of Philadelphia’s plan. The Moorfields reference points to the considerable influence of landscape gardening in the genesis of the Portraiture and the moral as well as political meaning Penn invested in his ideal city plan. Conscious of the destruction wrought by the Great Fire of 1666 as it swept through the narrow and haphazard streets of London, Penn initially planned his colonial capital as a two hundred–acre commercial center within a ten thousand–acre area that comprised “the bounds and extent of the libertyes of the town.” Residential lots were to be laid out along the banks of the Delaware at Upland (now Chester), in a series of strips of land with houses erected at the center of each tract so as to leave generous space for gardens and orchards “that it may be a greene Country Towne, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112 (1968): 61. Similarly, Moorfields is mentioned only in passing as in John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1965), 163, and Perry L. Norton, “William Penn Plans His City,” Pennsylvania Heritage 9 (spring 1985): 30. The notable exception is Anthony N. B. Garvan, who recognized the importance of the squares and proposed some sources in “Proprietary Philadelphia as Artifact,” in The Historian and the City, ed. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 189–90. His observations were a starting point for the present study. 2006 THE POLITICS OF PENN’S SQUARES 259 wch will never be burnt, and allways be wholsome.”3 Penn did not specify how the commercial center should be laid out, directing the commissioners who preceded him to the colony only to find a navigable stretch of the Delaware with a viable landing area where a quay could be constructed with a storehouse “wch will yet serve for Market and State houses too.”4 He made no mention of public spaces such as parks or squares, nor did he direct that common spaces be reserved for houses of worship. The commissioners discovered that this plan was impractical. A Swedish settlement was already well established at Upland and no adjacent site was large enough or topographically appropriate for Penn’s town and the adjoining liberties. Accordingly they selected an alternate site farther upriver on a low-lying plain between the Delaware and the Schuylkill rivers and purchased a three hundred–acre tract on the Delaware for the commercial center. By the time Penn arrived in the autumn of 1682, Holme had sketched out a rudimentary layout of streets and house lots at this site, and distribution of town properties by lottery had begun.5 Because there was insufficient frontage property along the Delaware for all who had purchased land to date, Penn proposed that the town be extended westward to incorporate the east bank of the Schuylkill, lots along which would be assigned to absentee purchasers. He directed his commissioners to negotiate the purchase of Schuylkill properties and wrote back to prospective colonists in England to praise the Schuylkill’s potential as the avenue into the heartland. Holme duly revised the plan.6 3 Penn’s first plans are spelled out in “Certaine Conditions or Concessions agreed upon by William Penn . & those who are the adventur[ers] and purchasers in the same Province,” dated July 11, 1681, and in the “Instructions given by me William Penn Proprietor and Governor of Pennsylvania,” of Sept. 30, 1681, in The Papers of William Penn, ed. Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1981–87), 2:98–102, 118–21 (henceforth abbreviated as Penn Papers). These strip lots would have resembled the land allotment pattern adopted in many New England settlements that in turn derived from long-established field systems in England and the continent. Sylvia Doughty Fries, “Philadelphia,” in The Urban Idea in Colonial America (Philadelphia, 1977), 91–92, suggests that the city might have stretched for some fifteen miles. Nash challenges this theory in “City Planning and Political Tension,” 57n21. See also Roach, “Planting of Philadelphia, I,” 6–10, 20, and Reps, Making of Urban America, 120–21, 138–40. 4 Penn, “Instructions,” 2:120. 5 The earliest surveys were started by Thomas Fairman, acting on orders from Commissioner William Markham; Holme took over the survey project after his arrival in the spring of 1682. Roach, “Planting of Philadelphia, I”, 24–25; Nash, “City Planning and Political Tension,” 55–59. 6 Complicating Penn’s project was the fact that here, too, Swedish as well as some Dutch and English settlers already occupied much of the land. Roach, “Planting of Philadelphia, I,” 12–14, 31–34; Nash, “City Planning and Political Tension,” 58–59. See also Irma Corcoran, “William Penn and His Purchasers: Problems in Paradise,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 138 (1994): 478–79. 260 ELIZABETH MILROY July This revised plan, the full title of which was A Portraiture of the city of Philadelphia in the Province of Pennsylvania, was published, with Holme’s commentary, to accompany Penn’s enthusiastic description of the colony sent to the investment group known as the Free Society of Traders. “I remember not one better seated,” Penn announced, “so that it seems to me to have been appointed for a Town, whether we regard the Rivers, or the conveniency of the Coves, Docks, Springs, the loftiness and soundness of the Land and the Air, held by the People of these parts to be very good.”7 Holme was careful to label the plan a “draught” that might “here- after, when time permits, be augmented” and drew in only a rough approximation of topography, leaving out such worrisome details as the numerous streams that zigzagged through the area and the marshy banks along the Schuylkill that would impede the building of roads or houses immediately adjacent to that river. The Portraiture described an efficient commercial hub where “Ships may ride in good Anchorage, in six or eight fathom water in both rivers, close to the City, and the Land of the City level, dry and wholsom: such a scituation is scarce to be parallel’d.”8 And Penn could report that settlement was already proceeding apace: “The Planted part of the Province and Territories . [has been] cast into six Counties . containing about Four Thousand Souls,” with “four Score Houses and Cottages,” merchants, craftsmen and “Country-men . close at their Farms.” The capital “Philadelphia, the Expectation of those that are concern’d in this Province,” Penn noted, “is at last laid out to the great Content of those here, that are any wayes Interested therein.”9 The city was projected to develop across a compact one-mile-by-two- mile grid of streets covering roughly twelve hundred acres. Holme subdi- vided the grid into four quarters, defined by the intersection of Broad Street, running north-south, and High (Market) Street, running east- west, both one hundred feet wide. “Front” streets along each river (also one hundred feet wide) were set back, leaving the banks open. The remaining streets would be fifty feet wide. The plan was symmetrical along Broad Street: on each side ten streets ran north-south; three streets 7 Letter . to the Committee of the Free Society of Traders, 239–40. This plan was adjusted as early as 1684, when Broad Street was shifted westward. See Hannah Benner Roach, “The Planting of Philadelphia, A Seventeenth-Century Real Estate Development. II,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92 (1968): 156.
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