Explore Philadelphia

Philadelphia City Hall is the Second Empire seat of the city government at Penn Square, designed by John McArthur Jr. and built between 1871 and 1901. Its masonry tower, 167 metres high, is topped by Alexander Milne Calder's bronze statue of William Penn, and visitors can take tours of the interior and the tower's observation deck.

Hard Rock Cafe Philadelphia is a restaurant of the Hard Rock chain at 1113 Market Street, in the former Reading Terminal headhouse at the corner of 12th Street, open since January 1998. It serves American dishes in a dining room hung with music memorabilia, has a bar, and its Rock Shop sells Hard Rock clothing and souvenirs.

Reading Terminal Market is an indoor public market at 12th and Arch Streets in Center City, opened in 1893 beneath the train shed of the Reading Railroad. More than a hundred merchants sell produce, meat, fish, cheese, baked goods and prepared food around a central seating area, including Pennsylvania Dutch stalls.

The Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul is the mother church of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, on Logan Square at the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Built of brownstone from 1846 to 1864 to designs by Napoleon LeBrun and John Notman, it has a copper dome and interiors painted by Constantino Brumidi; it also hosts the light-and-sound show LUMINISCENCE.

The Academy of Natural Sciences, founded in 1812 and part of Drexel University since 2011, is the oldest natural science research institution in the Americas. Its museum on Logan Square shows a dinosaur hall with a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, historic wildlife dioramas and a tropical butterfly house.

The Franklin Institute is a science museum named after Benjamin Franklin, founded in 1824 and housed since 1934 in a Neoclassical building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It has hands-on exhibits on physics, electricity, the human body and space, the Fels Planetarium, a Baldwin steam locomotive and the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.

The Mütter Museum is the medical history museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, founded in 1858 with the collection of the surgeon Thomas Dent Mütter. It shows anatomical and pathological specimens, wax models, skeletons and antique medical instruments, including the Hyrtl skull collection and slides of Albert Einstein's brain.

The Barnes Foundation shows the collection assembled by the chemist Albert C. Barnes, with large groups of paintings by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse alongside African sculpture, furniture and ironwork. Founded in 1922 in Merion, it moved in 2012 to a building by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where the rooms keep Barnes's own arrangements.

The Liberty Bell was ordered from a London foundry in 1752 for the Pennsylvania State House and recast twice in Philadelphia by John Pass and John Stow, whose names it bears. Abolitionists gave it its name in the 1830s. Since 2003 it hangs in the Liberty Bell Center opposite Independence Hall, beside exhibits on its history and its crack.

Independence Hall is a Georgian brick building in Philadelphia, completed in 1753 as the Pennsylvania State House, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776 and the US Constitution was drafted in 1787. A World Heritage Site since 1979, it is shown on ranger-led tours that include the Assembly Room.

The National Constitution Center is a museum about the US Constitution on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, opened on July 4, 2003 in a building designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Its galleries explain the Constitution and its history through historic documents, artifacts and interactive exhibits, and it hosts public debates and lectures.

The Rodin Museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway opened in 1929 as the gift of the cinema owner Jules Mastbaum, in a Beaux-Arts building and garden by Paul Cret and Jacques Gréber. Run by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it shows bronzes, marbles and plasters by Auguste Rodin, with a cast of The Thinker at the gate and The Gates of Hell at the entrance.

The Benjamin Franklin Museum lies beneath Franklin Court, the site of Franklin's house off Market Street, now part of Independence National Historical Park. Robert Venturi's steel ghost structure of 1976 outlines the vanished house above the museum, and the court's row houses hold a working printing office and a post office.

The Museum of the American Revolution is a history museum at Third and Chestnut Streets, two blocks from Independence Hall, opened on 19 April 2017. Its brick building by Robert A.M. Stern Architects holds galleries on the Revolutionary War, and a theatre shows George Washington's original field tent.

The Betsy Ross House on Arch Street is a brick house of about 1740 where Betsy Ross, the upholsterer whom family tradition credits with sewing the first American flag, is said to have lived and worked. Restored in the 1930s, its small rooms are furnished in 18th-century style, and Ross and her third husband are buried in the courtyard.

Elfreth's Alley is a narrow lane in Old City laid out around 1703, lined with some 32 brick houses built between 1728 and 1836 and still lived in. It is among the oldest continuously inhabited residential streets in the United States; two of its houses form the Elfreth's Alley Museum, which also runs guided walks.

Eastern State Penitentiary is a former prison in Fairmount, opened in 1829 to John Haviland's radial plan of cellblocks around a central hub, built to hold inmates in solitary confinement. It held prisoners such as Al Capone until it closed in 1971, and is now a historic site preserved in a state of partial ruin, visited with an audio tour.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art was founded in 1876 and moved in 1928 into its neoclassical main building on Fairmount, at the end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Its collection spans Asian, European and American art, from medieval cloisters to Duchamp, and the east entrance stairs became known as the Rocky Steps after the 1976 film.

The Penn Museum is the University of Pennsylvania's museum of archaeology and anthropology at 33rd and South Streets, in a brick building begun in 1899. It holds more than a million objects from its own excavations and collecting, with galleries on Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, Rome, Africa, Asia and the Americas, including a 13-ton granite sphinx of Ramesses II.

Boathouse Row is a line of 19th-century boathouses on the east bank of the Schuylkill River beside the Fairmount Water Works, home to the city's rowing clubs. The buildings are private clubhouses seen from Kelly Drive and the river trail, and their outlines are lit at night; the row is a National Historic Landmark.