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Philadelphia

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, sits at the junction of the Schuykill and Delaware Rivers, and is also a major ocean port,1 although its nationalist monuments, the Liberty Bell, the Betsy Ross House and Independence Hall are better known.2 Other tourist sites include an underground museum at the site of Benjamin Franklin's House and an art museum. It has a metropolitan population of 6.423 million, with 1.523 million in the city proper.3 East of the city, along the New Jersey coast, is Atlantic City, famous for its casinos and other entertainments. The Philadephia International Airport is one the busiest in the United States of America.

The tallest building is Comcast Tower, 57 stories, which boasts the largest liquid tuned column damper.4 The tallest older building, from 1901, is the City Hall, topped with a 37 story statue of William Penn, and featuring other statues of indigenous and Swedish settlers. From around the same time is the Wanamaker building, which has one of the world's largest organs.5

The metropolitan area extends to Wilmington, Delaware, a tourist destination noted for, among other things, its Hagley Museum that includes the original DuPont gunpowder works.

YearPopulationPolitical entity
1800 CE68,0006United States of America
1900 CE1,418,0006United States of America
2000 CE6,188,0003United States of America

Delaware river view from up high in Philadephia, monument in foreground, docked ship in mid-ground, highways right, New Jersey shore left
Philadephia waterfront and Delaware River

Historical maps

map showing part of the United States of America, 1800 and 1900 CE

map showing part of the United States of America, 2000 CE

Footnotes

1. 'Ameriport' is listed as a world-important container, oil and grain port in Alastair Cooper, ed., The Times Atlas of the Oceans (Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1983), "commodity loading ports" map.
2. The hall is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
3. Metropolitan population from world-gazetteer.com, accessed 3/2/2013.
4. For an illustration of tuned liquid column dampers see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttDpEQULxrI.
5. Information about buildings is from Emporis.com, accessed 3/16/2013. One Liberty Place has more stories, 61, but the Comcast Tower is taller.
6. Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, 2nd ed. (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987), "Tables of World's Largest Cities". From 1800 to the present Philadephia has been the largest city in the area that combines Pennsylvania and New Jersey.