Philadelphia's Lost History

In this section, I will look at some of Philadelphia's Lost History, starting with The Sesquicentennial in 1926, since most of it was at FDR Park, I had the urge to find out more.

 So I started my search in one place I know you can find anything, EBay. To my surprise there were quite a few things on there and reasonably priced. So I bid on some of the items I was interested in, a couple of books, some postcards with some things I recognized, a few Pictorial Guides and a couple other items. I found out alot of interesting things about the Sesquicentennial in a book I purchased. There are so many things that I will take you on a kind of a pictorial walkthrough whatever I have pictures of and do my best to describe what I can remember.

 Well The Sesquicentennial was huge, not only in size, but in its importance for the City of Philadelphia at the time. It began on June 30, 1926 and ran all the way into December of that year. It's size was enormous and stretched from Broad St. and Oregon Ave. all the way to and including the Naval Base. Something like 80 countries participated, including Russia, India and Japan to name a few.

 At Broad and Oregon Ave there is a park split up the middle by Broad St. This Giant Liberty Bell stretched across Broad St. in between the 2 parks. It had 26,000 incandescent light bulbs on it, and was lit up at night for the festival. It was over 85ft. high. and cars and trucks drove under it. I have not been able to find many photos of this. If anybody has any, I would love to scan them. I will post the others I have here. This photo still shows the scaffolding they used to erect it, and I'm not sure if this is looking south or north on Broad St.

 This is another photo taken well before it was completed. A little history here, this festival took 3 years of planning and many thousands of man hours to complete. Most of which were in the final months leading up to the Opening Day Ceremonies which took place in "The Million Dollar Stadium" aka JFK Stadium which cost the city 2 million dollars to build. Like I said most of it in the final months leading up to opening day. Many thought it would not be completed in time and there was a lot of squabbling going on about all kinds of issues.

 Continued Here