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Looking west on Chestnut Street at the University’s east entrance. Drexel’s brand appears on the “High Line,” which carries freight trains around 30th Street Station.
Anthony J. Drexel (1844–1893), Philadelphia investment banker, founder of the Drexel Institute.
Though the MOVE organization is notoriously famous by dint of the tragic 1985 MOVE fire, an event that shook the city to its core and ramifies even today, their history in West Philadelphia spans more than forty years, from the mid-1970s to the late-2010s.
At the turn of the last century, the privately formed Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company contracted with the city to build and operate the electrified Market Street Elevated (“The El”), with a component designated for West Philadelphia.
The West Philadelphia Community Free School—an experimental school annex created to alleviate overcrowding at West Philadelphia High School—was ultimately undone by conflicting visions for how it would function.
The University of Pennsylvania in the 20th and early 21st centuries was shaped in no small way by social and economic conditions in West Philadelphia.
The neighborhood that today is Overbrook was once a hunting ground for the Lenape Indians; from the late 17th to the mid-19th century, a fertile, well-watered area of farmlands and stream-driven mills; and after the late-19th century, increasingly an area of residential housing.
Mill Creek, Indian Run, Morris Park, and City Line are notable historical features of the Overbrook landscape.
Arriving in the mid-1680s, Welsh Quakers held the original patents in the Western Liberties. The descendants of these immigrants maintained sizable estates in the 18th and 19th centuries that evolved into the modern Overbrook.
Throughout the late 19th century and early 20th century, houses of worship and benevolent/charitable institutions played a role in the Overbrook section.
Anthony J. Drexel is significant in West Philadelphia’s history not only as the founder and namesake of Drexel University, but also as an expansive property owner, developer, and philanthropist.