The Franklin Institute (1937 - 2007) - Philadelphia, PA
N 39° 57.472 W 075° 10.345
18S E 485273 N 4423095
With my back to Logan Square, on the southwestern most corner, I stood on the sidewalk, perhaps in the same exact spot where the AMG author for the Institute article once stood, and snapped this photo, seventy years after the first photo was taken.
Waymark Code: WM8NNT
Location: New Jersey, United States
Date Posted: 04/24/2010
Views: 6
Recreating this photo was rather easy as nothing has changed in the last seventy years. William Penn's opens space, Logan Square, still stand unaffected by progress and modernization and my view was completely unobstructed.
John T. Windrim designed the building in the Classical Revival or "Classical Beaux-Arts" tradition. The entrance facing 20th Street is very impressive; it is made of buff Indiana limestone. The base and the exterior steps were fashioned out of Milford pink granite. The cornerstone for the current location of the Museum (20th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway) was laid in 1932.
The Franklin Institute itself comprises three centers, The Science Center, The Franklin Center, and The Center for Innovation in Science Learning. It also houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial. I remember my graduation year from high school hearing that this site attained national recognition status and was placed on the national register. I must have visited this place over a dozen times with family, on field trips, geocaching and lately, waymarking. The most notable part of every visit is the huge heart and that static generator you touch and makes your hair stand on end.
49. The Franklin Institute (open 2-10 Wed-Fri and Sun., 10 a.m. - 10 p.m. Sat.; adm. 25¢), Winter St. at 20th St., was founded in 1824 through the efforts of Samuel Vaughan Merrick and Dr. William Keating. The first exhibition of the institute was held in the fall of 1824 at Carpenters' Hall, and for more than a century the association occupied a building on the east side of 7th Street below Market. John T. Windrim was the architect of the new building, opened in 1934. Of light-buff limestone with a granite base, it has a central portico with six tall Corinthian columns. Pennsylvania: A Guide to the Keystone State, 1940; page 278-79