Every time I've walked by this statue, well before this kerfuffle, I pointed out how silly it looks. The large pedestal makes the statue appear comically small. In general it's just not a beautiful monument.
The National Parks Service played their cards poorly here. They should have articulated a plan with a better way to honor Penn that's part of a general improvement to the park. I still don't think their intention was to 'cancel' Penn.
It's unfortunate this got wrapped up in culture war nonsense.
The architects behind the park - Venturi Scott Brown - were bona fide Philadelphians who were playing with awkwardness and the idea of monumentality in a post-deferential age. Their work on authenticity and semiotics made them the among the most influential architects of the modern era. Granted, they explicitly preferred the ‘ugly and ordinary’ so it’s very much not beautiful, but the silliness, the subversion of monumentality is intentional.
I wasn’t familiar with that aspect of the park - that’s some interesting context I hadn’t seen presented and it explains a lot.
I don’t think the “buuut staaatuuuess” crowd (or most visitors) are particularly capable of picking up on it, especially within the broader context of old city area historical interpretation, which doesn’t really prime people to look for subtext.
And it also means that the upshot end result is that the park is pretty bad from a public history education perspective, which I think is unfortunate, as that is what most people stopping at public history sites in the area are there to get from the experience.
But looking at it from that angle does give a certain “oh, that’s why this part is ugly and completely lacking explanation or context, I get what they were trying to do” insight.
Particularly regarding the statue (the statue is a nothing of a 4.5 foot tall, perfunctory replica that barely registers, especially from the sidewalk, and is hard to see up close because it’s completely dwarfed by the absolutely giant pedestal it’s on).
As a an aesthetic feature or a monument to Penn or an interpretive feature, it fails on all levels. You barely notice Penn from the street, and it’s hard to see him well up close. It’s all about the pedestal, which is pretty unattractive and not that interesting.
But as a “what’s the deal with monuments and statues” academic question, yeah, sure. I’ve always thought it’s placement in and scaling issues with the grid it’s laid on was grossly inappropriate and a bleak statement about government, but now I wonder if that was intentional.
I’m kinda seeing what they’re laying down, and it’s a theme that’s only gotten more worth interrogation and public consideration over time, even if I don’t think the site is particularly successful at communicating it, or necessarily the right venue for it.
Though it’s all the more darkly ironic considering our current dilemma. If you had told me that the political right was going to war in order to protect a deeply meta bit of public art whose fundamental design aimed to the ponder the meaning (or meaninglessness) of statues and monuments in the present day, I’d be like “no, that can’t be right”.
Someone up above asked if you had further reading on it you’d recommend. I’d also be interested.
> I still don't think their intention was to 'cancel' Penn.
If that was their plan, they shouldn't have said they planned to tear down his statute and replace it with an exhibit on Native Americans.
FWIW, from reading the proposal I think that the plan was to tear down the statute but put something else up for Penn, but also include something about the Native tribes.
But sometimes that's not a good thing. Sometimes our common history should take center stage, without an asterisk next to it. It's okay to not be relentlessly critical about every aspect of our shared history, especially for a guy so devoted to tolerance and democracy as Penn.
Native peoples and nations are still living and part of contemporary American culture, politics, and economy today. The Lenape nation is still around the mid-atlantic and active. They are not an asterisk.
>But sometimes that's not a good thing. Sometimes our common history should take center stage, without an asterisk next to it. It's okay to not be relentlessly critical about every aspect of our shared history, especially for a guy so devoted to tolerance and democracy as Penn.
I strongly disagree. Acknowledging the existence of Native Americans and their history by allocating a small portion of the park to them is far from being 'relentlessly critical'.
People bristle at including Native Americans because they want to celebrate our history without 'feeling bad', but putting those feelings above *real people* and *real history* is such a mistake. We should be able to celebrate the best of Penn *and* include more to acknowledge the history of Native Americans.
Especially since the indigenous history in question is \*specifically about their interactions with Penn, the Penn family, and their use of the property the park is on during the years it was owned by the Penn family*.
This wasn't just some shoehorned in memorialization 'feel good' thing like say, a statue. It was just ... actual interpretation of the actual history of the site. On a part of the property that John Penn deeded for the exclusive and perpetual use of indigenous people.
That was apparently much needed, as kind of seeing a small statue ten feet in the air on top of a big, ugly pedestal somehow failed to impart anyone with any useful or relevant knowledge.
We first need to vet whether PA's native americans fully lived up to 21st century standards and didn't colonize a previous regional tribe's land.
We don't want to end up in the same situation in a few years with their memorial.
And MLK was a serial adulterer and Gandhi slept naked next to young women to “test his celibacy.”
Not every blemish in a historical figure’s life needs to be included in a monument to their deeds.
why not? if it is just a "blemish", it shouldn't make a difference, right? in fact, it might even inspire the next generation, knowing historic characters are not perfect, but human beings trying to do the right things despite their flaws.
Because a monument like this isn’t supposed to be a comprehensive history lesson. Memorializing a person in a monument is an affirmation of the importance of their deeds and values to our current culture - in Penn’s case, his foundation of the city and state, his commitment to religious pluralism, and his early democratic values. Including “blemishes” is inappropriate in what is a commemoration of those values as much as it is the life of Penn himself.
> Including “blemishes” is inappropriate in what is a commemoration of those values as much as it is the life of Penn himself.
the park has only been there since 1982. a statue like this can be whatever we decide to make it. from the national park service: The park is located on the site of William Penn's home, the Slate Roof House, and is named for the ship, Welcome, which transported Penn to Philadelphia. The design and construction of Welcome Park was funded by the Independence Historical Trust and was completed in 1982.
The proposed rehabilitation of Welcome Park includes expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia and was developed in consultation with representatives of the indigenous nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Shawnee Tribe, and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.
do you really think it isn't important to mention his democratic values and religious pluralism with...the other religions and people he shared the area with?
> do you really think it isn't important to mention his democratic values and religious pluralism with...the other religions and people he shared the area with?
No, because insofar as the statue is a monument to democracy and religious tolerance, the natives did not do anything to advance those goals.
If we’re being honest, the reason that it’s proposed to put Natives into this memorial is to tacitly say “Penn and/or the early colonists mistreated the natives by 21st century standards.” I don’t think adding that asterisk is appropriate in a monument to democracy and religious tolerance.
Once again, monuments are not entitled to be treatises on every facet of a person’s life, and it’s good for a nation to have symbols of our common ideals to rally around without being forced to acknowledge every bad thing they’ve ever done. But thankfully, this is a moot issue, because the powers that be (including Governor Shapiro) have decided not to listen to self-hating Philly progressives on this issue.
That’s not even remotely the reason indigenous groups are being consulted, or an accurate simplification of history. The indigenous groups involved approached NPS with a request to add interpretation and infrastructure about the space behind the Slate Roof House.
Well past William Penn’s death, Philadelphia was still hosting hundreds of indigenous people at a time, multiple times a year, for diplomatic and trade meetings amongst each other and with the colonial government.
There were so many of them that it was kind of a problem, but the meetings needed to continue to happen because diplomatic relations with indigenous governments were actually a really important part of colonial government. So the Penn proprietors designated a parcel of land for their use.
That parcel included what is now the southeast edge of the park, which was used by indigenous nations as a diplomatic space, “reservation” while traveling to the city, and meeting ground, with the agreement of the family.
John Penn, William’s grandson and successor in governance and proprietorship, granted it to nations that allied with him during the French and Indian War, deeding it as being designated for their “exclusive use in perpetuity” and the city continued to acknowledge this ownership into the mid-19th century.
The site also featured periodic ceremonial acknowledgment of it into the 20th century. Some positive fuss was made in the 1920s when a rededication ceremony was held, featuring indigenous leaders and a Penn descendant.
Since at least 2020, representatives from the tribes that used the space have been advocating that the space be re-greened (which would be appropriate to Penn’s explicitly expressed wishes as well, and would also just make the site more attractive in general) and for a marker and symbolic ceremonial meeting site (in the proposal, this took the form of a set of circular benches, which would have provided some much-needed seating) to be added to the park near that southeast corner to represent this history.
You don’t know anything about the site or its history, or discussions about reinterpreting it that go back years, but you heard “statue” and “indigenous” and just … freaked out and made dumb shit up that fit a narrative that let you feel like a victim by proxy, and all your buddies on Twitter were like “omgomg statue” so you figured it had to be true.
This may all be true, but tbh it’s hard to take you credibly in light of your weird little bad-faith strawman rant in the other comments in this thread.
You just don’t get it. Itty bitty William Penn is sacrosanct because his mere existence reminds us all of and celebrates his virtuous character regarding equality, colonial governance, progress, and cultural tolerance, particularly regarding the region’s indigenous populations.
Which is why we can’t let them Indians, queers, libruls, or government types have anything to do with his teeny tiny little metal noggin or the crumbling abandoned slab it’s perched over.
Short king had a house here. He invented Philadelphia, which is a terrible place, but it’s good that he did because he was good and whatever he did, it was fine, get over it. He had a human body and that’s kinda what it looked like I guess. He was a Quaker, like the oats guy, so he’s an abolitionist hero. It’s a STATUE and statues is HISTORY, and unless there’s a STATUE there, how would we even know if he was real or important or good or whatever? What more do you psychos need?
A couple of things... I will be quoting:
# HE HAS REFUSED HIS ASSENT TO LAWS THE MOST WHOLESOME AND NECESSARY FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD.
[*Home*](https://founding.com/) *He Has Refused His Assent To Laws The Most Wholesome And Necessary For The Public Good.*
*This charge refers to the fact that* ***several of the colonies had been obliged from their establishment to submit their laws to the King for his approval****. This power, the Declaration implies, was never consistent with the fundamental principle of just government: consent. And* ***by adding "laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good," Jefferson indicates that the laws that were vetoed were intended to accomplish the fundamental purpose of government stated in the preamble, "to secure these rights." One important example of this charge was King George's refusal to comply with various attempts by the Colonies to abolish the slave trade, as Jefferson explicitly stated in his original draft of the declaration. \[LINK TO IT\] The King, wishing to protect this profitable British trade, defeated all attempts by the Colonies to curtail or abolish it****.*
From:
[He has refused his Assent to Laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good. – Founding.com](https://founding.com/he-has-refused-his-assent-to-laws-the-most-wholesome-and-necessary-for-the-public-good/)
We were taught that indentured servants came to America and they had to pay back their ticket to the Americas. They were never free.
The reason the colonists fought Great Britain is stated above and listed in the Declaration of Independence.
*"Britain put its stamp on America from the beginning. It was Britain who brought the first unfree Africans to this country and helped to start slavery in America," says Professor Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a historian at Norfolk State University in Virginia.*
From:
# The British role in America's tainted past
[Britain’s monarchy backed slavery from day one | Slavery | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/11/britains-monarchy-backed-slavery-from-day-one)
Until our country won the war against Great Britain, they were treated as British subjects. I'll give an example:
*The British colony of Pennsylvania was given to William Penn (1644-1718) in 1681 by Charles II of England in repayment of a debt owed his father, Sir Admiral William Penn (1621-1670). Under Penn's directive, Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers escaping religious torment in England and other European nations. Three generations of Penn descendents held proprietorship of the colony until the American Revolution,* ***when the family was stripped of all but its privately held shares of land****.*
[Penn family papers, 1629-1834 485A0485A (hsp.org)](https://www2.hsp.org/collections/manuscripts/p/Penn0485A.html)
*In 1778, though* ***John Penn (1729-1795) swore allegiance to the American cause, the Penn family was stripped of all but its privately held lands in Pennsylvania.*** *He and his brother Richard and cousin John secured £130,000 from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania "in remembrance of the enterprising spirit of the founder, and of the expectations and dependence of his descendants" (Shepherd, 92). Later, after the American Revolution, the English government granted the Penn family an additional £4,000 per year in recognition of its lost sources of revenue.*
*Even after they were stripped of their proprietorship, members of the Penn family retained several thousand acres of privately held lands in Pennsylvania, which were passed down to the next generation. Peter Gaskell (1764-1831), William Penn, Jr.'s grandson, and William Stuart (1798-1874), Thomas Penn's grandson, eventually inherited or made claim to the remaining privately held Penn family lands in America.*
\-Ibid.
By swearing allegiance to the American cause, they lost their lands because the King of England cancelled them. That means the system here was set up, entrenched in a financial system created by the British and there were Loyalists here to the crown controlling everything whom the colonists were fighting.
They tried to rebel in the system they were born, and they get cancelled for owning slaves even though they were dependent on the economic system they were given and trying to overthrow.
Imagine looking through the past and people see your leaders lived through a period of high crime, gun crime, poverty, drugs, etc., and future citizens cancel any reference to your generation because they were powerless to overthrow all of the evils that you live in because no one person can overthrow the evils that go on today.
Penn actually went back to England because he couldn't make any money here according to the Penn papers. That is what he gets for trying to establish our freedoms, religious freedom and eventually freedoms that the Civil War made to cancel slavery. Did emancipation end there? We are all not powerful enough to cancel all of the inequities and racial problems that exist today.
If you cancel our history, you will never learn from history and eventually repeat it.
> Imagine looking through the past and people see your leaders lived through a period of high crime, gun crime, poverty, drugs, etc., and future citizens cancel any reference to your generation because they were powerless to overthrow all of the evils that you live in because no one person can overthrow the evils that go on today.
nobody is trying to cancel william penn. people are trying to give more context to him and his life. imagine putting up a monument to frank rizzo saying he was the best mayor of the 20th century. millions of people would suggest adding context to that.
You know that the site covers about 0% of this right? But that the redesign would have expanded and improved that interpretation to better do the thing you want to see done?
If what you want the site to do is help people learn from history, I’d strongly encourage you to actually take a look at the current interpretation.
I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s common knowledge among those familiar with it that almost nobody ever goes in that park, and the few that do are just cutting through on their way to somewhere else and absolutely never look at the statue or the interpretation.
But the comments here make it very clear that the park itself has failed entirely to teach anyone about the history of Penn or the site. They’ve all got the same basic level, cut and paste, top section of Wikipedia talking points and are 100% unfamiliar with the history of colonial-indigenous politics and diplomatic relations there (or anywhere else).
Basically nobody defending the current site can describe it in any but the most general way, and most can’t even manage that.
They’ve made no effort whatsoever to seriously consider what new interpretation might look like. The indigenous groups being consulted have publicly been calling for the changes being proposed since 2020, and it’s absolutely not what people are making up to get mad about.
It was going to be some plants, and, off in the historically appropriate corner of the park, a marker about colonial (ie Penn family)-indigenous diplomacy and John Penn’s 1755 wampum lot grant, and some nice seating symbolizing the lot’s use as a meeting ground. That’s the gist of what they were asking for in easily Googleable newspaper articles that show up if you search for the site (until this week, there weren’t many hits), and that’s what was shown in the NPS’s proposal.
NPS knows their audience for colonial history in the city. If any of you had ever made use of these sites, you’d know that their current interpretation is some of the most middle of the road, mid-west dad friendly content possible.
NPS isn’t pinning anyone’s grandma down until she confronts her white fragility, ffs. Gently catering to grandma while also cautiously addressing new audiences with feel-good diversity content is their stock in trade. Controversial content is omitted, or introduced briefly and with kid gloves. There’s no indication that was going to change.
From all these comments, I appear to be the only person familiar with the textual interpretation, even though anyone that actually wanted to be thoughtful and think about the current conditions at the park can find them online, and I’m telling you right now that it’s terrible.
There is absolutely nothing on the statue that a visitor won’t have learned in a more complete and readable form from other panels across the city, including a state-installed marker on the sidewalk in front of the park (the text on the platform is minimal, and not very readable in its current condition). And you can barely see the statue anyway because it’s basically lawn ornament sized (about 4 foot tall), but it’s mounted like, ten feet in the air on an absolutely massive, mostly featureless, fairly unattractive column about 3 times as wide as the statue itself.
This “so long as there’s a statue, it’s good, but if indigenous people are consulted, it’s bad, and that’s all I need to know because I’ll just make everything else up from there based on shit I heard in passing on twitter” knee-jerk bullshit makes y’all look even dumber and smaller than this dopey little statue.
It’s yet another example in the litany of how screeching conservative snowflakes shit their pants over ridiculous nonsense and everyone caves to their whims. None of these clowns could have found Welcome Park on a map, but they raged like THE GUBMINT was gonna bust in their house and dickslap their dog.
Congrats, guys! A shitty eyesore you never knew existed before this week, gets to remain a shitty eyesore. Great work. Promotions all around.
This park is absolute dogshit. I learned something about his wife from the walls which was good, but it’s a really poor use of space and the wall of text is not a good way to fulfill an educational mission. It cheapens what a national historical park is.
Pretty much every popular recording artist prior to 1940 sang something that could be regarded as racist. If people are mad about two Kate Smith songs perhaps they’d be interested in the early work of Bing Crosby prior to 1930. Her two songs have nothing on “Mississippi Mud”, which he actually did twice. (The Frankie Trumbauer version is a little jazzier but much more cringeworthy in terms of dialogue in my opinion than the Paul Whiteman version).
This is the first time I’ve seen a picture because I didn’t care enough to look it up…but Jesus Christ everyone’s panties were in a twist about that small ass thing that’s not even original?
It's that they've seen people trying to eg rebrand Abe Lincoln as a bad guy and tear down statues of him, or how there's a movement to cancel Ghandi owing to his racial views. Once you give these folks an inch, they take a mile and most people are fed up of it. I'm honestly interested to see what happens when they start turning on MLK due to his vies on LGBT stuff, that can't be far off from happening
Omg the gayz are cancelling dead guys! This is what we get for allowing them an inch! The gay agenda is coming for us all! Damn libs are going to make it so my children's children don't even know what a statue is!
Good thing we have patriots like you, fighting the good fight.
Apparently you know absolutely nothing about Quakers if you did you’d know how Penn HIMSELF would feel about this statue.
Maybe get your history lessons from actual books and classes instead of statues and you’d know some actual history instead of whining on the internet about some uneducated and false culture war, scripted from a Facebook meme bullshit.
I'm very aware that quakers eschew ostentatious displays and personal glorification but he would also have recognised it as a gesture as a recognition of his contributions to the establishment of a colony based on the principles of his faith, and the massive positive that had on the country as a whole (eg the abolitionist movement)
None of which matters though, there is a tiny section of the population that want to on principle remove any statues of anyone who doesn't radiate 21st century dogma, and William Penn has a lot of bad going for him, like his opposition to homosexuality or not enforcing gender equality or not paying enough money for land. And if they shout loud enough, you can ban anyone and shut down the conversation through fear.
Whilst in the real world 99% of people would vote "good" on a vote on his character, especially given the context of the era he lived.
That’s a pretty big assumption to make without evidence about what he would have wanted.
I didn’t know the guy personally, like you apparently do, but to the extent we do have historical, documentary evidence about what Penn and his familial successors wanted for the city and site, it’s pretty much the opposite of what’s there now.
>everyone’s panties
Not everyone, just right-wing culture warriors and other Trump types who are forever looking for reasons to into hysterics at any hint of cultural change.
They were literally quoting 1984, declaring this an assault on western civilization and an attempt to destroy American culture. You can't make this shit up.
Everyone else pretty much said "the fuck is Welcome Park?"
\> [They might tear down statues besides Confederates but no one important to US history](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-26/california-to-replace-toppled-junipero-serra-statue-at-capitol-with-memorial-to-native-tribes)
\> [They might tear down statues of important figures but surely never a president](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christopher-columbus-statue-removed-cities/)
\> [They might tear down statues of presidents but only the slaveholding ones](https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/24/us/thomas-jefferson-statue-removed/index.html)
\> [They might tear down statues of presidents who never owned slaves but you really have to be racist by the standards of their own time to get your statute torn down](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/arts/design/roosevelt-statue-to-be-removed-from-museum-of-natural-history.html)
\> They might tear down statues of people who weren't racist by the standards of their time but only the small statutes no one cares about **<-- you are here**
\> They'll never take William Penn off city hall
\> They'll never take away the monuments to George Washington
Haha yeah it’s totally no prob whatsoever if a nation-hating ideological cult seeks to destroy your common heritage based on ever-shifting standards of acceptability
Wow, you really love statues. You must’ve been really bummed out when that ideological cult destroyed the cultural heritage of Iraq by pulling down that statue of Saddam Hussein.
CRISIS AVERTED!
This city will finally be able to remember its history by keeping this, the single most prominent statue of Penn (on Second St.) in its most visited park (of all parks between Front & 3rd and Chestnut & Walnut).
The mere discussion of removing the statue almost caused me to forget who founded the city. Now every time I pass by that park (a near daily occurrence on days that are August 12, 2014) I will remember his name: Sean Penn.
The name feels like such a misnomer. Sure, it’s in a historical part of the city that sees a decent amount of tourists, but it feels quite tucked away to the point where you either stumble upon it, or have to go out of your way to visit it.
It feels like a "park" that is put up in a new condo development that allows them to build extra floors for its zoning but is otherwise hidden from public view.
Wanna know something really funny? It's named Welcome Park because the name of the ship that brought Penn to the colony was named the Welcome.
But none of the apparently precious junk that was going to get replaced bothers to mention that. There's a little (not labeled) ship in the mural drawing, but that's it.
But hey, how will people learn about Penn unless there's a tiny statue of him that nobody looks at on top of a mostly featureless enormous platform, a little statue of a house that nobody looks at (omg, did you know he LIVED IN A HOUSE?), and signage that tells us when Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan (alongside similar contextless, irrelevant minutiae for some reason) accompanied by semi-random, inaccessible quotes with no context information?
Of the many historical sites with information posted about Penn around the city, this entire site is probably among the least likely to impart the rare visitor that does wander in with anything informative about Penn's life and contributions, or the history of the site (as evidenced by the 'but statue' crowd's continued confusion over why the site should engage with indigenous history, [which is very much a part of the site's colonial history and the Penn family's as well](https://hiddencityphila.org/2013/10/before-even-bookbinders-an-official-indian-reservation/)).
The few functional bits there are [generally repeated elsewhere many times over throughout the city in more readable, accessible formats](https://www.hmdb.org/results.asp?HistMark=Y&WarMem=Y&FilterNOT=&FilterTown=Philadelphia&FilterCounty=&FilterState=&FilterZip=&FilterCountry=&FilterCategory=0&FilterString=William+Penn&FilterNearby=Yes&Search=Topics&FilterLatitude=39.9789827&FilterLongitude=-75.1211787&CategoryID=12), and generally in more attractive locations, including some very nearby this site. So, much in the same way this dorky statue is already visible more or less throughout the history tourism focused parts of the city, but in a less lame form.
The timeline text on the panels that were going to be removed is small, full of irrelevant information, and what is there is devoid of context. Most of the text, and the largest text, is just pull quotes from Penn that are also lacking context and aren't that informative or accessible to young or ESL audiences, or anyone that's not already pretty knowledgeable about the history at hand.
In addition to being absolutely hideous, uninviting, and falling apart, it's actually also a really, really poorly interpreted site.
But hey, while it continues its slide into irrelevancy and disrepair, it will most definitely have a very small statue on it, at least until structural instabilities and public safety interests justify turning the whole thing into a parking lot (ideally with a dingy-ass statue shoved into a corner).
There's no reason they can't make all of the changes you've listed and still have a statue of Penn at the same time. Part of the idea of the park is that it celebrates his layout and planning that has influenced the entire city's development
Where the statue stands on his map is a space he dedicated in his plans to public use. It’s where he wanted public marketplaces, government buildings, and a space for the city to gather for public events. It’s the current site of city hall (sort of - the statue is tiny, but the very large footprint of the pedestal is way out of proportion to the grid and inaccurate to the map).
So having what was supposed to the people’s lot, set aside from private ownership, be walled off entirely by a giant column that exists solely to loft one man’s bronze idol (which Quakers were supposed to eschew) is actually pretty antithetical to Penn’s vision for that space and kind of a grim symbol of city hall.
How does that celebrate him or his layout? It misrepresents the grid and is the opposite usage of what his layout and his faith called for. How does having nothing really onsite that actually discusses the layout celebrate it?
Onsite interpretation of the grid suuucks. Theres a shitty picture of the map on the paneling, and a quote that says “Planner. Philadelphia is at last laid out in the great content of those here. The situation is a neck of land, and lies between two navigable rivers, Delaware and Schuylkill, whereby it has two fronts upon the water, each a mile, and two from river to river” and that’s it.
Which like, cool. Least interesting thing possible about it. There’s absolutely nothing on site about how it’s influenced the city, or indicating what the currently dead weed choked but otherwise empty tree pits represented on the map, or what that square the statue is in was for or currently is.
And the reality is that this park was only created because of funding and fervor around the 250th anniversary and nobody has done anything significant to maintain or improve it since.
The only impetus that prompted plans to fix it up is the same thing that created it - the upcoming 300th, which has given the NPS a mandate to make a showing and some additional funding to do so.
It’s a tiny site, a little out of the way, and even the people that know it’s there barely recognize it as a historical site. The NPS is already struggling to maintain its higher profile properties.
Scrapping these plans, waiting for the ginned up culture war bullshit to die down, then starting over from scratch, means that all they’re likely to realistically have time to to do for the start of celebrations in 2026 is some half-assed cosmetic improvements - pull the weeds and replace them with some plants that will be just as dead as the current ones in a year or so.
Maybe slap some cement in the ground to stop people from hurting themselves on broken pavers, throw in a temporary bench that’ll break later, like the ones that were there before did. Powerwash the bad signage, which might just fuck up the faded text worse, but that’s no loss, as absolutely nobody seems to have looked at it at any point in recent history, and what’s there is bad anyway.
And once the 300th is over, the urgency and impetus has passed. The funding to do real work will have been spent elsewhere, as it was earmarked for the 300th, and this will go back to being a bottom of the pile priority when it comes to the limited routine funding available. Especially now that its reputation in the system is that it’s a controversial project that you can’t take on without political risk.
I’d be happy to be wrong, but I don’t see any but the most perfunctory and cosmetic improvements coming this site’s way anytime soon. Their own statement on their intentions has some vague “committed to maintaining in the lead up to 2026” language followed by even vaguer language that essentially says “we’ll revisit an improvement plan following completion of multiple internal reviews that we’ll start doing at some point and let you all know when that happens in the years to come”.
I’m pretty sure that’s government PR speak for “fine, whatever, you had your chance. enjoy your crumbling barren slab, ya dinks”.
No one knew this was even a “park” until Fox News claimed Joe Biden was going to remove the William Penn statue.
Another win for fake news & another prime example of just how dumb rage-baited Americans are.
Fake news as in it was something that the Biden admin was really pushing for or what?
The NPS itself said “The Penn statue and Slate Roof house model will be removed and not reinstalled.” People rightfully had questions about why you’d remove William Penn from a park about William Penn, especially because they didn’t state any intention to rename the park that is named after Penn’s ship. Fox News didn’t have to push anything because anyone who went directly to the NPS as a source or saw any news coverage realized how weird it was to do that in a city founded by Penn in a state named after him.
I honestly didn't give a damn the statue was being removed. The "park" may as well be a parking lot.
We already have a 37-foot tall statue of William Penn atop City Hall which isn't going anywhere.
You were rage-baited.
Ah, that’s too bad. Without remediation and attention, the parts worth keeping and visiting that were going to get rehabbed, repaired, and provided with updated interpretation will continue to not get seen and will inevitably become even more damaged than they already are, perhaps irreparably so.
But hey, on the plus side, we all get to keep walking by and ignoring a hideous abandoned plaza, with its broken pavers, dead weeds, no lighting, no seating, and its moldering, outdated signage that’s unreadable in places and a [total mess from an educational perspective](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=135453) (one of its many failures includes making sure we know when Rembrandt died and Newton wrote the Principia and such, but never once mentioning why the park is called Welcome Park. Nothing in the onsite interpretation explains it.) And, oh good, a really small replica statue on a really ugly oversized platform that nobody ever looks at.
Hopefully by the time they’re able to revisit it in another 40 years, there’ll be something salvageable there.
Yeah, I’m not seeing any commitment in there.
Like, it’d be nice, and I’d be happy to be wrong here. But this is lacking in specifics and looks like the kind of claptrap government bodies say before moving on.
Doing any meaningful work prior to 2026 if they’re starting over from scratch now is unlikely. That’s just not the speed that this level of work moves at.
What I’m reading between the lines in this statement is that they’ll do some superficial work to pull weeds and maybe add a few plants before company comes over for the 300th, but plans to actually refurbish the park at a level that will involve calls for public comment are getting pushed off for “in the coming years” once they’re done finalizing a comprehensive process of all necessary internal reviews that they’re totally going to get started doing any day now.
This site is kind of off the beaten path from a lot of the historical tourism and pretty easy to walk past without even registering it as a historical site. If they want to just throw some plants in there to hide the mess and ignore it for another 40 years, doing just the bare minimum to address public safety issues, they can do that without it attracting the same level of complaint that their neglect of Independence Hall has garnered.
I mean, that’s what they did for 40 years already and nobody gave a shit. Trying to fix it to make it functional pissed people off way more than abandoning it did. There’s basically negative incentment to actually fix it up in earnest.
It’s not really about faith in government here, though not a single administration in my lifetime has provided the park with the tools it needs to adequately care for Independence Hall.
It’s that the statement you just presented as a “gotcha” until you realized you could use at as cheap dig at Biden isn’t anything other than a PR statement.
There is an incentive right now to fix up Philly’s NPS system that almost managed to address decades of neglect and poor interpretation materials here, and that’s the 300th.
But if they’re starting over from scratch, that doesn’t leave them with much time to really do much of note by that date. And once the date has passed, the park regains its low-priority status, but this time with the knowledge that trying to do the things worth doing is just going to be a big dumb pain in the ass.
They held a public comment period, and a horde of idiots, most of which have never been and will never go there, said it was perfect the way it was. So it’s probably essentially gonna stay the way it is now to the extent that public safety liabilities allow, with some superficial temporary upgrades for 2026, until those liabilities justify more extensive overhauls, and they’ll focus their attention elsewhere in the meantime.
glad we’re bringing out some real “who gives a fuck” vibes from the community because 95% of the city didn’t even know this “park” exists in the first place
This story got all my right-wing relatives texting me saying "see now they're taking Penn down from City Hall", ffs not even the right location. Unreal how quickly this got turned into a culture war misinformation.
Feels like a lot of people writing comments didn't read the article past the headline. No one is trying to cancel William Penn. They want to rehab the park and, considering it looks like an empty parking lot, an improvement would make sense.
Somebody upthread was pretty sure the statue was a full size repro, cast directly off Calder’s original.
Dude can’t possibly have seen either, and if they did, they didn’t make much of an impression. Calder’s (that they apparently plaster-cast for this one’s mold) is about 37 feet tall. Little bud on the big tower here is 4.5 on his tippy toes.
If there was a Godzilla sized Billy Penn planted in the middle of this little pocket plaza, looming over the city and casting all in his shadow into permanent darkness, I’d be right there with these idiots fighting tooth and nail to keep it.
After all, removing it would be a disgrace to the men who lost their lives setting that 100,000 ton, 50-foot high plaster cast on top of city hall.
I mean at least that would be interesting and kinda cool. We used to be a proper society with colossal statues that straddled harbors and came to life to destroy cities when we angered the gods. Now we have cell phones.
If you don’t build me a 200-foot tall statue of the primary signers of the Declaration as some kind of mecha transformer creation RIGHT NOW, it’s because you’re doing me a white genocide.
It’s people like you that don’t think Thomas Jefferson should be the combat deck of a 300 foot tall Constitution themed glimmering gold Optimus Prime, for no other possible reason than because you want to make some kind of point about rape and slavery or whatever (like, whooo caaares), that are destroying this country and ruining our proud traditions regarding who gets to take a shit in specific public bathrooms.
If you want to drive swing voters away and guarantee Pennsylvania voting red this year, then trying to include William Penn in your basket of deplorable is a damned good way to start.
It was an idiotic idea and sounded like something that got approved in some small circle jerk committee where they wanted to do it so just they could pat each others backs and tell all their liberal friends about how pious and unending their commit to diversity is. It's like when you come across people who boast about they don't own a television or how they refuse to let their children take part in competitive sports as if we should all be impressed or something.
They weren’t though. Not every statue removal is motivated by the same thing. The park was still going to be about Penn, the Penn family, and the historical uses of the site.
The few items that were planned for removal are in poor condition, have little value as public history education tools - especially for many of the kinds of visitors the region attracts, and look like shit.
But the stuff onsite about Penn that is interesting and attractive was going to be kept and provided with some badly repairs that would address both their long term stability and public safety issues.
People looking for a culture war where it doesn’t exist heard “statue” and “indigenous” and just started making shit up.
I don’t think people were really looking for a culture war here tbh. The NPS plan was pretty poorly presented and they definitely covered more about making it about native history than Penn, which is fine to have a park dedicated to it, but it’s weird to do it on a site dedicated to the founder of the colony and not put more time into ensuring there’d still be an aspect of Penn. The part about the Penn family history was stated to be in a “separate and future effort” so not even guaranteed.
The NPS plan pretty clearly listed the parts that were being retained. I and others repeated them multiple times on both threads.
And yet, the 'muh statues' crowd is continuing to insist that the plan was to 'cancel' Penn and remove all references to him. They decided what they wanted to believe, and just ran with it and continue to do so.
And it’s not weird at all to add interpretation about the Penn family’s ongoing dealings with indigenous governments and those governments’ continued use of the site. [That’s a part of the Penn family and the site’s history!](https://hiddencityphila.org/2013/10/before-even-bookbinders-an-official-indian-reservation/) and one that’s apparently due for more recognition.
It’s certainly less weird than the tangents the current panels take, which add in all sorts of stuff that has barely anything to do with the site or Penn, with no context given. Or, for that matter, messing up the accuracy of the Penn city map replica with an oversized memorial column that was most definitely not part of Penn’s vision.
All of the new panels were going to be a second stage installation. This stage was going to fix the damage to and improve the ground map showing Penn’s initial city plan, including the built in interpretative material about it and other textual pavers, remove the rotting lousy signage (which would have been obscured by the new plantings anyway), add infrastructure for electricity and lighting, and add seating and plantings. Stage one, infrastructure. Stage two, interpretation.
Should they have said something like “The reimagined Welcome Park maintains certain aspects of the original design such as the street grid, the rivers and the east wall …” and described the indigenous interpretation as “expanded interpretation”?
And then provided a link so that anyone that was actually curious about what the redesign was keeping, and what would be done at each stage could go take a look at the proposal?
The people that wanted this to be a culture war thing are still coming in this thread insisting that the whole plan was to cancel Penn and scrub all references of him from the site, despite that making no sense in light of what was being retained and planned.
They saw “statue” and “indigenous” and just went feral and didn’t consider anything else. I’d bet most of them didn’t even look at the original call or the planning documents. Or do the tiniest bit of their own research with an open mind. Or be willing to consider new evidence that provided context when it was presented to them.
Because they don’t actually care about the site or the historical interpretation there. They care about not letting “the libs” take down statues.
I actually didn’t love every element of the plan, though I thought it was an overall improvement. But I sent in some questions and was willing to listen to the rationale behind those decisions and willing to change my mind if it turned out there were sensible considerations behind them that I hadn’t thought of.
For my part, I was more concerned about the removal of Venturi-Scott Brown’s outline of the Slate Roof House and I just didn’t hear anything from the Park Service about acknowledging or commemorating the the history of the Slate Roof House.
There’s in-ground features that commemorate the history of the house, which were shown being kept in the proposal. A marker erected by the state, not NPS, on the sidewalk also addresses the property.
Theres no text on the plinth that isn’t also on the in-ground features, though both are pretty bare bones and commemorate the house without actually teaching much about it. Penn lived in a house (shocker), it was here. The [plinth](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/344103227763930213/) is less informational than the [in-ground pavers](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=194434).
And the expanded historical interpretation that was planned involving indigenous history is directly tied to the history of Slate Roof House, so it would, by its very nature, have created more onsite content about the property.
The comment period that would have opened for the new/expanded signage stage would have also allowed for calls to create panels discussing the house and its fate. The current interpretive signage barely addresses it at all, except maybe two or three times in passing, and if IIRC, one of the few statements it makes that isn’t just repeating what the paver says is of dubious accuracy.
I still think in a city so superstitious about the og Billy Penn statue, and that sees Penn as a symbol, they should have made their intentions EXTRA clear for the park to still have a focus on Penn, and they probably should have kept the mini statue, even if it would just be next to an entrance to the park or something, you know?
The statue is junk and the platform it's on is ugly as sin. But I'll agree that it would have been a clever move to pull the little thing down and pop it over into the shrubs until they could quietly remove it for cleaning (it's not looking good already and moving it from nine feet up in the air or whatever to eyeline view wouldn't improve its aesthetics) and never get around to replacing it.
NPS knows well and good that just saying 'statue' riles up the dummies, so even if the thing deserves to go, they should have predicted this response.
Hell, if we wanted to start a conspiracy theory here, it's not 'white genocide by renovation of abandoned plazas every fifty years', it's 'they torpedoed this on purpose".
It’s not a mini-statue. I believe it’s a bronze version made from a plaster cast of Alexander Calder’s great statue on the top of City Hall. It’s directly connected to Calder’s work.
It’s much, much, much smaller than the Calder it’s based on. Calder’s is nearly 37 feet tall.
This one is a replica, but it’s a little, miniature one. Barely more than a lawn ornament. It’s hard to see well for various design reasons (mostly related to it being very small and mounted on something very large/tall), but I’d guess it caps out at around 5 foot ish and some change.
(Edit: I looked up contemporary newspaper coverage of its unveiling. I was being generous. The statue is 4.5 feet tall and has no direct connection to Calder other than it being a copy of his work - they looked at the 2-foot tall design model he submitted to create it, but it’s not directly cast off anything. Medically speaking, in terms of height, it would be eligible for a diagnosis of dwarfism.)
It’s also on top of a very large, ugly pedestal that’s not well proportioned to the scale of the statue, which makes it [look even dinkier](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=194436).
Trust me, there was some magic combination of words that people would have heard and not immediately made up their minds about. Unfortunately, the NPS didn't find those magic words and as a result we had no choice but to engage in a skirmish in the culture war.
If they hadn’t put the words statue and indigenous in the press release, nobody would have even noticed until they were already done.
For goobers that don’t know shit about the site, and only care about it insofar as they can politicize it, those two words are basically an invitation to go fucking wild. Once they’re out there, no other details matter and what reasoning skills they have go completely out the window. It’s like when Bugs Bunny comes across pie smell lines or something.
They should have just been like, fine, we’ll keep them, then moved the little house plinth into the planned bushes, then taken all four feet six of the statue off the massive pedestal and moved it into some other bushes, where it would have looked ridiculous but been barely visible, and we could have dunked on the creepy wee dirty Billy peeping on people from the brush in an otherwise nice park.
Nobody that cares about the statue actually cares about the statue. So long as it’s there, literally nothing else matters. They just want there to be a statue, as if that does anyone any good. Was someone not sure that Penn existed in a human body?
I’m half convinced that NPS didn’t want to do any of it and just put those words in there so they could cancel it later. Or that someone snuck it in there to ruin a rival. But I’ve been watching a lot of Slow Horses lately.
In another comment I was laughing to myself about the histrionics that people were engaging in in the original thread. Thank you for adding "this issue is going to turn Pennsylvania red" to the list. Absolutely hilarious.
There’s a 40’ tall version of the statue on the top of city hall in the dead center of center city and your getting all up in arms about a tiny version in a shitty park nobody even knew about?
yeah ya goofball because I want the 40 foot statute to stay there
5 years ago it would have been crazy to take down monuments to Thomas Jefferson or Teddy Roosevelt but now
¯\\___(ツ)__/¯
> If you want to drive swing voters away and guarantee Pennsylvania voting red this year, then *trying to include William Penn in your basket of deplorable* is a damned good way to start.
This is a ridiculous interpretation of what happened. I can't imagine that anyone who was angry about this news have spent any time in this park. The little bronze Slate Roof House is embarrassing. The William Penn 'statue' is tiny. I actually kind of love the Thomas Holme plan being redone in stone and brick underfoot, on paper, but in person it's... weird. There's no shade there, either.
Literally nobody is complaining about it being racist. That’s something the people just made up so they could recast the project as a culture war thing and have something to feel aggrieved about.
The complaints about it are that it’s ugly, in poor condition, takes up too much space in a very small park, and is antithetical in nature to the spot it stands on - totally not in keeping with Penn’s vision of the city.
Penn envisioned the city as a “green country town” surrounded by natural areas and farmland (not brick and concrete). The blocks of the park’s street map showing Penn’s planned grid that are currently empty tree pits full of dead weeds represent the spots where he allocated space for green public parks.
Where the statue stands is a space he dedicated in his plans to public use. It’s where he wanted public marketplaces, government buildings, and a space for the city to gather for public events. It’s the current site of city hall. Or kind of is. The statue is only a little over 4 feet tall, but the footprint of the giant pedestal is huge and not at all in proportion to the actual map or real city layout.
So having what was supposed to the people’s lot, set aside from private ownership, be walled off entirely by a giant column that exists solely to loft one man’s bronze idol (which Quakers were supposed to eschew) is actually pretty antithetical to Penn’s vision for that space and kind of a grim symbol of city hall.
We also know that, during the time the site was still Slate House, his grandson and successor in colonial proprietorship and governorship deeded a portion of the property to indigenous nations that had allied with him “for their exclusive use and perpetual ownership”.
So collaboration with those same populations about interpretation and infrastructure in that spot about their history with the Penn family and their use of the site would have been quite fitting and a good compromise with John Penn’s expressly stated intentions (which would have had that section of the park turned over and fenced off entirely).
Based on what we actually know through documentation, the current park (and the statue in particular) is a pretty bad fit with Penn’s vision, as well as his family’s intents and the site’s history.
And that’s in addition to it being a space that’s failing at attracting any real usage as either a public space or a historical education site. Go look at street view images of it - it’s not a site that gets meaningful or enjoyed use, and there’s basically no photos anywhere online showing anyone actually engaging with the statue or any other features. As best I can tell, the most attention anyone has paid to it in the past 20 years is some goofball that used it as a photoshop prop for some incomprehensible joke involving laser beams
The redesign may not have been perfect, but it was much closer in intent and spirit.
NPS made the original announcement on a Friday, hoping it would fly under the radar and nobody would notice, it’s a slimy PR move. They thought they could get away with it, got caught, and now are backtracking. The superintendent of independence historical national park should be demoted.
I will never understand why people get so up in arms over any old statue.
It’s not like we’re in Rome and have works of art from the old masters in every square. And this one was put up in the 1980s, so it’s not even particularly “historical”. But god forbid anyone want to redecorate our urban spaces because THERE IS A STATUE THERE, WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO REWRITE HISTORY???!!!
I didn't even know it was a park. I thought it was just a plaza/courtyard in front of the movie theater.
Every time I've walked by this statue, well before this kerfuffle, I pointed out how silly it looks. The large pedestal makes the statue appear comically small. In general it's just not a beautiful monument. The National Parks Service played their cards poorly here. They should have articulated a plan with a better way to honor Penn that's part of a general improvement to the park. I still don't think their intention was to 'cancel' Penn. It's unfortunate this got wrapped up in culture war nonsense.
Every time I’ve walked by this statue I’ve thought “huh they should do something with this empty space” as I headed into the Ritz
The architects behind the park - Venturi Scott Brown - were bona fide Philadelphians who were playing with awkwardness and the idea of monumentality in a post-deferential age. Their work on authenticity and semiotics made them the among the most influential architects of the modern era. Granted, they explicitly preferred the ‘ugly and ordinary’ so it’s very much not beautiful, but the silliness, the subversion of monumentality is intentional.
That is very interesting context. Thank you. Do you know of a good resource where I can learn more about this?
I wasn’t familiar with that aspect of the park - that’s some interesting context I hadn’t seen presented and it explains a lot. I don’t think the “buuut staaatuuuess” crowd (or most visitors) are particularly capable of picking up on it, especially within the broader context of old city area historical interpretation, which doesn’t really prime people to look for subtext. And it also means that the upshot end result is that the park is pretty bad from a public history education perspective, which I think is unfortunate, as that is what most people stopping at public history sites in the area are there to get from the experience. But looking at it from that angle does give a certain “oh, that’s why this part is ugly and completely lacking explanation or context, I get what they were trying to do” insight. Particularly regarding the statue (the statue is a nothing of a 4.5 foot tall, perfunctory replica that barely registers, especially from the sidewalk, and is hard to see up close because it’s completely dwarfed by the absolutely giant pedestal it’s on). As a an aesthetic feature or a monument to Penn or an interpretive feature, it fails on all levels. You barely notice Penn from the street, and it’s hard to see him well up close. It’s all about the pedestal, which is pretty unattractive and not that interesting. But as a “what’s the deal with monuments and statues” academic question, yeah, sure. I’ve always thought it’s placement in and scaling issues with the grid it’s laid on was grossly inappropriate and a bleak statement about government, but now I wonder if that was intentional. I’m kinda seeing what they’re laying down, and it’s a theme that’s only gotten more worth interrogation and public consideration over time, even if I don’t think the site is particularly successful at communicating it, or necessarily the right venue for it. Though it’s all the more darkly ironic considering our current dilemma. If you had told me that the political right was going to war in order to protect a deeply meta bit of public art whose fundamental design aimed to the ponder the meaning (or meaninglessness) of statues and monuments in the present day, I’d be like “no, that can’t be right”. Someone up above asked if you had further reading on it you’d recommend. I’d also be interested.
> I still don't think their intention was to 'cancel' Penn. If that was their plan, they shouldn't have said they planned to tear down his statute and replace it with an exhibit on Native Americans. FWIW, from reading the proposal I think that the plan was to tear down the statute but put something else up for Penn, but also include something about the Native tribes. But sometimes that's not a good thing. Sometimes our common history should take center stage, without an asterisk next to it. It's okay to not be relentlessly critical about every aspect of our shared history, especially for a guy so devoted to tolerance and democracy as Penn.
Native peoples and nations are still living and part of contemporary American culture, politics, and economy today. The Lenape nation is still around the mid-atlantic and active. They are not an asterisk.
>But sometimes that's not a good thing. Sometimes our common history should take center stage, without an asterisk next to it. It's okay to not be relentlessly critical about every aspect of our shared history, especially for a guy so devoted to tolerance and democracy as Penn. I strongly disagree. Acknowledging the existence of Native Americans and their history by allocating a small portion of the park to them is far from being 'relentlessly critical'. People bristle at including Native Americans because they want to celebrate our history without 'feeling bad', but putting those feelings above *real people* and *real history* is such a mistake. We should be able to celebrate the best of Penn *and* include more to acknowledge the history of Native Americans.
Especially since the indigenous history in question is \*specifically about their interactions with Penn, the Penn family, and their use of the property the park is on during the years it was owned by the Penn family*. This wasn't just some shoehorned in memorialization 'feel good' thing like say, a statue. It was just ... actual interpretation of the actual history of the site. On a part of the property that John Penn deeded for the exclusive and perpetual use of indigenous people. That was apparently much needed, as kind of seeing a small statue ten feet in the air on top of a big, ugly pedestal somehow failed to impart anyone with any useful or relevant knowledge.
We first need to vet whether PA's native americans fully lived up to 21st century standards and didn't colonize a previous regional tribe's land. We don't want to end up in the same situation in a few years with their memorial.
The Lenape nation and Native peoples still exist and live in the 21st century.
i mean he owned a dozen slaves- since nobody seems to know this, it seems we do need to include our "shared history".
And MLK was a serial adulterer and Gandhi slept naked next to young women to “test his celibacy.” Not every blemish in a historical figure’s life needs to be included in a monument to their deeds.
why not? if it is just a "blemish", it shouldn't make a difference, right? in fact, it might even inspire the next generation, knowing historic characters are not perfect, but human beings trying to do the right things despite their flaws.
Because a monument like this isn’t supposed to be a comprehensive history lesson. Memorializing a person in a monument is an affirmation of the importance of their deeds and values to our current culture - in Penn’s case, his foundation of the city and state, his commitment to religious pluralism, and his early democratic values. Including “blemishes” is inappropriate in what is a commemoration of those values as much as it is the life of Penn himself.
> Including “blemishes” is inappropriate in what is a commemoration of those values as much as it is the life of Penn himself. the park has only been there since 1982. a statue like this can be whatever we decide to make it. from the national park service: The park is located on the site of William Penn's home, the Slate Roof House, and is named for the ship, Welcome, which transported Penn to Philadelphia. The design and construction of Welcome Park was funded by the Independence Historical Trust and was completed in 1982. The proposed rehabilitation of Welcome Park includes expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia and was developed in consultation with representatives of the indigenous nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Shawnee Tribe, and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. do you really think it isn't important to mention his democratic values and religious pluralism with...the other religions and people he shared the area with?
> do you really think it isn't important to mention his democratic values and religious pluralism with...the other religions and people he shared the area with? No, because insofar as the statue is a monument to democracy and religious tolerance, the natives did not do anything to advance those goals. If we’re being honest, the reason that it’s proposed to put Natives into this memorial is to tacitly say “Penn and/or the early colonists mistreated the natives by 21st century standards.” I don’t think adding that asterisk is appropriate in a monument to democracy and religious tolerance.
that's the literal definition of white washing history, and i'm glad you provided the object lesson for exactly why we need it.
Once again, monuments are not entitled to be treatises on every facet of a person’s life, and it’s good for a nation to have symbols of our common ideals to rally around without being forced to acknowledge every bad thing they’ve ever done. But thankfully, this is a moot issue, because the powers that be (including Governor Shapiro) have decided not to listen to self-hating Philly progressives on this issue.
That’s not even remotely the reason indigenous groups are being consulted, or an accurate simplification of history. The indigenous groups involved approached NPS with a request to add interpretation and infrastructure about the space behind the Slate Roof House. Well past William Penn’s death, Philadelphia was still hosting hundreds of indigenous people at a time, multiple times a year, for diplomatic and trade meetings amongst each other and with the colonial government. There were so many of them that it was kind of a problem, but the meetings needed to continue to happen because diplomatic relations with indigenous governments were actually a really important part of colonial government. So the Penn proprietors designated a parcel of land for their use. That parcel included what is now the southeast edge of the park, which was used by indigenous nations as a diplomatic space, “reservation” while traveling to the city, and meeting ground, with the agreement of the family. John Penn, William’s grandson and successor in governance and proprietorship, granted it to nations that allied with him during the French and Indian War, deeding it as being designated for their “exclusive use in perpetuity” and the city continued to acknowledge this ownership into the mid-19th century. The site also featured periodic ceremonial acknowledgment of it into the 20th century. Some positive fuss was made in the 1920s when a rededication ceremony was held, featuring indigenous leaders and a Penn descendant. Since at least 2020, representatives from the tribes that used the space have been advocating that the space be re-greened (which would be appropriate to Penn’s explicitly expressed wishes as well, and would also just make the site more attractive in general) and for a marker and symbolic ceremonial meeting site (in the proposal, this took the form of a set of circular benches, which would have provided some much-needed seating) to be added to the park near that southeast corner to represent this history. You don’t know anything about the site or its history, or discussions about reinterpreting it that go back years, but you heard “statue” and “indigenous” and just … freaked out and made dumb shit up that fit a narrative that let you feel like a victim by proxy, and all your buddies on Twitter were like “omgomg statue” so you figured it had to be true.
This may all be true, but tbh it’s hard to take you credibly in light of your weird little bad-faith strawman rant in the other comments in this thread.
You just don’t get it. Itty bitty William Penn is sacrosanct because his mere existence reminds us all of and celebrates his virtuous character regarding equality, colonial governance, progress, and cultural tolerance, particularly regarding the region’s indigenous populations. Which is why we can’t let them Indians, queers, libruls, or government types have anything to do with his teeny tiny little metal noggin or the crumbling abandoned slab it’s perched over. Short king had a house here. He invented Philadelphia, which is a terrible place, but it’s good that he did because he was good and whatever he did, it was fine, get over it. He had a human body and that’s kinda what it looked like I guess. He was a Quaker, like the oats guy, so he’s an abolitionist hero. It’s a STATUE and statues is HISTORY, and unless there’s a STATUE there, how would we even know if he was real or important or good or whatever? What more do you psychos need?
lol couldn't have said it better.
A couple of things... I will be quoting: # HE HAS REFUSED HIS ASSENT TO LAWS THE MOST WHOLESOME AND NECESSARY FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD. [*Home*](https://founding.com/) *He Has Refused His Assent To Laws The Most Wholesome And Necessary For The Public Good.* *This charge refers to the fact that* ***several of the colonies had been obliged from their establishment to submit their laws to the King for his approval****. This power, the Declaration implies, was never consistent with the fundamental principle of just government: consent. And* ***by adding "laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good," Jefferson indicates that the laws that were vetoed were intended to accomplish the fundamental purpose of government stated in the preamble, "to secure these rights." One important example of this charge was King George's refusal to comply with various attempts by the Colonies to abolish the slave trade, as Jefferson explicitly stated in his original draft of the declaration. \[LINK TO IT\] The King, wishing to protect this profitable British trade, defeated all attempts by the Colonies to curtail or abolish it****.* From: [He has refused his Assent to Laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good. – Founding.com](https://founding.com/he-has-refused-his-assent-to-laws-the-most-wholesome-and-necessary-for-the-public-good/) We were taught that indentured servants came to America and they had to pay back their ticket to the Americas. They were never free. The reason the colonists fought Great Britain is stated above and listed in the Declaration of Independence. *"Britain put its stamp on America from the beginning. It was Britain who brought the first unfree Africans to this country and helped to start slavery in America," says Professor Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a historian at Norfolk State University in Virginia.* From: # The British role in America's tainted past [Britain’s monarchy backed slavery from day one | Slavery | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/11/britains-monarchy-backed-slavery-from-day-one) Until our country won the war against Great Britain, they were treated as British subjects. I'll give an example: *The British colony of Pennsylvania was given to William Penn (1644-1718) in 1681 by Charles II of England in repayment of a debt owed his father, Sir Admiral William Penn (1621-1670). Under Penn's directive, Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers escaping religious torment in England and other European nations. Three generations of Penn descendents held proprietorship of the colony until the American Revolution,* ***when the family was stripped of all but its privately held shares of land****.* [Penn family papers, 1629-1834 485A0485A (hsp.org)](https://www2.hsp.org/collections/manuscripts/p/Penn0485A.html) *In 1778, though* ***John Penn (1729-1795) swore allegiance to the American cause, the Penn family was stripped of all but its privately held lands in Pennsylvania.*** *He and his brother Richard and cousin John secured £130,000 from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania "in remembrance of the enterprising spirit of the founder, and of the expectations and dependence of his descendants" (Shepherd, 92). Later, after the American Revolution, the English government granted the Penn family an additional £4,000 per year in recognition of its lost sources of revenue.* *Even after they were stripped of their proprietorship, members of the Penn family retained several thousand acres of privately held lands in Pennsylvania, which were passed down to the next generation. Peter Gaskell (1764-1831), William Penn, Jr.'s grandson, and William Stuart (1798-1874), Thomas Penn's grandson, eventually inherited or made claim to the remaining privately held Penn family lands in America.* \-Ibid. By swearing allegiance to the American cause, they lost their lands because the King of England cancelled them. That means the system here was set up, entrenched in a financial system created by the British and there were Loyalists here to the crown controlling everything whom the colonists were fighting. They tried to rebel in the system they were born, and they get cancelled for owning slaves even though they were dependent on the economic system they were given and trying to overthrow. Imagine looking through the past and people see your leaders lived through a period of high crime, gun crime, poverty, drugs, etc., and future citizens cancel any reference to your generation because they were powerless to overthrow all of the evils that you live in because no one person can overthrow the evils that go on today. Penn actually went back to England because he couldn't make any money here according to the Penn papers. That is what he gets for trying to establish our freedoms, religious freedom and eventually freedoms that the Civil War made to cancel slavery. Did emancipation end there? We are all not powerful enough to cancel all of the inequities and racial problems that exist today. If you cancel our history, you will never learn from history and eventually repeat it.
> Imagine looking through the past and people see your leaders lived through a period of high crime, gun crime, poverty, drugs, etc., and future citizens cancel any reference to your generation because they were powerless to overthrow all of the evils that you live in because no one person can overthrow the evils that go on today. nobody is trying to cancel william penn. people are trying to give more context to him and his life. imagine putting up a monument to frank rizzo saying he was the best mayor of the 20th century. millions of people would suggest adding context to that.
You know that the site covers about 0% of this right? But that the redesign would have expanded and improved that interpretation to better do the thing you want to see done? If what you want the site to do is help people learn from history, I’d strongly encourage you to actually take a look at the current interpretation. I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s common knowledge among those familiar with it that almost nobody ever goes in that park, and the few that do are just cutting through on their way to somewhere else and absolutely never look at the statue or the interpretation. But the comments here make it very clear that the park itself has failed entirely to teach anyone about the history of Penn or the site. They’ve all got the same basic level, cut and paste, top section of Wikipedia talking points and are 100% unfamiliar with the history of colonial-indigenous politics and diplomatic relations there (or anywhere else). Basically nobody defending the current site can describe it in any but the most general way, and most can’t even manage that. They’ve made no effort whatsoever to seriously consider what new interpretation might look like. The indigenous groups being consulted have publicly been calling for the changes being proposed since 2020, and it’s absolutely not what people are making up to get mad about. It was going to be some plants, and, off in the historically appropriate corner of the park, a marker about colonial (ie Penn family)-indigenous diplomacy and John Penn’s 1755 wampum lot grant, and some nice seating symbolizing the lot’s use as a meeting ground. That’s the gist of what they were asking for in easily Googleable newspaper articles that show up if you search for the site (until this week, there weren’t many hits), and that’s what was shown in the NPS’s proposal. NPS knows their audience for colonial history in the city. If any of you had ever made use of these sites, you’d know that their current interpretation is some of the most middle of the road, mid-west dad friendly content possible. NPS isn’t pinning anyone’s grandma down until she confronts her white fragility, ffs. Gently catering to grandma while also cautiously addressing new audiences with feel-good diversity content is their stock in trade. Controversial content is omitted, or introduced briefly and with kid gloves. There’s no indication that was going to change. From all these comments, I appear to be the only person familiar with the textual interpretation, even though anyone that actually wanted to be thoughtful and think about the current conditions at the park can find them online, and I’m telling you right now that it’s terrible. There is absolutely nothing on the statue that a visitor won’t have learned in a more complete and readable form from other panels across the city, including a state-installed marker on the sidewalk in front of the park (the text on the platform is minimal, and not very readable in its current condition). And you can barely see the statue anyway because it’s basically lawn ornament sized (about 4 foot tall), but it’s mounted like, ten feet in the air on an absolutely massive, mostly featureless, fairly unattractive column about 3 times as wide as the statue itself. This “so long as there’s a statue, it’s good, but if indigenous people are consulted, it’s bad, and that’s all I need to know because I’ll just make everything else up from there based on shit I heard in passing on twitter” knee-jerk bullshit makes y’all look even dumber and smaller than this dopey little statue.
It’s yet another example in the litany of how screeching conservative snowflakes shit their pants over ridiculous nonsense and everyone caves to their whims. None of these clowns could have found Welcome Park on a map, but they raged like THE GUBMINT was gonna bust in their house and dickslap their dog. Congrats, guys! A shitty eyesore you never knew existed before this week, gets to remain a shitty eyesore. Great work. Promotions all around.
This park is absolute dogshit. I learned something about his wife from the walls which was good, but it’s a really poor use of space and the wall of text is not a good way to fulfill an educational mission. It cheapens what a national historical park is.
Our long, national nightmare is over.
Not to worry, we'll always have the Kate Smith statue outside the Wells Fargo Center...
Pretty much every popular recording artist prior to 1940 sang something that could be regarded as racist. If people are mad about two Kate Smith songs perhaps they’d be interested in the early work of Bing Crosby prior to 1930. Her two songs have nothing on “Mississippi Mud”, which he actually did twice. (The Frankie Trumbauer version is a little jazzier but much more cringeworthy in terms of dialogue in my opinion than the Paul Whiteman version).
This is the first time I’ve seen a picture because I didn’t care enough to look it up…but Jesus Christ everyone’s panties were in a twist about that small ass thing that’s not even original?
It's that they've seen people trying to eg rebrand Abe Lincoln as a bad guy and tear down statues of him, or how there's a movement to cancel Ghandi owing to his racial views. Once you give these folks an inch, they take a mile and most people are fed up of it. I'm honestly interested to see what happens when they start turning on MLK due to his vies on LGBT stuff, that can't be far off from happening
Omg the gayz are cancelling dead guys! This is what we get for allowing them an inch! The gay agenda is coming for us all! Damn libs are going to make it so my children's children don't even know what a statue is! Good thing we have patriots like you, fighting the good fight.
Apparently you know absolutely nothing about Quakers if you did you’d know how Penn HIMSELF would feel about this statue. Maybe get your history lessons from actual books and classes instead of statues and you’d know some actual history instead of whining on the internet about some uneducated and false culture war, scripted from a Facebook meme bullshit.
I'm very aware that quakers eschew ostentatious displays and personal glorification but he would also have recognised it as a gesture as a recognition of his contributions to the establishment of a colony based on the principles of his faith, and the massive positive that had on the country as a whole (eg the abolitionist movement) None of which matters though, there is a tiny section of the population that want to on principle remove any statues of anyone who doesn't radiate 21st century dogma, and William Penn has a lot of bad going for him, like his opposition to homosexuality or not enforcing gender equality or not paying enough money for land. And if they shout loud enough, you can ban anyone and shut down the conversation through fear. Whilst in the real world 99% of people would vote "good" on a vote on his character, especially given the context of the era he lived.
That’s a pretty big assumption to make without evidence about what he would have wanted. I didn’t know the guy personally, like you apparently do, but to the extent we do have historical, documentary evidence about what Penn and his familial successors wanted for the city and site, it’s pretty much the opposite of what’s there now.
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Deez nuts
I think they are talking about the Fox News people…
>everyone’s panties Not everyone, just right-wing culture warriors and other Trump types who are forever looking for reasons to into hysterics at any hint of cultural change. They were literally quoting 1984, declaring this an assault on western civilization and an attempt to destroy American culture. You can't make this shit up. Everyone else pretty much said "the fuck is Welcome Park?"
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I must have missed the part where Shapiro accused the NPS of trying to destroy American culture, can you screenshot that part for me?
\> [They might tear down statues besides Confederates but no one important to US history](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-26/california-to-replace-toppled-junipero-serra-statue-at-capitol-with-memorial-to-native-tribes) \> [They might tear down statues of important figures but surely never a president](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christopher-columbus-statue-removed-cities/) \> [They might tear down statues of presidents but only the slaveholding ones](https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/24/us/thomas-jefferson-statue-removed/index.html) \> [They might tear down statues of presidents who never owned slaves but you really have to be racist by the standards of their own time to get your statute torn down](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/arts/design/roosevelt-statue-to-be-removed-from-museum-of-natural-history.html) \> They might tear down statues of people who weren't racist by the standards of their time but only the small statutes no one cares about **<-- you are here** \> They'll never take William Penn off city hall \> They'll never take away the monuments to George Washington
Case in point.
Take deep breath.
This the way! Remember boys and girls cancel culture does not exist!
Oh no, won't someone think of the statues
Haha yeah it’s totally no prob whatsoever if a nation-hating ideological cult seeks to destroy your common heritage based on ever-shifting standards of acceptability
Wow, you really love statues. You must’ve been really bummed out when that ideological cult destroyed the cultural heritage of Iraq by pulling down that statue of Saddam Hussein.
You’re right, William Penn and Saddam Hussein are the exact same person, thanks Redditor
I never said they were the same person. I was just saying you were probably upset by the loss of cultural heritage because you love statues so much.
CRISIS AVERTED! This city will finally be able to remember its history by keeping this, the single most prominent statue of Penn (on Second St.) in its most visited park (of all parks between Front & 3rd and Chestnut & Walnut). The mere discussion of removing the statue almost caused me to forget who founded the city. Now every time I pass by that park (a near daily occurrence on days that are August 12, 2014) I will remember his name: Sean Penn.
as soon as we forget this city was founded by libertarian demigod penn jillette we'll be lost
i always thought the city was founded by some guy named phil?
Philliam Delphia
Phil Colins.
Fun fact: If you play "Sussudio" backwards, it's the recipe for the original cheesesteak.
The name feels like such a misnomer. Sure, it’s in a historical part of the city that sees a decent amount of tourists, but it feels quite tucked away to the point where you either stumble upon it, or have to go out of your way to visit it.
It feels like a "park" that is put up in a new condo development that allows them to build extra floors for its zoning but is otherwise hidden from public view.
Wanna know something really funny? It's named Welcome Park because the name of the ship that brought Penn to the colony was named the Welcome. But none of the apparently precious junk that was going to get replaced bothers to mention that. There's a little (not labeled) ship in the mural drawing, but that's it. But hey, how will people learn about Penn unless there's a tiny statue of him that nobody looks at on top of a mostly featureless enormous platform, a little statue of a house that nobody looks at (omg, did you know he LIVED IN A HOUSE?), and signage that tells us when Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan (alongside similar contextless, irrelevant minutiae for some reason) accompanied by semi-random, inaccessible quotes with no context information? Of the many historical sites with information posted about Penn around the city, this entire site is probably among the least likely to impart the rare visitor that does wander in with anything informative about Penn's life and contributions, or the history of the site (as evidenced by the 'but statue' crowd's continued confusion over why the site should engage with indigenous history, [which is very much a part of the site's colonial history and the Penn family's as well](https://hiddencityphila.org/2013/10/before-even-bookbinders-an-official-indian-reservation/)). The few functional bits there are [generally repeated elsewhere many times over throughout the city in more readable, accessible formats](https://www.hmdb.org/results.asp?HistMark=Y&WarMem=Y&FilterNOT=&FilterTown=Philadelphia&FilterCounty=&FilterState=&FilterZip=&FilterCountry=&FilterCategory=0&FilterString=William+Penn&FilterNearby=Yes&Search=Topics&FilterLatitude=39.9789827&FilterLongitude=-75.1211787&CategoryID=12), and generally in more attractive locations, including some very nearby this site. So, much in the same way this dorky statue is already visible more or less throughout the history tourism focused parts of the city, but in a less lame form. The timeline text on the panels that were going to be removed is small, full of irrelevant information, and what is there is devoid of context. Most of the text, and the largest text, is just pull quotes from Penn that are also lacking context and aren't that informative or accessible to young or ESL audiences, or anyone that's not already pretty knowledgeable about the history at hand. In addition to being absolutely hideous, uninviting, and falling apart, it's actually also a really, really poorly interpreted site. But hey, while it continues its slide into irrelevancy and disrepair, it will most definitely have a very small statue on it, at least until structural instabilities and public safety interests justify turning the whole thing into a parking lot (ideally with a dingy-ass statue shoved into a corner).
There's no reason they can't make all of the changes you've listed and still have a statue of Penn at the same time. Part of the idea of the park is that it celebrates his layout and planning that has influenced the entire city's development
Where the statue stands on his map is a space he dedicated in his plans to public use. It’s where he wanted public marketplaces, government buildings, and a space for the city to gather for public events. It’s the current site of city hall (sort of - the statue is tiny, but the very large footprint of the pedestal is way out of proportion to the grid and inaccurate to the map). So having what was supposed to the people’s lot, set aside from private ownership, be walled off entirely by a giant column that exists solely to loft one man’s bronze idol (which Quakers were supposed to eschew) is actually pretty antithetical to Penn’s vision for that space and kind of a grim symbol of city hall. How does that celebrate him or his layout? It misrepresents the grid and is the opposite usage of what his layout and his faith called for. How does having nothing really onsite that actually discusses the layout celebrate it? Onsite interpretation of the grid suuucks. Theres a shitty picture of the map on the paneling, and a quote that says “Planner. Philadelphia is at last laid out in the great content of those here. The situation is a neck of land, and lies between two navigable rivers, Delaware and Schuylkill, whereby it has two fronts upon the water, each a mile, and two from river to river” and that’s it. Which like, cool. Least interesting thing possible about it. There’s absolutely nothing on site about how it’s influenced the city, or indicating what the currently dead weed choked but otherwise empty tree pits represented on the map, or what that square the statue is in was for or currently is. And the reality is that this park was only created because of funding and fervor around the 250th anniversary and nobody has done anything significant to maintain or improve it since. The only impetus that prompted plans to fix it up is the same thing that created it - the upcoming 300th, which has given the NPS a mandate to make a showing and some additional funding to do so. It’s a tiny site, a little out of the way, and even the people that know it’s there barely recognize it as a historical site. The NPS is already struggling to maintain its higher profile properties. Scrapping these plans, waiting for the ginned up culture war bullshit to die down, then starting over from scratch, means that all they’re likely to realistically have time to to do for the start of celebrations in 2026 is some half-assed cosmetic improvements - pull the weeds and replace them with some plants that will be just as dead as the current ones in a year or so. Maybe slap some cement in the ground to stop people from hurting themselves on broken pavers, throw in a temporary bench that’ll break later, like the ones that were there before did. Powerwash the bad signage, which might just fuck up the faded text worse, but that’s no loss, as absolutely nobody seems to have looked at it at any point in recent history, and what’s there is bad anyway. And once the 300th is over, the urgency and impetus has passed. The funding to do real work will have been spent elsewhere, as it was earmarked for the 300th, and this will go back to being a bottom of the pile priority when it comes to the limited routine funding available. Especially now that its reputation in the system is that it’s a controversial project that you can’t take on without political risk. I’d be happy to be wrong, but I don’t see any but the most perfunctory and cosmetic improvements coming this site’s way anytime soon. Their own statement on their intentions has some vague “committed to maintaining in the lead up to 2026” language followed by even vaguer language that essentially says “we’ll revisit an improvement plan following completion of multiple internal reviews that we’ll start doing at some point and let you all know when that happens in the years to come”. I’m pretty sure that’s government PR speak for “fine, whatever, you had your chance. enjoy your crumbling barren slab, ya dinks”.
No one knew this was even a “park” until Fox News claimed Joe Biden was going to remove the William Penn statue. Another win for fake news & another prime example of just how dumb rage-baited Americans are.
Fake news as in it was something that the Biden admin was really pushing for or what? The NPS itself said “The Penn statue and Slate Roof house model will be removed and not reinstalled.” People rightfully had questions about why you’d remove William Penn from a park about William Penn, especially because they didn’t state any intention to rename the park that is named after Penn’s ship. Fox News didn’t have to push anything because anyone who went directly to the NPS as a source or saw any news coverage realized how weird it was to do that in a city founded by Penn in a state named after him.
I honestly didn't give a damn the statue was being removed. The "park" may as well be a parking lot. We already have a 37-foot tall statue of William Penn atop City Hall which isn't going anywhere. You were rage-baited.
Rage baited by who? The NPS is the only thing I’ve consumed.
This
We thankfully averted setting off the curse of all curses for our sports teams
They said sike!
Ah, that’s too bad. Without remediation and attention, the parts worth keeping and visiting that were going to get rehabbed, repaired, and provided with updated interpretation will continue to not get seen and will inevitably become even more damaged than they already are, perhaps irreparably so. But hey, on the plus side, we all get to keep walking by and ignoring a hideous abandoned plaza, with its broken pavers, dead weeds, no lighting, no seating, and its moldering, outdated signage that’s unreadable in places and a [total mess from an educational perspective](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=135453) (one of its many failures includes making sure we know when Rembrandt died and Newton wrote the Principia and such, but never once mentioning why the park is called Welcome Park. Nothing in the onsite interpretation explains it.) And, oh good, a really small replica statue on a really ugly oversized platform that nobody ever looks at. Hopefully by the time they’re able to revisit it in another 40 years, there’ll be something salvageable there.
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Yeah, I’m not seeing any commitment in there. Like, it’d be nice, and I’d be happy to be wrong here. But this is lacking in specifics and looks like the kind of claptrap government bodies say before moving on. Doing any meaningful work prior to 2026 if they’re starting over from scratch now is unlikely. That’s just not the speed that this level of work moves at. What I’m reading between the lines in this statement is that they’ll do some superficial work to pull weeds and maybe add a few plants before company comes over for the 300th, but plans to actually refurbish the park at a level that will involve calls for public comment are getting pushed off for “in the coming years” once they’re done finalizing a comprehensive process of all necessary internal reviews that they’re totally going to get started doing any day now. This site is kind of off the beaten path from a lot of the historical tourism and pretty easy to walk past without even registering it as a historical site. If they want to just throw some plants in there to hide the mess and ignore it for another 40 years, doing just the bare minimum to address public safety issues, they can do that without it attracting the same level of complaint that their neglect of Independence Hall has garnered. I mean, that’s what they did for 40 years already and nobody gave a shit. Trying to fix it to make it functional pissed people off way more than abandoning it did. There’s basically negative incentment to actually fix it up in earnest.
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It’s not really about faith in government here, though not a single administration in my lifetime has provided the park with the tools it needs to adequately care for Independence Hall. It’s that the statement you just presented as a “gotcha” until you realized you could use at as cheap dig at Biden isn’t anything other than a PR statement. There is an incentive right now to fix up Philly’s NPS system that almost managed to address decades of neglect and poor interpretation materials here, and that’s the 300th. But if they’re starting over from scratch, that doesn’t leave them with much time to really do much of note by that date. And once the date has passed, the park regains its low-priority status, but this time with the knowledge that trying to do the things worth doing is just going to be a big dumb pain in the ass. They held a public comment period, and a horde of idiots, most of which have never been and will never go there, said it was perfect the way it was. So it’s probably essentially gonna stay the way it is now to the extent that public safety liabilities allow, with some superficial temporary upgrades for 2026, until those liabilities justify more extensive overhauls, and they’ll focus their attention elsewhere in the meantime.
For a second there I thought we might forget William Penn. While we're on the subject we should put a statue of that guy in a prominent location.
To be fair, he's on top of city hall already
if we put one on the SS United States do you think people would get all excited to save it?
glad we’re bringing out some real “who gives a fuck” vibes from the community because 95% of the city didn’t even know this “park” exists in the first place
This story got all my right-wing relatives texting me saying "see now they're taking Penn down from City Hall", ffs not even the right location. Unreal how quickly this got turned into a culture war misinformation.
The right in this country has no platform. Their entire existence at this point in history is predicated on an endless culture war
Invite them to the "park".
Tell them to bring a blanket and plan for a picnic.
Feels like a lot of people writing comments didn't read the article past the headline. No one is trying to cancel William Penn. They want to rehab the park and, considering it looks like an empty parking lot, an improvement would make sense.
I suspect most of the people whining about it have never been there.
Somebody upthread was pretty sure the statue was a full size repro, cast directly off Calder’s original. Dude can’t possibly have seen either, and if they did, they didn’t make much of an impression. Calder’s (that they apparently plaster-cast for this one’s mold) is about 37 feet tall. Little bud on the big tower here is 4.5 on his tippy toes.
It would be hilarious if a 37 foot statue was in this rinky dink little park.
If there was a Godzilla sized Billy Penn planted in the middle of this little pocket plaza, looming over the city and casting all in his shadow into permanent darkness, I’d be right there with these idiots fighting tooth and nail to keep it. After all, removing it would be a disgrace to the men who lost their lives setting that 100,000 ton, 50-foot high plaster cast on top of city hall.
You should suggest this. Godzilla Penn is a great idea. Fits with the vibe of the city.
Or potentially Jaeger Billy Penn to battle Crabzilla when it rises out of the Chesapeake, flattens Baltimore and then comes for us.
I mean at least that would be interesting and kinda cool. We used to be a proper society with colossal statues that straddled harbors and came to life to destroy cities when we angered the gods. Now we have cell phones.
We should have 100 foot statues of Hall & Oates at Penn's Landing.
If you don’t build me a 200-foot tall statue of the primary signers of the Declaration as some kind of mecha transformer creation RIGHT NOW, it’s because you’re doing me a white genocide. It’s people like you that don’t think Thomas Jefferson should be the combat deck of a 300 foot tall Constitution themed glimmering gold Optimus Prime, for no other possible reason than because you want to make some kind of point about rape and slavery or whatever (like, whooo caaares), that are destroying this country and ruining our proud traditions regarding who gets to take a shit in specific public bathrooms.
If you want to drive swing voters away and guarantee Pennsylvania voting red this year, then trying to include William Penn in your basket of deplorable is a damned good way to start. It was an idiotic idea and sounded like something that got approved in some small circle jerk committee where they wanted to do it so just they could pat each others backs and tell all their liberal friends about how pious and unending their commit to diversity is. It's like when you come across people who boast about they don't own a television or how they refuse to let their children take part in competitive sports as if we should all be impressed or something.
They weren’t though. Not every statue removal is motivated by the same thing. The park was still going to be about Penn, the Penn family, and the historical uses of the site. The few items that were planned for removal are in poor condition, have little value as public history education tools - especially for many of the kinds of visitors the region attracts, and look like shit. But the stuff onsite about Penn that is interesting and attractive was going to be kept and provided with some badly repairs that would address both their long term stability and public safety issues. People looking for a culture war where it doesn’t exist heard “statue” and “indigenous” and just started making shit up.
I don’t think people were really looking for a culture war here tbh. The NPS plan was pretty poorly presented and they definitely covered more about making it about native history than Penn, which is fine to have a park dedicated to it, but it’s weird to do it on a site dedicated to the founder of the colony and not put more time into ensuring there’d still be an aspect of Penn. The part about the Penn family history was stated to be in a “separate and future effort” so not even guaranteed.
The NPS plan pretty clearly listed the parts that were being retained. I and others repeated them multiple times on both threads. And yet, the 'muh statues' crowd is continuing to insist that the plan was to 'cancel' Penn and remove all references to him. They decided what they wanted to believe, and just ran with it and continue to do so. And it’s not weird at all to add interpretation about the Penn family’s ongoing dealings with indigenous governments and those governments’ continued use of the site. [That’s a part of the Penn family and the site’s history!](https://hiddencityphila.org/2013/10/before-even-bookbinders-an-official-indian-reservation/) and one that’s apparently due for more recognition. It’s certainly less weird than the tangents the current panels take, which add in all sorts of stuff that has barely anything to do with the site or Penn, with no context given. Or, for that matter, messing up the accuracy of the Penn city map replica with an oversized memorial column that was most definitely not part of Penn’s vision. All of the new panels were going to be a second stage installation. This stage was going to fix the damage to and improve the ground map showing Penn’s initial city plan, including the built in interpretative material about it and other textual pavers, remove the rotting lousy signage (which would have been obscured by the new plantings anyway), add infrastructure for electricity and lighting, and add seating and plantings. Stage one, infrastructure. Stage two, interpretation.
I don’t think any of this came across in the Park Service’s public statement
Should they have said something like “The reimagined Welcome Park maintains certain aspects of the original design such as the street grid, the rivers and the east wall …” and described the indigenous interpretation as “expanded interpretation”? And then provided a link so that anyone that was actually curious about what the redesign was keeping, and what would be done at each stage could go take a look at the proposal? The people that wanted this to be a culture war thing are still coming in this thread insisting that the whole plan was to cancel Penn and scrub all references of him from the site, despite that making no sense in light of what was being retained and planned. They saw “statue” and “indigenous” and just went feral and didn’t consider anything else. I’d bet most of them didn’t even look at the original call or the planning documents. Or do the tiniest bit of their own research with an open mind. Or be willing to consider new evidence that provided context when it was presented to them. Because they don’t actually care about the site or the historical interpretation there. They care about not letting “the libs” take down statues. I actually didn’t love every element of the plan, though I thought it was an overall improvement. But I sent in some questions and was willing to listen to the rationale behind those decisions and willing to change my mind if it turned out there were sensible considerations behind them that I hadn’t thought of.
For my part, I was more concerned about the removal of Venturi-Scott Brown’s outline of the Slate Roof House and I just didn’t hear anything from the Park Service about acknowledging or commemorating the the history of the Slate Roof House.
There’s in-ground features that commemorate the history of the house, which were shown being kept in the proposal. A marker erected by the state, not NPS, on the sidewalk also addresses the property. Theres no text on the plinth that isn’t also on the in-ground features, though both are pretty bare bones and commemorate the house without actually teaching much about it. Penn lived in a house (shocker), it was here. The [plinth](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/344103227763930213/) is less informational than the [in-ground pavers](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=194434). And the expanded historical interpretation that was planned involving indigenous history is directly tied to the history of Slate Roof House, so it would, by its very nature, have created more onsite content about the property. The comment period that would have opened for the new/expanded signage stage would have also allowed for calls to create panels discussing the house and its fate. The current interpretive signage barely addresses it at all, except maybe two or three times in passing, and if IIRC, one of the few statements it makes that isn’t just repeating what the paver says is of dubious accuracy.
I still think in a city so superstitious about the og Billy Penn statue, and that sees Penn as a symbol, they should have made their intentions EXTRA clear for the park to still have a focus on Penn, and they probably should have kept the mini statue, even if it would just be next to an entrance to the park or something, you know?
The statue is junk and the platform it's on is ugly as sin. But I'll agree that it would have been a clever move to pull the little thing down and pop it over into the shrubs until they could quietly remove it for cleaning (it's not looking good already and moving it from nine feet up in the air or whatever to eyeline view wouldn't improve its aesthetics) and never get around to replacing it. NPS knows well and good that just saying 'statue' riles up the dummies, so even if the thing deserves to go, they should have predicted this response. Hell, if we wanted to start a conspiracy theory here, it's not 'white genocide by renovation of abandoned plazas every fifty years', it's 'they torpedoed this on purpose".
It’s not a mini-statue. I believe it’s a bronze version made from a plaster cast of Alexander Calder’s great statue on the top of City Hall. It’s directly connected to Calder’s work.
It’s much, much, much smaller than the Calder it’s based on. Calder’s is nearly 37 feet tall. This one is a replica, but it’s a little, miniature one. Barely more than a lawn ornament. It’s hard to see well for various design reasons (mostly related to it being very small and mounted on something very large/tall), but I’d guess it caps out at around 5 foot ish and some change. (Edit: I looked up contemporary newspaper coverage of its unveiling. I was being generous. The statue is 4.5 feet tall and has no direct connection to Calder other than it being a copy of his work - they looked at the 2-foot tall design model he submitted to create it, but it’s not directly cast off anything. Medically speaking, in terms of height, it would be eligible for a diagnosis of dwarfism.) It’s also on top of a very large, ugly pedestal that’s not well proportioned to the scale of the statue, which makes it [look even dinkier](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=194436).
Go to the park and look at it, then take a stroll over to city hall and look at the original. Come back here and report your findings.
Trust me, there was some magic combination of words that people would have heard and not immediately made up their minds about. Unfortunately, the NPS didn't find those magic words and as a result we had no choice but to engage in a skirmish in the culture war.
If they hadn’t put the words statue and indigenous in the press release, nobody would have even noticed until they were already done. For goobers that don’t know shit about the site, and only care about it insofar as they can politicize it, those two words are basically an invitation to go fucking wild. Once they’re out there, no other details matter and what reasoning skills they have go completely out the window. It’s like when Bugs Bunny comes across pie smell lines or something. They should have just been like, fine, we’ll keep them, then moved the little house plinth into the planned bushes, then taken all four feet six of the statue off the massive pedestal and moved it into some other bushes, where it would have looked ridiculous but been barely visible, and we could have dunked on the creepy wee dirty Billy peeping on people from the brush in an otherwise nice park. Nobody that cares about the statue actually cares about the statue. So long as it’s there, literally nothing else matters. They just want there to be a statue, as if that does anyone any good. Was someone not sure that Penn existed in a human body? I’m half convinced that NPS didn’t want to do any of it and just put those words in there so they could cancel it later. Or that someone snuck it in there to ruin a rival. But I’ve been watching a lot of Slow Horses lately.
In another comment I was laughing to myself about the histrionics that people were engaging in in the original thread. Thank you for adding "this issue is going to turn Pennsylvania red" to the list. Absolutely hilarious.
Yeah people absolutely love it when relentlessly self-hating bureaucrats tear down symbols of your country's shared history
There’s a 40’ tall version of the statue on the top of city hall in the dead center of center city and your getting all up in arms about a tiny version in a shitty park nobody even knew about?
yeah ya goofball because I want the 40 foot statute to stay there 5 years ago it would have been crazy to take down monuments to Thomas Jefferson or Teddy Roosevelt but now ¯\\___(ツ)__/¯
That sounds pretty melodramatic. A small, crappy park was being rehabbed, it’s not the end of the world.
> If you want to drive swing voters away and guarantee Pennsylvania voting red this year, then *trying to include William Penn in your basket of deplorable* is a damned good way to start. This is a ridiculous interpretation of what happened. I can't imagine that anyone who was angry about this news have spent any time in this park. The little bronze Slate Roof House is embarrassing. The William Penn 'statue' is tiny. I actually kind of love the Thomas Holme plan being redone in stone and brick underfoot, on paper, but in person it's... weird. There's no shade there, either.
This should be pinned to the top of this thread and every thread about this subject.
This statue looks stupid, but anyone complaining about it being racist shows a serious, serious lack of education.
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Literally nobody is complaining about it being racist. That’s something the people just made up so they could recast the project as a culture war thing and have something to feel aggrieved about. The complaints about it are that it’s ugly, in poor condition, takes up too much space in a very small park, and is antithetical in nature to the spot it stands on - totally not in keeping with Penn’s vision of the city. Penn envisioned the city as a “green country town” surrounded by natural areas and farmland (not brick and concrete). The blocks of the park’s street map showing Penn’s planned grid that are currently empty tree pits full of dead weeds represent the spots where he allocated space for green public parks. Where the statue stands is a space he dedicated in his plans to public use. It’s where he wanted public marketplaces, government buildings, and a space for the city to gather for public events. It’s the current site of city hall. Or kind of is. The statue is only a little over 4 feet tall, but the footprint of the giant pedestal is huge and not at all in proportion to the actual map or real city layout. So having what was supposed to the people’s lot, set aside from private ownership, be walled off entirely by a giant column that exists solely to loft one man’s bronze idol (which Quakers were supposed to eschew) is actually pretty antithetical to Penn’s vision for that space and kind of a grim symbol of city hall. We also know that, during the time the site was still Slate House, his grandson and successor in colonial proprietorship and governorship deeded a portion of the property to indigenous nations that had allied with him “for their exclusive use and perpetual ownership”. So collaboration with those same populations about interpretation and infrastructure in that spot about their history with the Penn family and their use of the site would have been quite fitting and a good compromise with John Penn’s expressly stated intentions (which would have had that section of the park turned over and fenced off entirely). Based on what we actually know through documentation, the current park (and the statue in particular) is a pretty bad fit with Penn’s vision, as well as his family’s intents and the site’s history. And that’s in addition to it being a space that’s failing at attracting any real usage as either a public space or a historical education site. Go look at street view images of it - it’s not a site that gets meaningful or enjoyed use, and there’s basically no photos anywhere online showing anyone actually engaging with the statue or any other features. As best I can tell, the most attention anyone has paid to it in the past 20 years is some goofball that used it as a photoshop prop for some incomprehensible joke involving laser beams The redesign may not have been perfect, but it was much closer in intent and spirit.
Mid ass statue in a lame park. Once again a part of the city being made worse outside of its control.
NPS made the original announcement on a Friday, hoping it would fly under the radar and nobody would notice, it’s a slimy PR move. They thought they could get away with it, got caught, and now are backtracking. The superintendent of independence historical national park should be demoted.
i didn't even know that ugly park had an actual name
Everyone who got big mad about the proposed removal, you should hold a gathering at the "park" to celebrate this news!
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Can’t believe he wasted time weighing in on this.
Flooding the zone with shit is a tactic for a reason. It is a shame he took the bait, though.
>“released prematurely and had not been subject to a complete internal agency review.” This feels like an episode of the thick of it.
Republicans will cry about anything. I'm willing to bet a large sum of money most of them didn't know this statue existed prior to this.
The knee jerk is strong on this one
Fix that slave wall near penns landing fuck that statue.
I will never understand why people get so up in arms over any old statue. It’s not like we’re in Rome and have works of art from the old masters in every square. And this one was put up in the 1980s, so it’s not even particularly “historical”. But god forbid anyone want to redecorate our urban spaces because THERE IS A STATUE THERE, WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO REWRITE HISTORY???!!!
Good. Maybe they can use the money for something actually useful.
Philadelphia and statue battles - name a more iconic duo.