History of the Site
The location of the Ruth and Raymond Perelman
Center for Advanced Medicine – 34th
Street and Civic Center Boulevard – is
the former home of three historic centers that
have occupied since the early 1800s. Learn more
about these centers:
These
centers have three distinct yet interconnected
stories that contribute to the rich history of
the site.
The Philadelphia Commercial Museum
A Center for Commerce – An Education
for American Businesses
The Philadelphia Commercial Museum was the brainchild
of William Wilson, a botany professor at the
University of Pennsylvania. Inspired by
a visit to the monumental World's Columbian
Exhibition in Chicago in 1983, he imagined creating
a permanent world's fair exhibition in
Philadelphia. Wilson founded the commercial
museum that same year. It became the official
repository for artifacts from the world's
fairs of the era – most importantly, the
1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the
1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis.
In the years that followed, exhibits from fairs
around the world were added.
By the turn of the 20th century, the Philadelphia
Commercial Museum was among the biggest museums
of any kind in the nation. It had hundreds
of exhibits with tens of thousands of objects
from countries all over the world. It functioned
both as a popular destination for locals and
tourists, and as a valuable resource for American
businessmen wanting to learn more about foreign
trade and economics in order to expand to overseas
markets.
Wilson wanted the museum to be more than a storehouse
for world's fair materials. While
he saw the museum's primary purpose as
collecting and displaying “the raw and
natural products from every quarter of the globe,
to study them with reference to their commercial,
economic and scientific value or usefulness in
the civilized world,” he also saw it as
an agency “…designed to search the
world for new products which may be made available
in the arts, the sciences, in manufacturing and
in agriculture.” Wilson wanted to
provide information about world markets to American
businessmen so that they could compete more effectively
with the Europeans on the stage of international
commerce.
This goal was achieved in several ways: 1) through
the extensive and varied exhibits that served
as educational resources for American businesspeople,
2) through international conferences, and 3)
through an in-house department called “Bureau
of Information,” which collected commercial
data, issued reports and distributed information
through a monthly publication, Commercial
America.
Several factors undoubtedly contributed to the
decline of the Commercial Museum. First,
the great age of world's fairs, out of
which the Commercial Museum sprang, came to a
close in the 1920s. These grand events
ceased to excite people in the way they had before
the First World War. Second, the Department
of Commerce, which was founded in 1903 primarily
to oversee interstate commerce, grew to be an
enormous agency in the 1920s under its dynamic
secretary, Herbert Hoover.
Finally, while
the Commercial Museum served initially as “a
school for American businessmen,” that
role was increasingly taken over by more formalized
business schools attached to American universities.
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
was the first one of these in the nation. Taken
together, these factors made the original mission
of the Commercial Museum less relevant by the
1920s.
The Philadelphia Civic Center
A Center of Civic Life – A Natural
Stage
In the 1920s, city officials began planning
to transform the Commercial Museum into a “center
for coordinating trade promotion efforts of all
kinds.” The result was the Civic
Center. The new complex on 34th Street
included the Municipal Auditorium, new exhibition
space and the existing Grand Exhibition Hall
of the Commercial Museum.
The Municipal Auditorium, finished in 1930,
was the centerpiece of the new convention center. It
was a splendid example of Art Deco design. The
Municipal Auditorium played host to a number
of important political events. In 1948
all three major political parties – Democratic,
Republican and Progressive – held their
conventions in the Municipal Auditorium.
In addition to the trade shows, the Center also
hosted dozens of sporting and entertainment events,
as well as annual events central to the rhythm
of life in the Philadelphia region, like high
school and college commencements and the Philadelphia
Flower Show, which used the Center starting in
1932. Tennis tournaments, bike races,
wrestling matches – all of these took place
in the Municipal Auditorium as its space was
reconfigured for a wide variety of uses.
The
Philadelphia Warriors played here from 1952 until
1963; the Philadelphia 76ers, from 1963 to 1967,
before they moved to their new home at the Spectrum
in South Philadelphia. In that final season
at Municipal Auditorium, Wilt Chamberlain led
the team to an NBA championship. When the
Beatles came through Philadelphia on their first
American tour in 1964, they played in the Municipal
Auditorium on September 2.
In the latter part of the 20th century, the
Civic Center became outmoded. With the
opening of the Spectrum in South Philadelphia,
fewer big sporting and entertainment events used
the Civic Center. Political conventions,
too, outgrew the capacity of the Civic Center
to host them.
By the 1980s, regional and state leaders had
begun to plan for a new convention center in
the heart of Center City. The Pennsylvania
Convention Center opened in 1993 and when it
did, most of the Events held in the Civic Center,
including trade shows and the annual Philadelphia
Flower Show, moved to the new facility.
In 2004, the Municipal Auditorium and what remained
of the Civic Center complex were torn down to
make room for the Center for Advanced Medicine.
The
Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine
A Center for Medicine – A Legacy of
Patient Care at the Penn School of Medicine
The first hospital in the nation, Pennsylvania
Hospital, was founded here in Philadelphia at
9th and Spruce streets. It was started
by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond in 1751
as a way to care for the sick and the poor of
the city.
In 1765, the College of Philadelphia (which
would be renamed the “University of Pennsylvania” in
1791) School of Medicine was founded by a young
doctor, John Morgan. It was the first medical
school in the country. The medical school
emphasized supplementing medical lectures with
bedside teaching. At the time, the College
was just a few short blocks from Pennsylvania
Hospital, and the medical students did rotations
and training there.
The history of medicine at this particular site
began in 1832. In that year, the City of
Philadelphia purchased the Blockley farm property
(which includes Woodlands cemetery) and built
a new almshouse complex. The almshouse
complex included an insane asylum and hospital
(which would later become Philadelphia General
Hospital), male and female quarters, work quarters
and stables. In addition, University of Pennsylvania
medical students trained here and professors
taught here.
In 1870, the University of Pennsylvania moved
to West Philadelphia. Four years later,
the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
(HUP) was founded with the help of Penn School
of Medicine alumni Dr. William Pepper. HUP
was the first university-owned teaching hospital
in the country. “From its founding
in 1874, HUP was a place where the best healthcare,
best medical education and best research intersected."
In the 20th century, Penn Medicine and HUP became
not simply national leaders in medicine, but
international leaders as well. Penn doctors
at HUP have always been at the forefront of medical
advancement and patient care. Stories of
individuals from Penn Medicine might include:
Dr. Truman Schnabel, Emeritus Professor of Medicine
(founding figure of genontology); Dr. Clyde Barker,
former chair of surgery for approximately 25
years; and Nadine Landis, nurse who in the 1980s
was a leader in overseas deployment of Penn
physicians.
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