The First Wall Street
The First Wall Street

Author: Robert E. Wright

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-04-15

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0226910296

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When Americans think of investment and finance, they think of Wall Street—though this was not always the case. During the dawn of the Republic, Philadelphia was the center of American finance. The first stock exchange in the nation was founded there in 1790, and around it the bustling thoroughfare known as Chestnut Street was home to the nation's most powerful financial institutions. The First Wall Street recounts the fascinating history of Chestnut Street and its forgotten role in the birth of American finance. According to Robert E. Wright, Philadelphia, known for its cultivation of liberty and freedom, blossomed into a financial epicenter during the nation's colonial period. The continent's most prodigious minds and talented financiers flocked to Philly in droves, and by the eve of the Revolution, the Quaker City was the most financially sophisticated region in North America. The First Wall Street reveals how the city played a leading role in the financing of the American Revolution and emerged from that titanic struggle with not just the wealth it forged in the crucible of war, but an invaluable amount of human capital as well. This capital helped make Philadelphia home to the Bank of the United States, the U.S. Mint, an active securities exchange, and several banks and insurance companies—all clustered in or around Chestnut Street. But as the decades passed, financial institutions were lured to New York, and by the late 1820s only the powerful Second Bank of the United States upheld Philadelphia's financial stature. But when Andrew Jackson vetoed its charter, he sealed the fate of Chestnut Street forever—and of Wall Street too. Finely nuanced and elegantly written, The First Wall Street will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the United States and the origins of its unrivaled economy.

Bleeding Out
Bleeding Out

Author: Thomas Abt

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1541645715

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From a Harvard scholar and former Obama official, a powerful proposal for curtailing violent crime in America Urban violence is one of the most divisive and allegedly intractable issues of our time. But as Harvard scholar Thomas Abt shows in Bleeding Out, we actually possess all the tools necessary to stem violence in our cities. Coupling the latest social science with firsthand experience as a crime-fighter, Abt proposes a relentless focus on violence itself -- not drugs, gangs, or guns. Because violence is "sticky," clustering among small groups of people and places, it can be predicted and prevented using a series of smart-on-crime strategies that do not require new laws or big budgets. Bringing these strategies together, Abt offers a concrete, cost-effective plan to reduce homicides by over 50 percent in eight years, saving more than 12,000 lives nationally. Violence acts as a linchpin for urban poverty, so curbing such crime can unlock the untapped potential of our cities' most disadvantaged communities and help us to bridge the nation's larger economic and social divides. Urgent yet hopeful, Bleeding Out offers practical solutions to the national emergency of urban violence -- and challenges readers to demand action.

A Prayer for the City
A Prayer for the City

Author: Buzz Bissinger

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-04-15

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 1101969911

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Friday Night Lights, the heart-wrenching and hilarious true story of an American city on its knees and a man who will do anything to save it. A Prayer for the City is acclaimed journalist Buzz Bissinger's true epic of Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell, an utterly unique, unorthodox, and idiosyncratic leader willing to go to any length for the sake of his city: take unions head on, personally lobby President Clinton to save 10,000 defense jobs, or wrestle Smiley the Pig on Hot Dog Day—all the while bearing in mind the eternal fickleness of constituents whose favor may hinge on a missed garbage pick-up or an overzealous meter maid. It is also the story of citizens in crisis: a woman fighting ceaselessly to give her great-grandchildren a better life, a father of six who may lose his job at the Navy Shipyard, and a policy analyst whose experiences as a crime victim tempt her to abandon her job and ideals. "Fascinating, humane" (The New Yorker) and alive with detail and insight, A Prayer for the City describes the rare combination of political courage and optimism that may be the only hope for America's urban centers.

The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City It Made
The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City It Made

Author: Domenic Vitiello

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2010-04-14

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0812242246

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The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City It Made recounts the history of America's first stock exchange and the ways it shaped the growth and decline of the city around it. Founded in 1790, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, its member firms, and the companies they financed had profound impacts on the city's place in the world economy. At its start, the exchange and its members helped spur the development of the early United States, its financial sector, and its westward expansion. During the nineteenth century, they invested in making Philadelphia the center of industrial America, raising capital for the railroads and coal mines that connected cities to one another and built a fossil fuel-based economy. After financing the Civil War, they underwrote the growth of the modern metropolis, its transportation infrastructure, utility systems, and real estate development. At the turn of the twentieth century, stagnation of the exchange contributed to Philadelphia's loss of power in the national and world economy. This original interpretation of the roots of deindustrialization holds important lessons for other cities that have declined. The exchange's revival following World War II is a remarkable story, but it also illustrates the limits of economic development in postindustrial cities. Unlike earlier eras, the exchange's fortunes diverged from those of the city around it. Ultimately, it became part of a larger, global institution when it merged with NASDAQ in 2008. Far more than a history of a single institution, The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City It Made traces the evolving relationship between the exchange and the city. For people concerned with cities and their development, this study offers a long-term history of the public-private partnerships and private sector-led urban development popular today. More generally, it traces the networks of firms and institutions revealed by the securities market and its participants. Herein lies a critical and understudied part of the history of metropolitan economic development.

City Water, City Life
City Water, City Life

Author: Carl Smith

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 022602265X

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A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian Carl Smith explores this concept through an insightful examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s. By examining the place of water in the nineteenth-century consciousness, Smith illuminates how city dwellers perceived themselves during the great age of American urbanization. But City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a refreshing meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential—and central—part of how we define our civilization.

Metropolitan Philadelphia
Metropolitan Philadelphia

Author: Steven Conn

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-02-12

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0812204085

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As America's fifth largest city and fourth largest metropolitan region, Philadelphia is tied to its surrounding counties and suburban neighborhoods. It is this vital relationship, suggests Steven Conn, that will make or break greater Philadelphia. The Philadelphia region has witnessed virtually every major political, economic, and social transformation of American life. Having once been an industrial giant, the region is now struggling to fashion a new identity in a postindustrial world. On the one hand, Center City has been transformed into a vibrant hub with its array of restaurants, shops, cultural venues, and restored public spaces. On the other, unchecked suburban sprawl has generated concerns over rising energy costs and loss of agriculture and open spaces. In the final analysis, the region will need a dynamic central city for its future, while the city will also need a healthy sustainable region for its long-term viability. Central to the identity of a twenty-first century Metropolitan Philadelphia, Conn argues, is the deep and complicated interplay of past and present. Looking at the region through the wide lens of its culture and history, Metropolitan Philadelphia moves seamlessly between past and present. Displaying a specialist's knowledge of the area as well as a deep personal connection to his subject, Conn examines the shifting meaning of the region's history, the utopian impulse behind its founding, the role of the region in creating the American middle class, the regional watershed, and the way art and cultural institutions have given shape to a resident identity. Impressionistic and beautifully written, Metropolitan Philadelphia will be of great interest to urbanists and at the same time accessible to the wider public intrigued in the rich history and cultural dynamics of this fascinating region. What emerges from the book is a wide-ranging understanding of what it means to say, "I'm from Philadelphia."