The Curse of Billy Penn
William Penn was an English colonial proprietor and the son of the admiral and politician Sir William Penn. Penn was a writer, early Quaker, and founder of the English North American colony the Province of Pennsylvania. He was an early advocate of democracy and religious freedom, n…
Liberty Place is a skyscraper complex in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The complex is composed of a 61-story, 945-foot skyscraper called One Liberty Place, a 58-story, 848-foot skyscraper called Two Liberty Place, a two-story shopping mall called the Shops at Libe…
Philadelphia City Hall is the seat of government for the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The building was constructed from 1871 to 1901 within Penn Square, in the middle of Center City. John McArthur Jr. and Thomas Ustick Walter designed the building in the Second Empire style. City Hall …
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It is located atop the Philadelphia City Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was installed in 1894. It was cast in fourteen sections, and took almost two years to finish. For almost 90 years, an unwritten gentlemen's agreement forbade any building in the city from rising above the hat on the Penn statue.
At over thirty-six feet tall and weighing more than 53,000 pounds, Alexander Milne Calder's sculpture William Penn atop City Hall is one of Philadelphia's most prominent landmarks.
Billy Penn: Philly's source for local news, info and things to do. LGBTQ.
"The figure is so placed," the story noted in its last paragraph, "that the eyes are gazing toward Treaty Park, the scene of Penn's memorable meeting and negotiation with the red men of the forest, and the spot where were laid the foundations of the longest peace ever kept between the native American and the European ...
Standing portrait of William Penn at thirty-eight. He stands erect, his proper right hand extended to offer a blessing. In his proper left hand he holds a scroll and leans against a tree stump.
William Penn, (born October 14, 1644, London, England—died July 30, 1718, Buckinghamshire), English Quaker leader and advocate of religious freedom, who oversaw the founding of the American Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other religious minorities of Europe.
Seriously, he spent only four of his 74 years in Pennsylvania. Drawn back to England in 1701 by his legal woes, Penn was confined to debtor's prison.
The Curse of Billy Penn was an alleged curse used to explain the failure of major professional sports teams based in Philadelphia to win championships since the March 1987 construction of the One Liberty Place skyscraper, which exceeded the height of William Penn's statue atop Philadelphia City Hall.
This ended in March 1987, when a modern steel-and-glass skyscraper, One Liberty Place, opened three blocks away. One Liberty Place is taller than City Hall by 397 feet (121 m), rising 945 feet (288 m) in height compared to the height of Penn's hat on City Hall, 547 feet (167 m). Its sister skyscraper, Two Liberty Place, at 848 ft (258 m), followed in 1990.