History
During the 18th century, the Square was used to graze animals and for burials by city's African American community and as a potter's field, much like the park of the same name in New York's Greenwich Village. During the Revolutionary War, the square was used as a burial ground for citizens and troops from the Colonial army.
After the Revolution, victims of the city's yellow fever epidemics were interred here, and the square was used for cattle markets and camp meetings. Improvement efforts began in 1815, as the neighborhoods around the square were developed and became fashionable. In 1825, the park was named Washington Square in tribute to George Washington and a monument to Washington was proposed. This monument was never built but served as the seed for the eventual tribute to soldiers of the Revolutionary War. The Curtis Building sits to the north of the park, a remnant of Philadelphia's publishing industry.
Washington Square was the site of the first human flight in the Americas in 1793 when Jean Pierre Blanchard ascended in his hot-air balloon from the Walnut Street Jail.
Read more about this topic: Washington Square (Philadelphia)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)