Home › Cities › Major Cities
Philadelphia
The sixth-largest U.S. city, between two rivers
Philadelphia sits on a neck of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers in southeastern Pennsylvania, near the head of Delaware Bay. William Penn laid it out in 1682 on a deliberate grid between the two rivers, one of the first planned cities in the colonies, designed as a "greene country towne." The deep Delaware gave it a major port, and its central Atlantic-seaboard position made it the largest city and de facto capital of the early United States.
The rivers frame the city — the broad, ship-bearing Delaware on the east, the smaller Schuylkill threading through on the west — at the boundary between the rolling Piedmont and the flat coastal plain. Philadelphia served as the nation's capital while Washington was being built, and its compact colonial core remains the cradle of American independence.
Today Philadelphia anchors a metro of more than six million in the dense Northeast Corridor, a historic port and manufacturing city between New York and Washington, still defined by the two rivers Penn built it between.